How to score it
Answer for the system as it behaves on an ordinary week. The most useful version of this exercise is two or three people scoring independently and then comparing: divergence is a finding in itself, because it means the team does not share a view of how the system works.
What the five dimensions cover
- Lifecycle
- Whether stage definitions are observable events with exit conditions, or shared vocabulary with private meanings.
- Ownership
- Whether every open record has one accountable owner, assigned automatically and quickly.
- Data
- Whether hygiene is maintained on a cadence and required fields are limited to what reports consume.
- Automation
- Whether the system creates the next action and raises breaches, or waits to be updated.
- Reporting
- Whether leadership runs the business from the CRM, and whether reps update it because it helps them.
Reading the result
Work the weakest dimension to completion before touching the others, and always in dependency order: lifecycle definitions, then ownership, then data, then automation, then reporting. Automation over ambiguous stages produces confident nonsense, and reporting over unowned records produces arguments.
| Weakest dimension | First repair |
|---|---|
| Lifecycle | Rewrite stage definitions with sales in the room; run the ten-record classification test |
| Ownership | Automatic assignment at creation with a named fallback owner |
| Data | Cut required fields to what a live report consumes, then deduplicate at entry |
| Automation | Auto-create the next task on stage change, and alert on SLA breaches |
| Reporting | Build the four core views and retire everything else |
Then what
The CRM cleanup playbook runs the repair over four weeks in the right order. Re-score with the same people afterwards; publishing the before-and-after is what earns the mandate for the next change.
Privacy
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Muhammad Sameed Abid
Muhammad Sameed Abid is a business operations, automation and growth systems professional with 9+ years across operations management, workflow and CRM automation, marketing operations and customer success. He is currently Head of Customer Success at GHA Marketing and writes here about the operating layer underneath growth.