Marketing Automation Audit: The 30-Point Checklist

We audit marketing automation systems for a living, and the results are consistently alarming. The average B2B SaaS company has at least 12 broken or underperforming automations running right now — silently dropping leads, sending wrong emails, or routing prospects into dead-end workflows. This 30-point checklist is what we use at GTM11 to diagnose and fix marketing automation systems across HubSpot, Salesforce, and connected tools.

Section 1: Data Hygiene (Points 1-8)

Bad data is the root cause of most automation failures. Before evaluating any workflow logic, we start with the foundation.

• 1. Duplicate contact rate: Check your duplicate percentage. Anything above 5% means your scoring, routing, and reporting are compromised. Use HubSpot's built-in dedup tool or Dedupely for Salesforce.
• 2. Email deliverability: Review bounce rates over the past 90 days. Hard bounces above 2% indicate list hygiene problems. Soft bounces above 5% suggest domain reputation issues.
• 3. Missing critical fields: Query your database for contacts missing company name, job title, or email. These gaps break personalization and segmentation.
• 4. Lifecycle stage accuracy: Pull a sample of 50 contacts in each lifecycle stage. Are they actually in the right stage? We frequently find MQLs that should be customers and subscribers that should be MQLs.
• 5. Property standardization: Check free-text fields like "Industry" or "Job Title" for inconsistencies. "SaaS", "saas", "Software as a Service", and "Software/SaaS" should all be one value.
• 6. Source tracking: Verify that UTM parameters are being captured correctly. Run a test submission from each major traffic source and confirm the source property populates.
• 7. Opt-in compliance: Ensure every contact has a clear record of consent. Check that your forms include proper opt-in language and that subscription types are correctly mapped.
• 8. Data decay rate: Measure how quickly your contact data goes stale. Job titles change, people leave companies, emails bounce. If you are not re-enriching quarterly, your data is degrading.

Section 2: Workflow Logic (Points 9-16)

This is where most of the damage hides. Workflows that looked good when built often have logical flaws that compound over time.

• 9. Enrollment triggers: Review every workflow's enrollment criteria. Are they too broad (enrolling irrelevant contacts) or too narrow (missing qualified leads)?
• 10. Suppression lists: Verify that existing customers, competitors, and internal team members are excluded from prospecting workflows.
• 11. Branch logic: Test every if/then branch in your workflows. We routinely find branches where both paths lead to the same action, making the branch pointless.
• 12. Delay timing: Check delay steps against your sales cycle. A 3-day delay in a nurture sequence might be perfect for SMB but too aggressive for enterprise.
• 13. Goal criteria: Every nurture workflow should have a goal that removes contacts when they convert. Without goals, leads keep receiving nurture emails after they have already booked a demo.
• 14. Error handling: What happens when an API call fails in your workflow? Most automations have zero error handling, meaning a failed enrichment call silently breaks the entire sequence.
• 15. Conflict resolution: Can a contact be enrolled in multiple competing workflows simultaneously? Without exclusion rules, leads receive contradictory messaging.
• 16. Workflow dependencies: Map which workflows feed into others. A change to your lead scoring workflow might break downstream routing without anyone noticing.

Section 3: Lead Management (Points 17-22)

• 17. Scoring model accuracy: Compare your highest-scored leads against actual conversion data. If your top-scored leads are not converting at higher rates, your model is broken.
• 18. MQL definition alignment: Interview three sales reps. Ask them to define an MQL. If you get three different answers, your MQL criteria need work.
• 19. Lead routing speed: Measure time from MQL trigger to sales rep notification. Best-in-class is under 5 minutes. If yours is over an hour, you are losing conversions.
• 20. Round-robin fairness: Check that lead distribution is actually balanced. Timezone-based routing or territory rules often create uneven distribution.
• 21. Recycling process: What happens to leads that sales rejects? If they go into a black hole instead of back into nurture, you are wasting pipeline.
• 22. SLA tracking: Are you measuring whether sales follows up on MQLs within the agreed timeframe? Without tracking, SLAs are meaningless.

Section 4: Integration Health (Points 23-27)

• 23. CRM sync status: Check your HubSpot-Salesforce sync (or equivalent) for errors. We typically find 50-200 sync failures that nobody has investigated.
• 24. Field mapping: Verify that critical fields map correctly between systems. A common issue: HubSpot lifecycle stages do not map to Salesforce lead statuses, creating data mismatches.
• 25. API rate limits: If you are using N8N, Zapier, or custom integrations, check whether you are hitting API rate limits during peak hours. Throttled API calls mean dropped data.
• 26. Webhook reliability: Test every incoming webhook. Send test payloads and verify they process correctly. Webhook endpoints fail silently more often than you think.
• 27. Third-party tool connections: Log into every connected tool (Clay, Apollo, Clearbit, etc.) and verify the connections are active. Expired OAuth tokens are a silent killer.

Section 5: Performance and Reporting (Points 28-30)

• 28. Attribution accuracy: Run a test conversion through your funnel and verify that attribution reports correctly credit the source, medium, and campaign.
• 29. Funnel stage conversion rates: Calculate conversion rates between every funnel stage. Any stage-to-stage conversion below 10% signals a leak that needs investigation.
• 30. Automation ROI: For every automation, calculate the cost (tool subscriptions + setup time) versus the value generated (leads processed, time saved, revenue influenced). Kill any automation with negative ROI.

How to Run This Audit

We recommend running this audit quarterly. Block a full day with your marketing ops team. Use a shared spreadsheet with each checkpoint as a row, columns for status (pass/fail/warning), notes, and assigned owner for fixes. Prioritize fixes by revenue impact: anything affecting lead routing or scoring gets fixed first.

At GTM11, we have automated portions of this audit using N8N workflows that run daily health checks on CRM sync, webhook endpoints, and data quality metrics, surfacing issues in Slack before they become problems. That is the goal state — proactive monitoring instead of quarterly fire drills.