Earlier this month I went through the CRM automations in my own system. Three workflows, built at various points over the last two years, all sensible ideas at the time. Two were switched on and reporting zero successful actions in the previous seven days. The third was the only one built properly, and it had been switched off since the day it was created.
That is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when something gets built once and nobody goes back to check it.
Switched on is not the same as working
The first workflow was meant to create a deal when a new lead came in. The trigger was a new contact and the action was “update all related deals”. A contact created one second ago has no related deals, so there was nothing to update. It could not have fired on any day since it was built. The name described the intention, the configuration described something else, and nobody ever put the two side by side.
The second was looking for contacts whose original source was “Email”. The email sync creates contacts constantly, but they do not carry that value, so the condition failed every time.
There is a sting in that one. Had I fixed it without checking what it would then catch, it would have raised a follow-up task for every contact the sync creates. In three days that was Xero’s billing address, a lead generation spammer and two of my own test addresses.
The one that worked was switched off
The third workflow raised an onboarding task whenever a deal moved to Won. Correctly built, exactly how I work, and switched off since the day it was created ten months earlier. It was also called “Untitled workflow”, so there was no way to tell from the list what it did.
Ten months of onboarding tasks done by hand, or not done at all, because nobody opened the list. It is the mirror image of five tools that never quite connect to each other. There the capability was never bought. Here it was bought, built and left in a drawer.
How to audit your own CRM automations
Every tool of this kind keeps a record of what it has actually done, and almost nobody opens it.
In Freshsales it is under Admin Settings, then Workflows: the Actions Executed column has a View history link showing successful and failed actions, with the reason for each failure. In HubSpot, the workflow details page has a Performance tab giving total records enrolled since creation and enrolments in the last seven days. In Zapier it is the Zap history page, one line per run. In Make it is the History tab on the scenario. The same applies to the automation builder inside Google Workspace and to most job management software.
Two things before you look. These logs do not go back forever: Zapier guarantees 60 days of run data, HubSpot keeps workflow action logs for 90 days, and Make’s retention depends on your plan. And a run count of zero on something that has been switched on for months is not a reporting glitch. It is the answer.
Put an hour in the diary this week. Open the list, read the names, and check the run count against every one of your CRM automations. Anything sitting at zero is either broken or pointless, and it is worth knowing which. CRM automations fail quietly. Nothing errors, nobody gets an alert, and the work simply goes back to being done by hand.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your CRM automations and the rest of the stack around them, the free audit at digilyse.co takes about ten minutes.
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