CRM Implementation Checklist

Capture firmographic and behavioral criteria for the ICP plus the 3–5 segments sales and marketing will route against (enterprise vs. mid-market, new logo vs. expansion, vertical splits). Reuse the segment names already used in GA4 and the MAP — drift between systems is the root cause of broken attribution later.

Whiteboard the lifecycle: lead → MQL → SAL → SQL → opportunity → closed-won. Note who owns each transition and the SLA. PMM, demand-gen, and sales ops should all sign off on the definitions before any field gets configured.

List every system that will read or write contact / account data — web forms, MAP (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot), CDP (Segment, mParticle), enrichment (ZoomInfo, Clearbit), event tools, Slack alerts. Note the system of record per field; conflicting source-of-truth is the #1 cause of CRM data rot.

Confirm consent capture and storage rules per audience: GDPR lawful basis for EU contacts, CCPA/CPRA opt-out flags for California, CASL express-consent timestamps for Canada. Decide where consent state lives (CRM field, CMP like OneTrust/Cookiebot, or both with sync) before fields get built.

Score Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, and Dynamics against the must-have list: native MAP integration, custom-object support, API limits, role-based permissions, sandbox availability. Disqualify on missing must-haves before optimizing on price.

Required when EU contacts are in scope. Pull the vendor DPA, list sub-processors, confirm data-region (EU vs. US hosting), and route through legal. File the executed DPA in the privacy folder so audit requests don't trigger a scramble.

Stand up a sandbox or developer org seeded with anonymized sample records. All field changes, automation, and integration testing happens here first — pushing untested config to production has caused full-org email send freezes more than once.

Build lifecycle stage, lead source, MQL date, SAL date, and SQL date as governed picklists — not free-text. Match the source / medium / campaign convention to the team's UTM doc so reports tie out to GA4 and the ad platforms.

Wire HubSpot / Marketo / Pardot into the CRM with two-way sync. Confirm sync direction per field (CRM-wins vs. MAP-wins), exclusion of sandbox addresses, and that consent / unsubscribe state replicates both ways within 10 minutes.

Implement scoring (demographic + behavioral) and round-robin or territory routing. Flag the MQL threshold and the SAL bounce-back path so a missed SLA escalates to the SDR manager rather than dying silently in a queue.

Capture utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term, gclid, fbclid, and the GA4 client_id on every form. Persist first-touch and last-touch separately. This is what unblocks multi-touch attribution downstream.

Run a dedupe pass on email + domain before import. Suppress hard bounces and global unsubscribes from the migration file — not after. Carry consent timestamps and source so CASL / GDPR audit trails survive the move.

Submit a test form, watch it move through MQL → SAL → SQL with the routing, scoring, and Slack alerts firing. Test a re-engaged contact path and an unsubscribe path. Document the test cases so regression testing has a baseline.

Triggered when UAT did not pass cleanly. Triage defects by severity, fix in sandbox, re-run the failing scenarios, and re-validate consent and routing paths before promoting again.

Run role-based sessions: SDRs on lead views and dispositions, AEs on opportunity stages and forecasting, marketers on campaign objects and UTMs. Record sessions and post the SOP in Notion / Confluence for new hires.

Deploy via change set / metadata package during a low-traffic window. Freeze data imports and outbound sends for the cutover window. Keep the rollback plan in the channel pinned message until 48 hours of clean operation.

Reconcile CRM pipeline by source against GA4 and the ad platforms. Variance over ~10% usually points to a UTM convention break or a duplicate conversion event firing. Walk the WBR with demand-gen and RevOps.

Run a duplicate report on email + domain, check required-field fill rates, and review the bounce / unsubscribe deltas since launch. Schedule an automated weekly hygiene job rather than doing this by hand each quarter.

Survey SDRs, AEs, and CSMs on friction in daily use — list views, required fields, mobile flows. Score requests by reach and effort, and load the top items into the next sprint instead of letting them sit in a Slack thread.