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Sales department audit: a checklist you can run yourself

in short

You can run a sales department audit yourself in one evening. Take the last three months and check six zones: whether every enquiry got an answer and how fast, whether the records let you rebuild the picture, how twenty conversations in a row sound, where conversion drops between stages, what the people are managed by, and what the team itself costs. Every point needs proof: a number from the records or a quote from a chat thread. Answers from memory do not count.

The four numbers every audit starts with

An audit starts with arithmetic. Leave the conversations with your reps until the end: after the numbers you will know what to ask, and you will hear answers, not versions.

  1. How many enquiries arrived over the last three months. Across all channels together: website, phone, messengers, direct messages, referrals.
  2. How many of them ended with money in the bank.
  3. How many days pass on average from enquiry to payment.
  4. What the team costs per month: base salaries, bonuses, phone system, CRM, hiring costs.

The first two give conversion, the third gives the deal cycle, the fourth paired with revenue gives cost of sales. If you could not dig one of them out in an evening, that is already your first audit finding: you have no records to lean on.

Zone 1. Enquiries: did they all arrive, and how fast did you answer

James Oldroyd of the Sloan School of Management (MIT), together with InsideSales.com, went through three years of data in 2007: six companies, more than 15,000 enquiries and more than 100,000 dial attempts. A call after five minutes instead of thirty gives a hundred times better chance of speaking to a person and a twenty-one times better chance of carrying the conversation through to qualification. Which is why speed gets checked first.

  • Every enquiry in one place. How to check: add up the enquiries from the website, the phone system, direct messages and messengers, and reconcile with your records for the same month. A bad answer: «it roughly matches».
  • First response time. How to check: over the last thirty enquiries, count the minutes from the enquiry to the rep's first message. A bad answer: you took an average and relaxed — what decides it is the tail, the enquiries that waited hours.
  • Enquiries with no answer at all. How to check: find enquiries with not a single outgoing message. A bad answer: «we never get those».
  • Evenings, weekends, lunch. How to check: look at what time of day enquiries arrive and who answers outside the schedule. A bad answer: a Saturday enquiry gets handled on Monday.
  • Missed calls. How to check: the phone system report for the month — how many calls went unanswered and how many of those got a call back. A bad answer: call-backs happened selectively.

Zone 2. Records: can you rebuild the picture from them

  • Every enquiry in the system. How to check: take five random days and reconcile the records against the messenger threads. A bad answer: some customers live only on a rep's phone.
  • Every open deal has a next step with a date. How to check: filter deals with no active task. A bad answer: there are more of them than deals with a task.
  • Stages describe an action by the customer. How to check: read the stage names in your funnel. A bad answer: «in progress» or «thinking» is among them.
  • The loss reason is written in the customer's own words. How to check: open twenty closed deals and read the reasons. A bad answer: «too expensive» everywhere, or blank.
  • The amounts in the records are money that arrived. How to check: reconcile the payment total in the CRM against what landed in the bank for the month. A bad answer: the CRM is higher and nobody explains the gap.

Zone 3. Conversations: twenty threads in a row

Take twenty deals that stopped at one and the same stage and read them from the beginning. Read consecutively: a selection made by a rep always consists of their best threads.

  • The price was named. How to check: find the message with a figure in it. A bad answer: no price until the fifth message, or none at all.
  • Questions about the customer's problem. How to check: count the rep's questions before the first product pitch. A bad answer: zero.
  • An agreed next step with a date. How to check: read the rep's last message. A bad answer: «I'll be in touch».
  • Touches after the customer went quiet. How to check: how many times they wrote after the customer's last reply. A bad answer: once, then the deal was closed.
  • The customer's language. How to check: which language the customer writes in and which one the rep answers in. A bad answer: different ones.
  • The reaction to «too expensive». How to check: read the rep's next three messages. A bad answer: a discount straight away.
  • Reply speed inside the thread. How to check: the pauses between messages during working hours. A bad answer: the customer waits hours once the conversation is already under way.

Zone 4. The funnel: where exactly it leaks

  1. Count the conversion of the move between every pair of neighbouring stages over three months.
  2. Find the move with the lowest conversion relative to its neighbours.
  3. Count the average time a deal spends on each stage.
  4. Mark the stages where the time is one and a half times higher than their neighbours.
  5. Read twenty threads that stopped at the move you found.

The calculation shows where it leaks. The reading shows why. Neither one alone leads to action: a number with no threads behind it turns into a guess, threads with no number turn into an impression.

Zone 5. People: plan, rhythm, comp plan

  • The plan broken down by week and by driver. How to check: ask for the current month's plan in the form it actually gets used in. A bad answer: one revenue figure for the month.
  • The rep knows their number for today. How to check: ask anyone, unprepared. A bad answer: «somewhere near plan».
  • A short morning stand-up. How to check: look at when the last one happened. A bad answer: «we meet when we need to».
  • Conversations reviewed every week. How to check: ask for the last review in writing. A bad answer: the reviews are verbal and live in the head of sales' memory.
  • The comp plan tied to payments. How to check: what last month's bonus was calculated on. A bad answer: on orders booked whose money has not arrived.
  • A new rep has a ramp plan. How to check: ask when the last new rep reached team level and how that was measured. A bad answer: nobody measured it.
  • A head of sales with no personal sales target. How to check: look at how many deals the head of sales closed personally. A bad answer: more than any rep.

Zone 6. Money: cost of sales, receivables, the price of missed enquiries

  • Cost of sales. How to check: divide every expense on the team by the revenue it brought in over the same period. A bad answer: the figure is above your product margin — the team is running at a loss.
  • Receivables. How to check: the total of invoices issued and unpaid for more than two weeks, with the age of each. A bad answer: nobody keeps that list.
  • The price of missed enquiries. How to check: multiply the number of unanswered enquiries by your conversion and your average deal size. A bad answer: the figure turned out comparable with your monthly advertising budget.
  • Average deal size by rep. How to check: count each one separately. A bad answer: the difference is severalfold and nobody explains why.
On the made-to-order furniture project the audit started with two numbers. One customer in thirteen waited more than an hour for a first reply, and conversion from enquiry to payment was 7.1%. Two months of work on speed and on conversation reviews later, one in twenty-seven waited more than an hour and conversion was 10.6%. The flow of enquiries did not change; orders went up by 17 a month.
100×the difference in your chance of speaking to a customer: a reply in 5 minutes against 30 (MIT, InsideSales, 2007)
7.1% → 10.6%conversion on the furniture project two months after the audit
$150an outside review of your team's conversations, three working days

What you should have at the end

An audit ends with a list of three lines.

  1. The place where it leaks most, with a number: which move, and how many deals stay there.
  2. The reason, backed by quotes from the threads.
  3. One change for next week, and the number that will show you the result.

Change one thing at a time. Launch three changes together and a month later you will not know which one worked, and repeating the result somewhere else will be beyond you.

Questions people ask

How long does an audit take if I do it myself?

The four opening numbers come together in an evening. Reading twenty threads is another two or three hours. The longest part is reconciling the records against messengers and the phone system: set aside a separate day for that.

Who inside the company should run the audit?

Whoever runs the team audits themselves, and it shows in the findings. If you are doing it in-house, take someone outside sales: your finance person, your operations director, or yourself.

Where do I start if time is very short?

With two things: the list of enquiries with no answer, and first response time across the last thirty enquiries. Those two checks find money faster than any of the others and take an hour.

How do I tell whether the problem is traffic or the sales team?

Compare enquiry count and conversion with the same months last year. The same number of enquiries and less money — look inside the team. The flow of enquiries fell — that is a question for marketing.

Should I warn the reps about the audit?

Yes, and tell them you are checking the system. A hidden check gives you one honest snapshot and damaged relationships for months. People who know their threads are being read start writing better the next day — that is a result too.

What if the records are empty and there is nothing to count?

Then the first finding of the audit is the records. Start the simplest spreadsheet for a month: enquiry, channel, date, stage, next step, amount. In a month you will have the numbers for a real audit.

What does an outside review cost?

A review of your team's conversations is $150 and three working days. You get a list of the places where it leaks, with quotes from your own threads and a count of what each place costs you per month.

Sources: our own measurements on 2026 projects and the made-to-order furniture case; the Lead Response Management study — James Oldroyd, MIT Sloan School of Management together with InsideSales.com, 2007 (three years of data, six companies, more than 15,000 enquiries).
if you need this done in your company

We do the review from outside: we listen to your team's calls and read their chat threads, show the places where money is lost with quotes, and count what they cost you per month. $150, three working days.

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