We all know how much salespeople love using a CRM.
(That was sarcasm—for those of you new to our brand of humor.)
As much as we’d love to ignore the problem, it’s in every revenue operator’s best interest to fix pipeline hygiene with as little effort required from sales as possible.
And no, it’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because their job is one most of us wouldn’t want to take on. They deserve every break we can give them from NSAs (Non-Selling Activities).
Even if these fixes sound like a dream, get sales leadership buy-in before automating anything.
Then, communicate the changes to your reps—with a heavy emphasis on time savings.
And finally, remind them again a few months later that you’re a benevolent admin genius making their lives easier.
Run a report to find open opportunities with a Close Date in the past.
Set up a scheduled flow (or a Zap) to automatically:
Why?
Most pipeline views are filtered for upcoming Close Dates. Reps rarely look at past-due deals.
Plus, a Push Counter helps you call out that 600-day-old Stage 1 opp in the most screenshot-friendly way.
Remove the “New” button from the Opportunity tab and the Opportunity related list on Accounts.
Sales should only be able to create opps via:
Why?
Creating opportunities from the Account or Opp tab just leads to extra work—reps have to manually select a contact (which they won’t) at minimum.
That breaks campaign attribution and not knowing who to talk to first makes life harder for marketing, CS, and renewals.
This one takes a convo with sales leadership, but it’s worth it:
Auto-close opps in Stage 0 ("pre-qualified") that haven’t had recent activity.
Use a scheduled flow that references the last activity date to avoid false positives.
(And if your team isn’t already using integrated email/calendar/call logging tools... what are we even doing here?)
Why?
Stale Stage 0 deals are often just “dibs” on an account. They create friction during territory realignments and block marketing from targeting otherwise valuable accounts. Time to send them out of opp purgatory!
No one wants to scroll through 200 fields, especially when most are empty.
If there are a few fields from the Account record that would make life easier for sales, auto-port them to the Opportunity.
Why fight it? Especially when the page is already cluttered with fields nobody uses. Someone had to say it.
Tools like Gong now use GenAI to generate action items after calls—perfect for populating the Next Steps field.
Depending on your setup, you can:
Or:
Why?
It’s a low-lift way to keep next steps up to date—and help reps avoid typing them in manually (which they won’t).
Some call recording tools can now auto-add meeting attendees to:
Just make sure you include a domain exclusion so you don’t log internal employees.
Why?
Marketing relies on contacts being appended to the opportunity for campaign influence to function properly in your CRM. Many attribution tools also leverage the opportunity contact role relationship.
Appending the right roles to the opportunity also helps marketing understand the makeup of buyer committees and gives customer success a decent place to start when engaging a client for onboarding.
Sales hates letting go. We get it. But that 600-day-old “Negotiation” opp with zero activity? It’s not closing.
If sales leaders push back on auto-closure, try:
Why?
Same reasons as Stage 0 clean-up. Stale opps block territory management, mess with forecasting, and stop marketing from touching dormant accounts.
Some hygiene reports every CRM admin should have on dashboards:
Ideally, these reports should be empty if your automations are firing correctly. But it’s still best practice to keep them visible—just in case.
We’d love to give you a step-by-step for this... but renewal automation is highly org-specific.
You’ll need to consider:
Check what your quoting tool supports, then map out what should happen before you automate anything.
This list is just the beginning. From renewal opp creation to CS handoffs to deactivation alerts—there’s a lot more automation to explore.
And your sales team will love you for any headache you remove.
Just don’t forget: communicate what you automate. Otherwise, “it didn’t happen.”
Looking for more great content? Check out our blog and join the community.
