How to audit your sales and marketing software

Somewhere in your business a former salesperson's phone may still hold your buyers' chats, and a subscription nobody remembers may renew next month. A software audit starts with one register: a row for every tool anyone pays for or logs into, with the facts that matter about each: what it is for, who uses it, what it costs, what data it holds, and what breaks if it stops. Then four rules decide what to keep, merge or close. The register is the work, and the decisions go quicker once it exists.

Find every tool, and not from memory

Tools hide in three places. Search the last year of bank and card statements for recurring payments, including personal cards that staff are reimbursed for. Search the shared inbox for words like "invoice", "renewal", "your trial" and "welcome to"; tools on free tiers leave only a welcome email behind. And ask each person to list what they open daily, free tools included. A free tool holding your customer list is still a tool.

You may find more than you expect, such as two tools doing the same job, one of them started by someone who has since left.

The register

Tool and plan | Purpose (one verb phrase: "send bulk WhatsApp")
Owner (one named person with admin rights) | Users (who logs in, in practice)
Annual cost (from the statement) | Data held | Renewal date
If it stopped: what could the business not do?

Keep "users" honest. A plan with ten paid seats and three logins is a finding. For cost, use what you actually paid last year, not the vendor's page. Then add the hidden cost the statement does not show: the hour a week a person spends exporting a list by hand, or the second tool bought because the first could not send a message. A cheap tool needing a daily manual step is not cheap, and a rough guess of that time beside the fee makes the decisions easier to defend.

Four cut rules, applied in order

No owner, no tool. If nobody can say who is responsible, nobody looks after passwords, exports or access for leavers. Assign an owner or close it.

One job, one tool. Where two tools do the same job, keep the one the team really uses and move the other's data across. Choose by where the team already is, not by feature lists.

One home for the data. Customer names and numbers should live in one place that is the truth; the others read from it or are fed from it. If three tools each hold part of the customer list, you have no list.

No unused paid seats. Reduce seats to the people who log in, at the next renewal unless the vendor lets you cut sooner.

Four questions about the data

For each tool holding customer information, ask who can see it, and remove former staff first. Ask whether you can export it, and whether you have tried; a tool you cannot export from is a tool you cannot leave. Ask whether it is duplicated elsewhere, since duplicates are where wrong phone numbers breed. And ask whether anything in it should not be held. Call recordings and personal details raise obligations that differ by situation and change, so check with your own adviser if unsure.

Leavers and logins

Some of the worst findings are about people, not products. Every time someone leaves, the tools they touched should be checked against the register: shared passwords changed, personal accounts moved to a company login, devices cleared. Add a leaver line to the register itself, so the check happens because a row exists and not because someone remembers. If that feels heavy for a team of six, keep it to one question each time someone leaves: whose access did we not remove?

A tile exporter in Morbi

Here is an invented example. An exporter of ceramic tiles in Morbi has six people in sales and support, and the owner suspected the software bill was too high.

The register turned up ten tools. A CRM that two people used. A second lead sheet kept by the telecaller. A bulk SMS tool and a bulk WhatsApp tool. An email service whose last campaign was long past. A design app one salesperson had paid for personally and billed to the company. And one surprise: the business WhatsApp number was logged in on the phone of a salesperson who had left months earlier. It held the only copy of several buyers' chats and the price lists sent to them.

Rule one closed the email service after its list was exported and checked. Rule two merged the lead sheets into the CRM. Rule three exposed the WhatsApp problem. The owner's first idea was to ask the former employee to delete the app, which would have wiped the chats. Instead the owner had the number linked to a company device, exported the important chats to the CRM notes, spot-checked ten records, and only then removed the old login. The design app stayed because the salesperson still needed it, and the SMS and WhatsApp tools both stayed for another renewal while the team decided which to keep.

When not to cut

Not in your busiest selling stretch: changing a tool mid-season costs more than the subscription. Not because a tool is unfashionable; if it works and the team uses it, retraining is a real cost. And do not run the audit alone if you are the main user. Ask someone else to read the register cold, since the person who set a tool up often cannot see how little of it they use. A plain sheet may serve better than yet another system, as in does a small business really need a CRM or is Excel enough.

Decide the top three rows

Pick the three rows with the largest annual cost or the most worrying data and settle those first. Leave the rest for their next renewal. The implementation checklist helps if a new tool is the outcome, and the rest of our sales work sits under sales. For an outside view of how your tools should connect, revenue technology stack audit and architecture is the service, and tell us what you need is how it starts.