You don’t need me to find your most obvious leaks — you can run a first-pass self-audit in an afternoon and surface the big ones yourself. Here’s how, step by step, with the trap that catches most people at each stage. It won’t be as thorough as a full audit, but it’ll tell you whether you have a problem worth taking seriously.
Step 1: Draw the actual path a lead takes
Not the idealised funnel diagram — the real one. Every intake point, every system a lead passes through, every moment ownership changes hands. Whiteboard it end to end.
The trap: drawing the process as designed rather than as it runs. Ask the people at each step what actually happens, not what the documentation says.
Step 2: Mark every handoff
Circle each point where a lead changes owner or system: marketing to sales, SDR to AE, one tool to the next. These are your candidate leak sites — the failures cluster here, not in the middle of a stage.
The trap: assuming the handoffs are fine because no one’s complained. Silent leaks generate no complaints.
Step 3: Follow a real cohort through
Take last month’s leads and trace what happened to them. How many were worked? How fast? How many are sitting unassigned or untouched right now? Count, don’t estimate.
The trap: looking at summary metrics instead of individual records. Averages hide the unassigned queue; a record-level trace reveals it.
Step 4: Find the definition gaps
Ask marketing what “qualified” means, then ask sales. Ask two reps what “stage 3” means. Where the answers differ, you’ve found a leak — every mismatch is re-work and dropped follow-up.
The trap: accepting the written definition as the working one. What’s documented and what’s applied are often different things.
Step 5: Quantify the biggest leak
For the worst leak you found, estimate the cost: number of leads affected, times a conservative conversion rate, times average deal value. A rough number is fine — it turns “we should probably fix that” into “that’s costing us this much”, which is what gets it prioritised.
The trap: stopping at “we found some issues” without a cost. Unpriced problems don’t get fixed.
What a self-audit can and can’t do
Done honestly, this surfaces your obvious leaks and tells you whether you need to look deeper. What it won’t catch is the subtle stuff — the enrichment gap misrouting your enterprise leads, the attribution model quietly misdirecting spend — because those hide from a first pass. If the self-audit finds real money leaking, that’s the signal to go deeper.
That’s exactly where a free health check picks up — I’ll find the leaks your afternoon didn’t.
Related reading
See seven signs your handoff is leaking pipeline and what a Pipeline Leak Audit actually delivers.