Four inputs matter most. First, historical lead and customer records, which teach the tool what a good fit looks like in your market. Second, a clean CRM, meaning deduplicated accounts, consistent fields and defined pipeline stages, because agents act on whatever state your data is in.
Third, documented qualification criteria, including the firmographic thresholds, disqualifiers and buying signals your team already uses informally. Fourth, knowledge about your offers, pricing boundaries and common objections, which becomes the company brain that chatbots, voice agents and email assistants draw from.
Gaps found during assessment get fixed before build rather than after, since retrofitting data quality into a live tool costs more than preparing it first. Companies sometimes worry their data is too messy to start.
In practice, messy data is the normal starting condition, and the readiness assessment exists precisely to map what needs cleaning, what needs documenting and what can be automated safely on day one.