Every business I work with has a CRM. Almost none of them actually use it.
The typical pattern goes like this. Someone buys HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or whatever the sales rep convinced them was the best option. There's a flurry of setup activity. Contacts get imported, often from a spreadsheet that hasn't been updated since 2022. A few fields get customised. The team is told to use it. Three months later, the only person logging in is the person who bought it, and even they've given up entering notes after meetings.
The CRM becomes a graveyard of incomplete records, outdated information, and good intentions. Meanwhile, the actual customer relationships live in email threads, WhatsApp messages, sticky notes, and the salesperson's memory.
This is fixable. Not in three months with a consultant. In about a week, if you're willing to be ruthless.
CRMs don't fail because the software is bad. They fail because the setup doesn't match how people actually work.
The most common mistake is too many fields. Someone (usually the most organised person in the company, or worse, the software provider's onboarding specialist) creates 40 custom fields covering everything from "budget authority" to "preferred communication channel." Nobody fills them in because nobody has time to fill in 40 fields after every interaction. So the data is either empty or fictional.
The second mistake is no clear process. The CRM has a pipeline, but the stages don't match how deals actually progress in your business. "Qualified Lead" means something different to every person on the team. "Proposal Sent" might mean a formal proposal, a quick email with pricing, or a verbal quote on a phone call. Without clear definitions, the pipeline data is meaningless.
The third mistake is no consequence for not using it. If a salesperson can book meetings, close deals, and get paid without ever updating the CRM, they won't update the CRM. Simple as that.
Here's what I'd do if I had one week to make a CRM that people actually use.
Day one and two: delete everything that doesn't matter. Open the contact record and look at every field. For each one, ask: does this information change how we sell to this person? If the answer is no, hide it or delete it. Most businesses can get down to ten to twelve meaningful fields. Company name, contact name, email, phone, sector, company size, where they came from, what they're interested in, last contact date, next action, and status. That's it. Everything else is noise.
Day three: rebuild the pipeline to match reality. Talk to whoever actually closes deals and ask them: what are the real steps between "someone who might buy" and "someone who bought"? Not what the textbook says, what actually happens. For most B2B service businesses, the honest pipeline is something like: New Enquiry, First Conversation Had, Proposal Sent, Proposal Followed Up, Won, Lost. Maybe six stages. Not twelve. Not eight with sub-stages.
Define each stage clearly enough that two different people would put the same deal in the same stage. "First Conversation Had" means a phone call or meeting where you discussed their needs. Not an email. Not a LinkedIn message. A conversation.
Day four: set up tags that mean something. Tags should describe attributes that affect how you market to someone. Industry tags (manufacturing, professional services, SaaS). Source tags (referral, website, cold outreach, event). Status tags (active client, lapsed, prospect). That's it. Not "interested in product A" and "interested in product B" and "interested in product A and B" and "might be interested in product C."
Day five: automate what you can. When an email gets a reply, log it automatically. When a meeting is booked, move the deal to the next stage automatically. When a deal sits in one stage for more than two weeks, send a reminder automatically. The less manual work the CRM requires, the more likely people are to use it. We build these automations for clients using their CRM's native features or workflow tools that connect to it, and the difference in adoption is immediate.
When a CRM works, you can answer basic questions instantly. How many active conversations are we having right now? What's the total value of proposals we've sent this month? Which deals have stalled? Who hasn't been contacted in more than 30 days? Where did our last ten clients come from?
Those answers should take thirty seconds. If they take thirty minutes of spreadsheet wrangling, your CRM isn't working.
We set up CRM environments for clients with pipelines that reflect their actual sales process, custom fields that capture useful information without creating admin burden, and automation that handles the repetitive updates. The goal isn't a perfect database. It's a functional one that people use because it's easier than not using it.
A CRM that five people use imperfectly is worth infinitely more than a CRM that one person maintains perfectly while everyone else ignores it. Aim for adoption first. Optimise later.
Martin Dugan, AA2
