Your CRM Isn't the Problem. Your Process Might Be.

Your CRM Isn't the Problem. Your Process Might Be.

A business buys a CRM because it wants things to be more organised.

Customer information should be in one place. Sales activity should be visible. Follow-ups should be easier to manage. Managers should be able to see what is happening without asking five people.

Then a few months later, the CRM is there, but people are still using spreadsheets.

Important information is sitting in email inboxes.

Someone has a separate tracker.

A manager asks for an update and gets three different answers.

It is easy to conclude that the CRM is the problem.

Sometimes it is.

But before replacing the system, it is worth looking at something else:

How is the work actually supposed to happen?

A CRM cannot fix a process nobody has defined

Imagine a company receives a new enquiry.

The CRM is supposed to be the place where it is recorded.

But who enters it?

When?

What information is required?

Who owns the enquiry after it is entered?

What happens if the customer does not respond?

When should someone follow up?

When is the enquiry considered closed?

If nobody has agreed on these things, the CRM cannot work out the answers for you.

People will create their own ways of working.

One person might keep a spreadsheet.

Another might use reminders in their calendar.

Someone else might keep everything in their inbox.

The business then has a CRM, but not one consistent process.

Look at what people do, not what the system says they do

One of the most useful things you can do is watch a piece of work move through the business.

Take a recent enquiry and follow it from the moment it arrived.

Ask:

• Where did it first arrive?
• Who saw it?
• Where was it recorded?
• What happened next?
• Who was responsible for following up?
• Where did they record the next action?
• How did the next person know what to do?
• What happened when information was missing?
• How was the enquiry eventually closed?

Don't start by looking at the CRM reports.

Start with the work.

You may find that the system is capable of doing what you need, but the process around it is unclear.

The spreadsheet may be telling you something

A common reaction to a side spreadsheet is:

"We need to stop people using spreadsheets."

Maybe.

But first ask why the spreadsheet exists.

Perhaps the CRM does not show the information in a way the team needs.

Perhaps the CRM requires too many steps to update.

Perhaps the team needs to track something the original process never accounted for.

Perhaps nobody trusts the information in the CRM.

Or perhaps the spreadsheet is simply easier.

That last point matters.

If the official process is harder than the workaround, people will naturally use the workaround when they are busy.

Removing the spreadsheet without fixing the reason behind it will probably not solve the problem.

You may just end up with frustrated people and the same information being tracked somewhere else.

Find the point where the process breaks

Instead of asking, "Why aren't people using the CRM?"

Try asking:

"At what point does the CRM stop being useful to them?"

For example, perhaps the sales team records the enquiry correctly.

Then the customer asks for a quotation.

The quotation is prepared somewhere else.

The customer replies by email.

The reply is not added to the CRM.

A week later, someone asks what happened with the enquiry.

Now the team has to search through emails to find the answer.

The problem may not be the initial CRM entry.

The problem is the handoff between the enquiry and the quotation.

That is a process problem.

Sometimes the system really is the problem

This does not mean the answer is always "use your existing software better."

Sometimes the software genuinely does not fit the way the business operates.

There may be a missing feature.

The process may have changed as the business grew.

Two systems may need to share information but currently do not.

Or the team may have outgrown the way the system was originally set up.

The important thing is to find that out after looking at the workflow, rather than assuming it from the beginning.

Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time changing systems without changing the underlying problem.

Try this before changing your CRM

Pick one type of work that causes regular frustration.

It could be:

• New enquiries
• Quotations
• Customer onboarding
• Service requests
• Renewals
• Complaints
• Cancellations

Then take three recent examples.

For each one, write down what actually happened.

Don't describe the ideal process.

Describe what people really did.

Then mark where:

Information was entered twice

Where did someone copy information from one place to another?

Ownership changed

Who became responsible for the work, and was that clear?

Someone had to remember

Was there a follow-up or action that depended on someone's memory?

The work left the main system

Did someone move to email, WhatsApp or a spreadsheet to continue the work?

Someone had to ask for an update

If a manager had to chase someone to find out what was happening, why wasn't the status already visible?

These points give you something concrete to work on.

Fix the process before adding more technology

Once you understand where the problem is, the fix may be quite small.

Perhaps one field needs to be made mandatory.

Perhaps every enquiry needs one clear owner.

Perhaps the team needs one agreed place to record the next action.

Perhaps a spreadsheet can be removed because the CRM already contains the information.

Perhaps the CRM needs to be connected to another system.

Or perhaps automation would remove a repetitive step.

There is no rule saying the solution has to involve technology.

A clear process with clear ownership can be more useful than a complicated system nobody consistently uses.

The real test of your CRM

A CRM should support the way your business needs to work.

But it cannot decide what that way should be.

If people are constantly working around the system, don't immediately blame the people or replace the software.

Follow the work.

Find where it becomes difficult.

Understand why people created the workaround.

Then decide what needs to change.

Sometimes that will mean changing the process.

Sometimes it will mean changing how the CRM is used.

And sometimes it will mean changing the system itself.

The important thing is to solve the actual problem rather than simply moving it into a new piece of software.

If your team has a CRM but work is still getting lost between people and systems, tell us where work is getting stuck.