CRM systems

Adoption is the whole game, and it is lost through friction rather than through disagreement. Every required field that does not help the person filling it in, every stage that does not match how deals really progress, every screen that takes four clicks to log a call — each one is a small tax, and the total is paid in a system that is six weeks out of date. The design question is not what management would like to report on; it is what a salesperson will still be entering in month four.

Build versus configure is worth being honest about. The major platforms handle contacts, deals, activities and reporting perfectly well, and most companies that believe their process is too unusual for one are describing a preference rather than a constraint. Custom is genuinely right when the object model does not fit — a business selling something that is not a deal with a value and a close date, or one where the relationship graph matters more than the pipeline — and it is expensive everywhere else.

Migrations are where CRM projects actually go wrong. The old system contains a decade of duplicates, contacts with three spellings of the same company, deals in stages that no longer exist and fields somebody repurposed in 2019 without telling anyone. Moving that as-is imports the mess into a new home and destroys trust immediately. The work is deduplication, mapping and a deliberate decision about what not to bring — which is a business conversation before it is a technical one.