QuestionCRMSmall business

When did everyone stop believing the CRM?

The biggest CRM problem might not be bad data. It might be that nobody quite believes the data that's already there. We're trying to work out how common that is.

By Danny · 10 August 2026

Back to the workbench

Nobody announces it. There's no meeting where a business decides the CRM can't be trusted. It just slowly stops being the thing people check first.

You can usually spot it in the workarounds. Someone keeps a private spreadsheet of the accounts they actually care about. Someone else asks in the group chat rather than looking it up. The weekly report gets re-typed by hand because the export never looks right.

Bad data isn't quite the problem

Most of the CRMs we open are about seventy percent right. That sounds fine until you realise nobody knows which seventy percent. So every number gets a mental asterisk, and once a number has an asterisk on it, people stop using it to make decisions.

We've got the data. We just always ring the account manager to check.
Sales director, twelve people, name withheld for obvious reasons

What we're trying to find out

-Whether the trust goes first, or the data quality does
-Which single field people distrust the most (our money is on lead source)
-Whether anyone has ever fixed it without starting again

Does this sound familiar?

If this is a bit close to home, you might recognise some of the things we've built or the tools we tend to reach for.

Also on the bench

Idea

CRM health check

Twenty questions, one honest score, and a list of the things quietly costing you money. No sales call at the end of it.

Note

Nobody actually wants an AI receptionist

They want the phone answered when everyone's up a ladder. That's a different thing, and it's a much smaller thing to build.

Observation

Lead Source New FINAL 2

We don't know who created it. 14,806 contacts have a value in it. Nobody is prepared to delete it.