Signs you need a custom CRM, not a spreadsheet

Ten symptoms in four groups. Most teams who recognise several of them still should not build.

The signs you need a custom CRM are boring. Nobody wakes up and decides the CRM is wrong. It goes wrong slowly, in workarounds nobody voted for, until one day the tool you pay for is not where the work happens.

Ten of them are below, in four groups. Read it as a scorecard.

Is there a spreadsheet next to your CRM?

If there is, you already have your answer and the rest of this is detail. A spreadsheet living beside the system is the clearest single sign that you have outgrown your CRM.

The CRM vs spreadsheet question settles itself on one observation: which one does someone open first when a customer calls. Before you act on it, find out why the spreadsheet exists. Sometimes the tool cannot hold that data, sometimes nobody configured it to, and those two carry very different price tags.

Signs 1 to 3: is the data the problem?

The data group has the clearest fix of the four, and it is the easiest to spot and the most expensive to leave alone. They all have the same shape: one fact exists in more than one place, and a person in the middle keeps the copies in step.

• 1. The same details get typed twice. A form arrives, someone re-keys it into the system. That step is pure loss, and it is where details quietly go missing.
• 2. There is no single customer view. Working out what was promised, by whom, and on which call means asking around or opening four tabs.
• 3. Reports get assembled by hand. The numbers already exist somewhere; a person spends a morning arranging them into a picture, every week or every month.

Signs 4 to 6: does the pipeline match how deals really move?

Rarely, and this group hides better than a data problem does. The data is fine and the tool works. The shape of it is wrong for your business, so people spend their day translating between the two.

• 4. The stages in the tool are not the stages the work passes through. A builder books a survey before anything can be priced properly, and an off-the-shelf funnel has nowhere to put it.
• 5. Half the fields are permanently empty. Each one exists because somebody asked for it, and stays blank because it does not fit the conversation people are actually having.
• 6. The CRM stops at the sale. Scheduling the work, doing it and billing for it happen in systems nobody told about the deal.

Signs 7 and 8: is the team working around the tool?

Workarounds spread quietly enough that nobody reports them. Adoption problems get blamed on people and are almost never about people: when a whole team builds the same workaround, the workaround is telling you something about the tool.

• 7. Everyone keeps a private version. A notebook, a phone, a personal sheet. The real state of a deal lives in one head and gets entered into the CRM afterwards, if there is time.
• 8. More training is always the answer. If the fix for every complaint is another session on how to use it, the tool is asking people to remember what it should be doing for them.

Signs 9 and 10: does it get worse as you grow?

Yes, and these are the only two signs on the list with a deadline attached. Everything above stays annoying at a steady rate. These two get worse every time you add a person, a brand or a location.

• 9. Another person costs more than another seat. The licence is the small part: most seats touch a fraction of what they are billed for, and every new hire needs a week of oral history first.
• 10. A second brand, location or product line does not fit. You end up with one account per brand, or one field standing in for the whole distinction, and reporting across them is manual again.

Are these signs you need a custom CRM, or signs you need a better process?

Usually the second one, and counting is the wrong test either way. Ten small annoyances can be cheaper to live with than one that costs a day a week, and a single sign in the growth group can outweigh five in the data group.

The number that decides it is your own, and you can work it out this afternoon. Add up the hours a week the workarounds cost across everyone doing them, multiply by what an hour of their time is worth, then multiply by four to get a month. That is roughly what the gap costs you, before errors and before the deals nobody followed up on.

Now hold that against what a build would cost. That is when to build a custom CRM: when the comparison says so.

Divide the build by what the gap costs you a month. If the answer is more months than you can see ahead, change the process and keep the tool.

That holds even though we build these for a living. If you sell the way everyone else in your trade sells, the CRM is not what is holding you back, and the budget does more somewhere a customer can see it. There is a longer piece on this site, custom CRM vs off-the-shelf, for once you are fairly sure you are on the other side of it.

What would we look at first?

The process, before any software. Discovery on this kind of work is one to two weeks of process mapping, a data model and a fixed scope, so the thing you are buying is described before anyone quotes it.

• Where the same fact gets entered more than once, and by whom
• The stages a deal really passes through, described the way your team talks about them rather than the way the tool labels them
• What the team keeps outside the system, and why they keep it there
• Which tools stay, and which get replaced

The last one matters most, because the answer is usually smaller than people expect. One pipeline, written in the words your team already says out loud, sitting on top of the systems nobody was ever going to give up.

If several of these landed, put the list in front of the people who work around the tool every day and ask which ones they recognise. Their answer is the scope; send the messy version to hello@99six.dev.

If that is your week too, thirty minutes is enough to find out.

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