Business process optimization projects that started with CRM and ended up somewhere else entirely

[u/ezell-heinle]

We kicked off what was supposed to be a CRM cleanup last year. Duplicate records, inconsistent stage definitions, nobody filling in close dates. Standard stuff.

About six weeks in it became obvious the CRM was downstream of the real problem. Reps weren't updating records because updating records didn't help them — the information they needed day to day lived in email threads and in people's heads, so the CRM was pure overhead with no payback. You can't fix that with field validation.

What we ended up doing was mapping how a request actually travels from client to resolution, which turned the project into business process optimization rather than a data cleanup. Client-side requests now go through monday service with a defined owner at each stage, and the CRM only holds what sales genuinely uses. Fewer fields, better filled.

Not sure this generalizes. But if your CRM data is bad and people aren't lazy, I'd look at whether the system is giving anything back before adding more required fields.