The three-salespeople test
It takes five minutes. Ask each person on the team, separately: what has to be true for a deal to move from demo to proposal? What happens after a proposal goes out? Who owns a deal once the client says yes? If the answers match, the process exists and the question is whether the tool supports it. If they don’t, the tool has been asked to hold something that was never defined, and swapping it will reproduce the problem with a different logo.
What a real tool problem looks like
They exist, and they’re rarer than the complaints suggest. The process is agreed and written down; the team runs it the same way; and the software makes a step slower than doing it on paper: a required field that doesn’t apply, a pipeline that can’t model two parallel tracks, a report that needs an export to read. Those are configuration problems nine times out of ten, and a migration problem the tenth.
What a process problem looks like (in the CRM)
- Deals that only ever move forward, because nobody defined what moves one back.
- A “next step” field that’s empty on half the records, because nobody owns filling it.
- Stage names that mean different things to different reps. “Qualified” is the usual one.
- A spreadsheet the manager keeps on the side, because the CRM “isn’t accurate”, which is a polite way of saying the process isn’t followed.
- A second CRM being evaluated, eighteen months after the first one went in.
Why the tool gets blamed
Because it’s the only part of the sales system you can point at. A process that lives in people’s heads can’t be criticised; a screen can. And because buying a new tool feels like action, while writing down what “qualified” means feels like admin. It’s the opposite: the definition is the work, and the tool is admin.
What to do first
Run the test. Write down the answers. Where they differ, decide, as a team, which answer is right, and make that the entry criterion for the stage. Do that for every stage before touching the CRM. Then configure the tool you already have to enforce the definitions you just agreed. Only if it genuinely can’t should you shop. What the stages should measure is the companion to this note; Find the leak is the version where I run the test for you, against your last ninety days of deals.