What Good Looks Like: CRM
If you cannot say what is in your pipeline right now, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a development leader runs into, and it is rarely about the software.
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Protect what is Working Before you Systematize It
The spreadsheet was doing two jobs at once: holding the friction and holding the knowledge. Automating the follow-up can oversaturate the people you were carefully tending. The wrong system does not just fail to help; it quietly erases the thing that was generating the growth.
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The CRM Underneath
The development director could not fully answer the board’s question about the pipeline because the data was in two CRMs, three spreadsheets, and a pile of handwritten notes from the gala. The system had not broken that week. It had been broken for a while, and that week was when the cost happened to be sitting at the head of the board table.
