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. Good usually does not mean a new system. It means a pipeline you can read at a glance, where every record earns its place and every stage means the same thing to everyone. Most of the way there is a few decisions, not a rebuild, and there is real ground you can cover on your own this week. Here are a few places to start.
Where it stops: those five hold for a quarter. Staying clean past that takes rules for how records enter, update, and retire, built so the system maintains itself instead of depending on the weekly cleanup holding.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
