Our CRM rollout failed because we ignored the sales team's data

We spent close to $40k on a fancy CRM last year, and the whole thing tanked. I found out the real reason digging through our old spreadsheets: the sales reps had been tracking follow-ups with notes in a shared doc, and our new system couldn't import those free text fields. The vendor kept saying the migration would be smooth, but they never asked about our actual workflows. We lost 6 months of pipeline history and had to rebuild everything from scratch by hand. Now I check every tool's import options before we even look at demos. Has anyone else had a rollout fail because the software ignored how your people already work?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

the_drew1mo ago

Sitting here wondering if losing 6 months of pipeline history really set you back that much. I mean, sales data goes stale pretty quick anyway, and you probably know which deals were worth chasing. Sounds more like a pain in the butt than a total disaster.

4