Reps are the symptom, not the cause of bad CRM data
Bad CRM data usually gets blamed on lazy reps. In reality it's a product design problem: sales leaders build the CRM around their own reporting needs, not around the people who use it every day.
It's Friday 6:04. The office has emptied out. But my screen is still open on a deal I am just not ready to close. The date field blinks red. Waiting for an answer I doesn't have. Monday's pipeline meeting won't leave room for the truth - nor does the system. So I pick a date. Because I don't care. Because a guess satisfies the field. And a guess gets me out of here faster than a conversation with my manager who clocked off 2 hours ago.
One of many scenarios I talked about with Jonas from Koalify on his podcast, Dirty Data Secrets. Listening back, I had more to say than fit in the episode.
The CRM is built for the wrong user
We spent the podcast on the obvious version of this problem: sellers put bad data into HubSpot. But the CRM setup itself is the actual cause. It comes from sales leaders and ops teams designing systems around their own needs, not the rep's.
Their user stories usually look like this:
- I need to present to the board, including investors who read numbers closely, so I need a forecast that's completely watertight
- I need to make my number, so I need to see activity in the system to prove we'll hit the pipeline target
- I need my reps to multi-thread because it raises close rates, so I want each of them to submit an account map and a stakeholder list
None of these are unreasonable goals. But none of them describe what I as a rep need to do my job. Implemented literally, they create a CRM that exists to satisfy reporting. And everything else is sales parody: reps have to fill in fields to justify a number, commit deals they doesn't believe in, log activity that doesn't move anything forward, and rebuild account plans and org charts by hand outside the CRM because there's nowhere to do it inside.
I once worked with a large corporation that ran an executive dashboard tracking "data completeness" as a KPI - reps were required to fill 20 fields per account, every record. The result wasn't better data. It was 20 fields with two words typed into each of them, populated once and never touched again.
Reps are smart. Faced with documentation that doesn't help them sell, they'll do the minimum to stay compliant and spend the rest of their time on what actually gets them to quota. That's not a discipline problem. That's a rational response to a badly designed tool. Reps are the symptom. The system is the cause.
What the CRM should do instead
If the CRM is going to produce good data, it has to earn that data by being useful to the people entering it. Three things follow from that.
- The CRM should make reps better at their job, not just better at reporting. If a feature doesn't help close a deal, it's overhead that gets skipped.
- It should carry guardrails from an actual sales process perspective. A methodology like MEDDIC works when it's a handful of useful fields that are tied to real deal stages. It doesn't help if reps are forced to enter 15 fields on Discovery stage where realistically they can't know all of it. After the 2nd solution presentation that information will be outdated.
- Documentation should be a byproduct of the work, not a separate task. Making calls, discovering pains and identifying stakeholders are parts of the job that every good rep does - the CRM should help them do it efficiently and update itself.
I will keep preaching this - thanks to Jonas for giving me the audience this time around 🖤
Markus
about Koalify Koalify makes complex deduplication in HubSpot effortless and reliable. Automatically detect duplicate contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects. Analyze duplicate records, apply custom deduplication and primary record rules, and bulk merge duplicates; all without leaving HubSpot.