You’ve stepped into a new commercial leadership role. Within a few weeks, the picture starts to become clear. You see deal records that haven’t been updated in months. Pipeline stages that nobody follows the same way. Reports that exist but aren’t driving decisions. A team that refers to their own spreadsheets or each other rather than the system.
You’ve inherited a CRM that was built around someone else’s approach. Getting commercial visibility from it, quickly and without breaking what still works, is one of the first real tests of the role.
This guide covers how to approach it.
What a Broken CRM Actually Looks Like
Before fixing anything, it helps to identify what you’re dealing with. Broken CRMs tend to share the same symptoms:
🔴 Pipeline stages that don’t reflect reality, with deals sitting unchanged for weeks and reps using stages differently from each other
🔴 Data nobody acts on, with pipeline values and close dates entered to satisfy the system rather than inform decisions
🔴 Empty or inconsistently filled fields, added at implementation and never properly adopted
🔴 Reports that aren’t opened, built for someone else’s priorities and no longer relevant to how the business runs
🔴 Workarounds everywhere, with personal spreadsheets, shared documents, and message threads holding the information the CRM should
The workarounds are usually the clearest signal. When people stop trusting the system, they build around it. Those workarounds show you exactly where the gaps are.
The Two Mistakes to Avoid
The temptation when walking into this is to act quickly. The two most common responses both cause problems.
Ignoring it and working around it buries the problem. The team’s habits solidify. New reps learn the informal system rather than the official one. By the time the pressure to fix things becomes unavoidable, the gap between the CRM and commercial reality is wider than it needed to be.
Rebuilding from scratch immediately sounds decisive. In practice, it destroys whatever institutional knowledge exists in the system, creates disruption before trust is established, and often reproduces the same structural mistakes in a cleaner interface, because the underlying process questions haven’t been answered yet.
Both approaches skip the same thing: a clear-eyed assessment of what’s actually broken and why.
Assess Before You Fix
Spend your first few weeks observing the system rather than changing it. The goal is to understand what was intentional, what drifted, and what was never fit for purpose.
Work through these questions:
- Are pipeline stages being used consistently? Pull up ten deals across different reps. Do the stages mean the same thing to everyone, or are they used as rough approximations?
- Is the data being used to make decisions? Ask your sales manager which reports they look at before a pipeline review. If the answer is none of them, that tells you something important.
- Which fields are empty across the board? Fields nobody fills in are usually a design problem. They were added without a clear purpose and never stuck.
- Where do reps go instead of the CRM? Their workarounds are a map of the system’s failures. Follow them.
- What does the previous setup reveal about how they sold? Every CRM reflects how its last owner ran the process. Understanding that helps you separate what was designed badly from what was designed for a different way of selling.
By the end of this phase, you should have a clear picture of what’s structural (stages, field design, pipeline architecture) and what’s behavioural (inconsistent use, partial adoption). The structural problems need to be addressed before the behavioural ones will improve.
Fix in the Right Order
With the assessment done, the priority becomes sequence. Fixing everything at once creates confusion and resistance. Fix in this order:
| Priority | What to Fix | Why It Comes First |
| 1 | Stage structure | Forecasting, pipeline reviews, and performance visibility all depend on it |
| 2 | Decision-driving fields | Data quality has to be right before reports built on it mean anything |
| 3 | Reports and dashboards | Only useful once the foundation underneath is reliable |
- Stage structure first: Define what has to be true for a deal to sit at each stage, and agree on that with the team before anything else changes. Stages that reflect how deals actually move are the foundation on which everything else is built.
- Fields that drive decisions second: Identify the handful of fields that feed into reports or shape how managers coach. Make sure those are clearly defined, required where it matters, and understood by the team. Leave the rest for later.
- Reports last: Reports built on unreliable stage data and empty fields will still be wrong. Fix the foundation first, then reconfigure reporting around what leadership actually needs to see.
The Window You Have Right Now
New leaders have a brief period where changes to the system feel like part of getting started rather than criticism of what came before. The team expects things to shift when someone new arrives. That window is worth using deliberately.
Use it to have an open conversation about what the CRM is for — not as a compliance lecture, but as a practical discussion about what the team needs from the system, what leadership needs to see, and what’s currently getting in the way of both. That conversation, held early, sets the foundation for a system that works for the business rather than one that reflects a sales approach that no longer exists.
If you’d like support assessing your current CRM setup and working out what needs to change, book a demo with the BuddyCRM team.