.png)
Your CRM is supposed to be one of your business's greatest assets. So why does it often feel like an albatross around your neck?
After seeing dozens of B2B SaaS companies grapple with this question, we noticed consistent warning signs that something is amiss:
- Revenue leaders wasting hours on manual reporting
- Teams building "shadow systems" in spreadsheets
- Key customer information being lost at handoff points
- Sales hates the CRM while CS lacks customer context
- Process errors and frequent hot fixes
But will moving to a new CRM solve the issue?
We’ve encountered companies who’ve spent 6-12 months and $200K+ migrating to a new CRM, only to recreate the same fundamental problems. That’s because many "CRM problems" are not platform issues but rather configuration, resource, or data quality issues.
Written for growth-stage B2B SaaS companies (Series A-D) evaluating if their current CRM can effectively support their next phase of growth, this guide will help you to:
- Identify signs that your current CRM setup is limiting growth
- Determine if a CRM migration is truly necessary right now
- Understand next steps to evaluate if a migration is right for your business
Is Your CRM Limiting Business Growth? Key Indicators:
Evaluating the three following areas will give you a clearer picture of to what degree your CRM serves as an asset to your business - or to what extent it is holding you back from growth.
1. Business Impact
Executive Time & Strategic Focus
- Revenue leaders spend significant time on manual reporting
- Unable to accurately forecast revenue and measure key growth metrics
- Difficulty measuring marketing attribution and ROI
Customer Experience & Growth
- Can’t easily track the full customer journey
- Inconsistent customer experiences across touchpoints
- Limited visibility into customer health, churn risks and expansion opportunities
- Support tickets have limited customer context
2. Operational Efficiency
Team Collaboration
- Teams maintaining separate "shadow systems" outside the CRM
- Inconsistent handoffs across marketing, sales and customer success
- Increasing reliance on manual workarounds and spreadsheets
- Key systems are not integrated with the CRM, creating silos.
Growth Requirements
- Difficulty onboarding new reps effectively
- Data hygiene becoming increasingly unmanageable
- Need for enhanced compliance and data governance
- Evolving from PLG or SMB motions into Enterprise sales
- Current workflows and processes don’t support upmarket movement
3. Technical Debt & Cost
- Need for increasingly clunky and hard-to-maintain customizations in order to achieve necessary functionality
- Foundational data issues causing reporting inaccuracies
- Licensing and maintenance costs exceeding the value delivered
Is it Time to Migrate? Decision Factors
If you recognized many of the indicators above in your current CRM, it is possible that migration to a more mature CRM may be a good move for your business.
At the same time, there are myriad factors why CRM issues may crop up. Here are our five reasons why a company might be experiencing issues with their CRM that can potentially be solved without migrating to a new platform:
Lack of Investment in CRM Resources
If your current CRM was set up by someone without extensive experience in CRM architecture, you might be experiencing the impact of non-optimal architectural decisions. Without an experienced internal team or external consultants to manage the platform, your CRM may struggle to scale effectively. As a result, revenue leaders may resort to building their own solutions and reports, often with subpar outcomes.
Insufficient Customization
An out-of-the-box CRM setup rarely aligns perfectly with a company's unique business processes. Customizations such as tailored fields, sales and marketing stages, workflows, and integration will benecessary to reflect your business operations accurately. Investing in these adjustments can enhance usability and ensure the CRM supports your team's needs.
Poor Data Hygiene
Duplicate entries, outdated information, and missing data can significantly diminish CRM effectiveness, creating the false impression that the system is not suitable. Conducting a data audit and implementing regular maintenance practices - such as deduplication, standardization, and validation rules - can help keep information accurate and actionable. This approach also clarifies whether issues stem from CRM compatibility or inadequate data management practices.
Lack of User Training and Adoption
Employees who do not fully understand how to use the CRM often report a poor experience, leading to inconsistent data entry and underutilization of the platform. Investing in comprehensive onboarding and ongoing training can improve user adoption, enhance the overall experience, and maximize the CRM’s potential.
Technical Debt
Technical debt can accumulate due to poor initial implementation, misconfigured integrations, inadequate data hygiene practices, or customizations by inexperienced users. Over time, this leads to a CRM that feels slow, cumbersome, and poorly adapted to business needs. Engaging an experienced consultant to review and optimize sources of technical debt - such as custom code, workflows, and integrations - can help streamline the system without requiring a complete platform migration.
What to Expect from a CRM Migration
If you determine that migration is the right path for your business, here's what you can generally expect:
Timeline Considerations
- Discovery & Planning: 4-8 weeks
- Development & Configuration: 6-12 weeks
- Data Migration & Testing: 4-6 weeks
- User Training & Launch: 2-4 weeks
- Post-Launch Optimization: Ongoing
Note: Timelines vary significantly based on system complexity, data volume, and team resources. We have migrated CRMs in as little a one month for very lean set-ups, or six months for more mature organizations with greater complexity.
Resource Requirements
- Internal Team: Dedicated project manager, executive sponsor, and subject matter experts from each department
- Budget Considerations: Beyond software costs, account for implementation services, data migration, training, and potential productivity adjustments
- Change Management: Plan for communication, training, and potential resistance to new workflows
Making an Informed Decision
If you're facing any of these challenges, it's worth discussing your situation with our team. After helping 70+ B2B tech companies evaluate and improve their GTM tech stacks, we've learned that the decision isn't always straightforward - sometimes a migration isn't the answer, or at least not yet.
We can help you assess your specific situation and determine the best path forward based on:
- Your current growth stage and trajectory
- The complexity of your existing systems
- Your team's bandwidth and capabilities
- Potential alternatives to a full migration
Ready to Turn Your CRM Into a Strategic Asset?
Book a Migration Clarity Call to:
- Review and assess your specific situation
- Determine if migration is truly necessary right now or explore alternatives
- Get a clear understanding of what success looks like based on our experience with companies like yours
.png)
