Is your CRM telling you the truth?
The system went in. The training happened. Two cycles later the activity report and the field tell different stories, and nobody can say which one is real.
Every commercial team I have worked with has a CRM. Most have a version of the same problem. Compliance reads in the high eighties on the slide, and everyone plans as though the data were not there. Nobody says so out loud, because the number looks fine.
Reviews ask whether the field is using the system. Wrong question. What matters is whether the record is something someone saw, or something someone remembered. Write up the morning after and you are reporting. Write up fourteen calls on the twenty-ninth and you are remembering, under pressure, against a target. Both go in green. Only one of them can carry a re-tiering.
Five checks follow. None of them needs a data extract, a vendor or a steering committee, and each wrong answer points at a different failure. The fixes are not interchangeable, which is why so many of them miss.
Five questions, in this order
Ask three reps where they keep the notes they actually read before a specialist call.
Not where they log. Where they look.
Plot record creation by day of month, and against the incentive cycle close.
One query. You are reading the shape, not the volume.
Ask a first line manager what they did differently last week because of something they saw in the system.
One specific instance. Not what the dashboard could show. What changed.
Count the mandatory fields on a call record, then complete one on a phone between appointments.
Time it honestly.
Ask what happens to a rep who does not update. Then ask what happens to one who does.
The second answer is the diagnostic.
Reading the pattern
Fail on one and two and the problem is the instrument. That is a design job, and a solvable one.
Fail on three and five and the instrument is probably fine. You have a management problem: slower to fix, less comfortable to name, and far cheaper than the re-implementation most organisations buy instead. The usual sequence is to assume a tooling failure, spend eighteen months and a seven figure budget proving it was not, and arrive at the management conversation anyway.
Fail on four and you have bought structure at the cost of truth, which is the most common and least discussed trade in field force design.
Take it into the room
The same diagnostic on a single A4 sheet, sized to print and hand across a table.
Run it and tell me what you found
If two or more came back wrong and you want a view on which fix is worth spending money on, that is the kind of thing I am useful for.
Tell me what needs to change →