Before you change your CRM, read this

It usually starts with a leadership team that has lost confidence in its own data and concluded the CRM is to blame.

But we’ve audited dozens of recruitment CRMs and the diagnosis is almost always the same:

The technology is fine. The foundations aren't.

Here are two different ways this problem showed up for recent clients.

Case Study 1: The “broken CRM” that was not the problem 

A recruitment firm with 80 consultants came to us convinced their CRM was broken. 

Pipeline reports were unreliable. Candidate search was near useless. Leadership had completely lost confidence in the data.

We audited the system.

The CRM was working fine, the problem was everything feeding into it. 42% of vacancies had no deal value recorded. Consultants were skipping pipeline stages and updating deals at month-end when KPIs were due. Over half of inbound applications never made it into the system at all. 

Nobody had ever clearly defined what the sales process should look like, so consultants had built their own versions of it, mostly in personal spreadsheets.

So we redefined the pipeline stages, introduced mandatory fields, and built a weekly hygiene routine. 

Forecasting accuracy improved significantly and leadership began to trust the numbers again.

Within six weeks, previously ‘invisible’ opportunities in the pipeline were being actively worked and converted.

No new software was required.