The 5 Reflections: What Your Messy CRM Is Actually Telling You

Every CRM I've audited tells a story. Not about the software — about the business. Here are the five most common reflections I see, and what they really mean.

Reflection 1: "We Have 12 Pipelines" → You Don't Have a Sales Process

A manufacturing company called us in. Three years on HubSpot. Twelve custom pipelines. Twelve.

When I asked why, the sales manager said: "Well, we have different products, so we need different pipelines."

No. You don't. You need one pipeline per sales motion. Maybe two. Twelve pipelines means twelve different ways of tracking the same thing — which means nobody tracks anything consistently.

What the mirror is showing you: You never agreed on how you sell. Each rep built their own pipeline because nobody defined a unified process. The CRM didn't create the chaos — it documented it.

The fix: Consolidate. Most B2B businesses need one or two pipelines. One for new business. Maybe one for renewals. That's it. Define 5-7 stages with clear entry criteria. Write a one-sentence definition for each stage. If a deal doesn't match the criteria, it can't be in that stage.

We took that manufacturer from 12 pipelines to 2. Adoption went from 4% to 91% in eight weeks. Because the mirror finally showed a process that was simple enough to follow.

Reflection 2: "Nobody Uses the CRM" → Your CRM Is Too Complicated

A software company. 35 employees. 23% CRM adoption. The CEO was furious: "I'm paying $48K a year for HubSpot Enterprise and my team won't use it."

So I sat down with a sales rep and said: "Show me how you create a deal."

Forty-seven clicks. Twenty-three required fields. Four dependent dropdowns. A mandatory notes section that required a minimum of 200 characters.

Forty-seven clicks to do the one thing the CRM exists for.

What the mirror is showing you: You designed the CRM for reporting, not for the people who actually use it. Someone (probably with good intentions) added every field they thought they'd "need someday." And in doing so, they made the CRM so painful that nobody bothers.

The fix: Apply the 3-Click Rule. The core action — creating a deal, logging a call, updating a stage — should take 3 clicks or fewer. Everything else is optional or auto-populated by workflows.

We reduced that software company's deal creation from 47 clicks to 3. Required fields went from 23 to 5. The other 18 fields? We built workflows to populate them automatically over the deal lifecycle.

Adoption went from 23% to 94%. Same CRM. Same team. Different design.

Simplicity scales. Complexity dies.

Reflection 3: "Our Data Is a Mess" → You Never Invested in Foundations

A recruitment agency wanted a revenue attribution dashboard. They'd already spent $15K with another agency building custom dashboards. Beautiful charts. Real-time data. All of it wrong by 35%.

Deal amounts were inconsistent (some included fees, some didn't). Close dates were unreliable (reps backdated deals to hit monthly targets). Source attribution was missing for 60% of contacts.

What the mirror is showing you: You built the house before pouring the foundation. You invested in visualisation before investing in data quality. The dashboards aren't wrong — the data underneath them is wrong. Data before dashboards. Every time.

The fix: Stop building reports. Start fixing data. Standardise deal amounts (one rule, documented, enforced). Fix stage definitions. Clean source attribution. Build validation workflows that prevent bad data from entering the system.

We spent three weeks fixing their data foundation. Then rebuilt three simple dashboards. Revenue reporting went from 65% accuracy to 98%. The founder could finally answer "where do our best clients come from?" with confidence. The answer — referrals at 42% — changed their entire marketing strategy.

Reflection 4: "We Need More Features" → You're Not Using What You Have

A professional services firm. 80 employees. HubSpot Enterprise at $48K/year. Two years in.

Total workflows created: zero. Sequences: zero. Custom reports: two (both unused). They were using a $48K/year platform as a $480/year address book.

When I asked about upgrading to additional Hubs, I stopped them: "You haven't used 90% of what you already have. Why would adding more features help?"

What the mirror is showing you: The problem isn't capability — it's adoption. Buying more software won't fix the fact that nobody was trained, nobody was accountable, and nobody built the systems to actually use the tools.

The fix: Don't add. Activate. We didn't sell them anything new. We spent four weeks building 12 workflows, creating 4 monthly email campaigns, and training three departments — each with a session tailored to what THEY cared about.

Monthly active usage went from 12% to 78%. They created their first marketing-attributed deal within six weeks. The Enterprise license finally justified its cost — after 2.5 years.

Your CRM is a mirror. It wasn't reflecting a bad tool. It was reflecting a failed implementation that nobody followed up on.

Reflection 5: "Only I Know the Full Picture" → The Founder Is the Bottleneck

This one hits close to home for a lot of people I work with.

A boutique consulting firm. Eight employees. The founder personally managed every deal. Every contact note. Every pipeline review. Every proposal. He worked 70-hour weeks and was the bottleneck for everything.

His team couldn't access pipeline data because "only I know the full context." Revenue had plateaued at $1.2M for three years.

What the mirror is showing you: This isn't a CRM problem. This is a trust problem. The founder couldn't — or wouldn't — systematise what lived in his head. The CRM was empty because the founder was the CRM.

The fix: This wasn't a HubSpot project. It was a delegation project that used HubSpot as the vehicle.

We designed a CRM structure that made the founder's knowledge visible: standardised deal stages with clear criteria, required fields that captured what used to live only in his head, and dashboards that gave the team "the full picture" without asking him.

We trained three team members as deal owners. Built the Automation Ladder from data quality up.

Result: Founder's CRM time dropped from 25 hours/week to 3 hours/week. Revenue went from $1.2M to $1.8M in 12 months — because the team could finally sell without waiting for him. He took his first two-week holiday in four years.

His words: "I didn't need a better CRM. I needed to stop being the CRM."

How to Read Your Own Mirror

Here's the hard part: looking honestly at what your CRM is reflecting.

Try this exercise. Open your CRM right now. Look at these five things:

1. Count your pipelines. More than 2? You probably don't have a unified sales process.

2. Count your custom properties. More than 100? You're hoarding. Most of those are empty, and they're making everything harder.

3. Check your adoption. What percentage of your team logged into HubSpot in the last 7 days? If it's under 80%, your CRM is too complicated or your team wasn't trained.

4. Check your data quality. Pull up 10 random closed-won deals. Do the amounts match your invoices? Are the close dates accurate? Is source attribution present?

5. Ask yourself: who's the bottleneck? If one person holds all the CRM knowledge, that's a single point of failure — and the CRM is reflecting it.

Be honest with the answers. The mirror doesn't lie.

The Cleanup Framework: 70/30 Delete

Once you've read the mirror, here's how to clean what it's showing you.

I call it the 70/30 Delete. In most CRMs, 70% of the configuration is waste: unused properties, dead pipelines, orphaned workflows, stale deal stages. Delete the 70%. Activate the 30% that matters.

Step 1: Identify the core. What are the 5 properties, 1-2 pipelines, and 5 workflows that your business actually needs? Everything else is a candidate for deletion.

Step 2: Archive, don't delete (at first). HubSpot lets you archive properties and deactivate workflows. Do that first. Give it 30 days. If nobody notices something is missing, it wasn't needed.

Step 3: Simplify what remains. For the properties you keep, make them required where they should be required. For the pipelines you keep, define clear stage criteria. For the workflows you keep, document them so anyone can understand them.

Step 4: Enforce going forward. Build the guardrails (see the Automation Ladder) so the CRM stays clean. Data quality workflows. Required fields. Validation rules. A monthly 30-minute audit.

Step 5: Revisit quarterly. The 70/30 Delete isn't a one-time project. Businesses evolve. Properties that mattered last year might be irrelevant now. Review quarterly and keep cutting.

A client had 400 custom properties. We archived 300. The remaining 100 did more than 400 ever did. Simplicity scales. Complexity dies.

The CRM You Deserv

Here's what a healthy CRM looks like. It's not flashy. It's boring. And boring is beautiful.

• 1-2 pipelines with clear stage definitions
• Under 50 active custom properties (most HubSpot defaults are fine)
• 5-10 workflows that enforce data quality and automate follow-up
• 80%+ daily active usage across the team
• 3-5 reports that you actually trust and look at weekly
• No single person who's the bottleneck for information

Just clean data, simple processes, and a team that actually uses the tool.

Your CRM is a mirror. Make sure it's reflecting a business you're proud of.

What to Do Next

Pick one reflection from this post — the one that hit closest to home — and do something about it this week. Not next month. This week.

• Too many pipelines? Consolidate to 2 by Friday.
• Low adoption? Count the clicks to create a deal. If it's more than 3, simplify.
• Messy data? Run HubSpot's deduplication tool and fix 10 deals manually.
• Too many properties? Export the list. Highlight the ones you actually use. Archive the rest.
• Founder bottleneck? Train one person to own their own deals this week.

And if you want an honest assessment of what your CRM mirror is showing — reach out. We do 15-minute CRM audits. No sales pitch. Just an honest look at what the mirror says.

Because your CRM is a mirror. And the sooner you look, the sooner you can fix what it's reflecting.

Mick Goman is the founder of DigiKat, where the first step of every engagement is looking in the CRM mirror with the client — and being honest about what we see together.

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