Full does not meanmoving.

The usual attempt has three parts: required fields are defined, a training session is held, and management says that this time it is serious. After six weeks the required fields are filled with “n/a”, because they are required after all, and nobody has a better answer to hand while the phone is ringing. The fault is not with the people but with the assumption that data upkeep is a matter of will. It is a matter of effort: as long as an entry means extra work, it loses against every other piece of work. So nothing is demanded here that does not happen anyway. Writing a mail, having a meeting or making a call is what creates the entry; the CRM reads along instead of asking.

The worry is fair, and in CRM projects it is more often the reason for failure than the technology. So here is the distinction that matters: an entry on the deal says a call happened on Tuesday and what it was about. An analysis per person says who made how many calls, and that is something else entirely. Sales needs the first, so a colleague can pick up the thread during a holiday; nobody needs the second, and without works council involvement it is not permissible either, as soon as the facility is capable of it. In practice that means no handling times per employee, no leaderboards, no activity quotas. That purpose limitation belongs in the works agreement, not in a promise from me.

The shadow sheet is not a discipline problem but a finding: it exists because it works better than the official system. It holds exactly the five columns somebody really needs, it opens in ten seconds, and nobody has to fill in required fields. A ban changes none of that; it only moves the sheet to a private machine. The only way to be rid of it is to make the CRM cheaper than it: once the entry appears by itself, the report names the source of every figure and search answers in two seconds, keeping the sheet stops without anyone discussing it. And as long as it does not stop, that is useful information about the CRM, not about the colleague.

The wish for a different system almost always comes from the same feeling: the current one feels heavy. But that is rarely the system and almost always what is in it. A migration takes duplicates, empty required fields and dead deals along and puts them behind a new surface; on top of that it costs a year of attention in which nobody talks about sales but about field names. The honest order is the reverse: measure first, tidy second, then connect the four sources. After that the question about a different CRM has either disappeared or become concrete and reads “we are missing this one thing”, and that is a question answerable in weeks instead of a year.