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Stop Buying New Laptops: Why Your CRM Problem Isn’t Technical

Summary for Time-Poor Leaders

Bottom line: Most organisations don’t need new technology. They need clarity about what problem they’re solving — before they write the cheque.

The Laptop Confession

I have a tell when I’m having a block and can’t get my writing and analysis to go as fast as I want. I start researching new laptops. Suddenly my perfectly functional ThinkPad feels sluggish, the keyboard seems mushy, and I’m convinced that a newer, fancier model with a slightly faster processor will somehow unblock my brain. It never does — I have tried. But comparing tech specs feels productive when the actual work is stuck.

I see organisations do the same thing with their CRMs, except instead of a $1,500 laptop, it’s a $200,000 migration. Work doesn’t progress as fast and smoothly as hoped, and instead of investigating broken processes, everyone blames the tools. Enter vendors with impressive dashboards and buzzword-heavy proposals. A new CRM promises relief. It rarely delivers. Because the laptop was never the problem, and neither is the CRM.

This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a governance problem dressed up as a software question.

The Pattern: Eight Years, Same Movie

After eight years working across nonprofit and public organisations, I’ve watched the same scenario play out over and over:

The Friction: Reporting is hard. Data is messy. Staff are frustrated.

The Diagnosis: Without clear governance or a technical roadmap, leadership concludes the system must be the problem.

The Pitch: Enter vendors with demos of impressive dashboards and buzzword-heavy proposals — Big data! AI-powered! Fully integrated! Cloud-based solutions! An expensive migration begins.

The Erosion: The institutional knowledge embedded in the old system gets dismissed. The staff members who understood the workarounds, knew why certain fields existed, and built functional processes around the platform’s quirks are ignored or they leave.

The Mirror: The new system launches with great fanfare. A few months later: same problems, same complaints, but in a new interface. A year later, someone in a meeting suggests maybe they should look at a different platform.

I lived through one particularly brutal version of this. Our team worked late nights for months to migrate away from a system everyone hated. The stress was crushing. Team members resigned during the process — one because the anxiety became unmanageable. We pulled through, exhausted and depleted. And then, once we’d finally escaped to the new system, some people said they missed the old one.

All that pain. All those lost staff members. And it didn’t even clearly improve things.

The Diagnosis: Why Smart People Make $200,000 Mistakes

This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about strategic misalignment and asking the wrong questions.

Symptoms vs. problems. “Reporting takes too long” isn’t a problem — it’s a symptom. The problem might be inconsistent data entry standards, unclear field definitions, the fact that you’re trying to answer questions your data was never designed to answer, or even that you’re not clear what your questions are. A new system won’t fix any of that.

Distance from reality. Decision-makers see polished demos, not daily workflows. They don’t know about the workarounds staff have built, or why those workarounds exist. They don’t see team members spending 20 minutes to 2 hours every morning struggling with the system and doing manual data transfer before they can start their actual job. The stress of unnecessary manual work and the uncertainty around how well it would go makes staff retention impossible.

The pressure to “innovate.” There’s professional currency in “digital transformation” and “leveraging new technology.” There’s no glory in “we fixed our dropdown menus and wrote better documentation.” No one writes a press release or even a LinkedIn post about improved data hygiene. But as in politics, sometimes boring is brilliant.

Vendor incentives. Most vendors genuinely believe in their product and want to help. But their job is to sell software, not to audit your internal processes. I’ve had off-the-record conversations with sales reps who admitted their client didn’t actually need a new system — they could have worked perfectly in their existing setup with better processes, clearer requirements, and staff training. The rep can’t say that publicly. Selling is their job, and their commission depends on the deal closing, not on solving your actual problem. The honest ones feel conflicted about it. But they do it anyway.

Non-technical people making technical decisions. Organisations wouldn’t let someone without financial expertise make a $200,000 budget decision. But they regularly make six-figure technology decisions without anyone who understands CRM architecture, data governance, and implementation patterns. I’ve worked with well-intentioned managers who genuinely wanted to improve things — proficient in buzzwords and adjectives, but who had never actually done the technical work themselves.

Part of this is cost anxiety. A consultant might cost $15,000–$30,000 to do a proper assessment. A wrong migration costs $200,000 plus lost productivity, staff turnover, and a year of organisational chaos. The independent consultant isn’t an expense; they’re an insurance policy against a six-figure catastrophe.

The sadder version: many experienced consultants — people who’ve implemented these systems dozens of times and know exactly what questions to ask — offer pro bono or heavily discounted time to nonprofits doing work they believe in. They want to help. But organisations skip that conversation entirely and go straight to the vendor demo, where everyone has an incentive to sell, not to assess.

So you end up with non-technical leaders making technical decisions based on sales pitches, while people who could actually help are never asked.

Sometimes It’s Not About the Laptop At All

The laptop metaphor goes further. Sometimes the reason you can’t write isn’t the hardware — it’s that you’re too close to the work and need to step away. Go outside. Take a break. Clear your head.

The same applies to organisations blaming their CRM. Sometimes the problem isn’t technical or even process-related. It’s labour. Staff aren’t trained properly. They’re not given time to do things right. They’re blamed when the system doesn’t work rather than listened to about why. They’re expected to absorb constant change without support.

No matter how sophisticated your CRM is, someone still needs to talk with clients and enter data in the system. In many scenarios, those interactions are and must be real — face to face or over the phone. The assessment of that interaction, most of the time, also needs to be done by a real human. And these tasks take time, and more importantly, compassion. Focusing only on cutting costs and labour-time, as if running a manufacturing plant, strips away that human touch. You might end up losing clients not because you weren’t efficient enough, but because you lost the staff who genuinely cared. And clients always sense that.

A new CRM won’t fix that. Neither will optimising the old one. If people are leaving because they’re unsupported and overwhelmed, buying new software is like buying a new laptop when what you actually need is a holiday.

What Works Instead: The Boring Stuff That Actually Helps

“Digital transformation” sounds impressive, but true efficiency comes from foundational work that doesn’t get you a conference speaking slot.

Start with listening, not solutions. Talk to people who live in the system daily. Not “what features do you wish you had” but “show me your workflow. Where do you get stuck? What do you avoid doing? What workarounds have you built?” The gaps between official process and actual practice are where your problems live.

Staff need to trust you enough to tell you the truth. If they fear you’re just asking them to automate their tasks and make their roles redundant, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. They need to know you actually care about their wellbeing.

Map reality, not aspiration. Most organisations have documented processes that bear no resemblance to what actually happens. That approach is fine for high-level mission and vision documents — but not for operations. Document the real workflows first. Understand what people actually do, and why they do it that way, before you decide what needs to change.

Define success in concrete terms. Not “better reporting” but “programme managers can pull enrolment numbers by demographic without emailing the data team.” Not “more user-friendly” but “new staff can log a client interaction in under two minutes.” Vague goals confuse everyone and get vague solutions.

Exhaust optimisation before replacement. Can you get 80% of what you want through fixing forms, implementing flows, data cleanup, staff training, process simplification, or a $500 integration tool? If yes, do that first. If not, you’ve at least learnt what actually needs to change.

Bring in technical expertise before deciding. If you don’t have someone in-house who deeply understands CRM architecture, data systems, and implementation — and most nonprofits don’t — find someone who does. Not a vendor but an independent consultant, a volunteer with technical experience, a peer organisation that’s been through it. This conversation should happen before you’re comparing platforms, when you’re still figuring out what you actually need.

Build with users, not for them. Not a steering committee of directors — the coordinators, the frontline staff, the people who’ll actually use it. Include the staff with the least technical expertise, as they set your lowest denominator. If they don’t have buy-in, your expensive new system will be sabotaged by spreadsheets and workarounds within a month.

Standardise your language first. I worked with an organisation convinced their CRM was broken. User interviews revealed people across departments had different understandings of fields and names. We worked across all departments to agree on shared definitions, updated field names and relationships, and provided training with clear documentation and short reference videos. A couple months of staff time, and suddenly the system worked fine. The alternative would have been an expensive new system with hundreds of hours of wasted time.

Sometimes You Do Need a New Laptop

I need to be honest: sometimes replacement is genuinely necessary. I worked at an organisation using a system that didn’t provide reliable vendor support — I logged tickets and nobody responded within any reasonable timeframe. Daily reports required hours of manual data entry and manual work to move information between systems. That kind of infrastructure creates real turnover risk — talented people leave when the tools actively prevent them from doing good work.

So I know what “genuinely needs replacing” looks like. Legacy platforms with no support. Growth that’s genuinely exceeded system capacity. Mergers requiring consolidation. Compliance requirements the current system can’t meet. These are real.

But mostly — in my experience, across multiple organisations — what you need isn’t new technology. You need clarity about what problem you’re solving. You need someone to help you articulate what you actually want before you spend six figures on what you think you want.

The work isn’t glamorous. It’s user interviews and process mapping and data cleanup and training. It won’t get you a conference speaking slot about “digital transformation.” But it will save you $200k and a year of frustration. And it won’t cost you talented staff who burn out from yet another poorly planned migration.

If you’re considering a major system change and want help figuring out whether you actually need it — and if not, what you need instead — reach out. I’m happy to help if I can, or to point you to others who might be a better fit. Sometimes the answer is a migration. More often, it’s three months of unglamorous work that actually solves the problem.

Because the laptop was never the issue. And neither is your CRM.