Who should not get a CRM?

You do not have enough leads to lose track of

If you handle a handful of enquiries a month and none of them slip, a CRM solves a problem you do not have. A notebook is genuinely fine at that volume.

The threshold is not a number, it is a symptom: when you start forgetting to follow up, or cannot remember what you quoted someone, you have outgrown the notebook.

Your problem is lead volume, not organisation

This is the most common mismatch. A business that is not getting enough enquiries buys a CRM and is disappointed, because a CRM is a system for handling leads and they needed a system for generating them.

If the honest problem is that the phone does not ring, spend the money on the phone ringing.

You have no repeatable process

A CRM encodes a process into stages and automations. If every deal genuinely goes differently and no repeatable path exists, there is nothing to encode and the stages will be invented, ignored, then removed.

Write down what actually happens between enquiry and sale first. If you cannot, the CRM is premature.

Nobody will own it

A CRM is a living system. Someone has to keep records clean, adjust automations, and notice when a rule stops matching reality. Without an owner it decays into a database of stale contacts within a year, and the reports quietly become fiction.

If nobody has the time, a smaller and simpler setup that actually gets maintained beats an ambitious one that does not.

Common questions

When is a business ready for a CRM?

When leads are being forgotten, when more than one person touches a deal, or when nobody can say where a customer came from. Those three symptoms are the signal.

Is a spreadsheet enough?

For a while, genuinely. Spreadsheets fail when several people need to update them at once, when follow-up needs to happen automatically, and when you need to connect the data to anything else.