01PROOF
You can’t get budget for a problem you can’t measure
Reps grumble, reports get second-guessed, deals slip through, but "the CRM feels broken" doesn’t survive a budget meeting. Without a duplicate rate, a dead-workflow count and a dollar figure on wasted licenses, the fix never gets funded.
02BLAME
The vendor blames usage. The team blames the tool.
Your platform rep’s answer is more licenses and a higher tier. Sales says the system is unusable; ops says sales won’t update it. You need a neutral party with no license to sell reading the actual instance.
03RISK
You don’t know who can see, or export, your pipeline
Admin rights handed out to solve one ticket and never revoked. Ex-employees with live logins, API keys in old Zaps, export permissions nobody remembers granting. Most instances we audit fail at least three access checkpoints.
04NUMBERS
Three dashboards, three different revenue figures
The board deck, the sales dashboard and finance’s spreadsheet disagree, so every meeting starts with an argument about whose number is right. Reporting nobody trusts is a data-quality and definitions problem, and it is measurable.