Is Your CRM Too Complicated? Let’s Talk Tech Stacks That Actually Work

When I speak with businesses, there is usually a familiar theme. Either the CRM has become far too complicated over time, or no one really knows what to add to the tech stack to make it more effective. There is a desire to improve things, but not always a clear plan.

A quick scroll through LinkedIn will show you how much interest there is in new technologies. AI pops up in every second post, promising to transform the way we work. But let’s leave that to one side for now. Before adding anything shiny or new, it is worth asking the basic question.

Why does building a tech stack feel so complicated?

Start With the CRM

Your CRM should be the foundation. It should reflect the real journey of a lead through your business.

Let’s break that down.

Leads come in through marketing activity. Those leads are then qualified and passed on to sales. Once sales is happy to work on them, they become sales qualified. From there, we track them as opportunities in the pipeline. They move through proposal, negotiation, and pitching stages, before we reach the final outcome.

Did we win the deal or lose it?

Your CRM should make that journey clear. Not just to leadership, but to the people actually using it every day. Sales. Marketing. Customer success. Everyone.

So Where Does It Go Wrong?

Over time, CRMs often get tailored to fit the way the business works. And that is understandable. But too many adjustments over too many years can make the system hard to use and even harder to change.

For older organisations, this might be because the original setup did not take future integrations into account. No one was thinking about what tools they might want to add five or ten years down the line.

For newer businesses, the system may have been designed to support a team of five, not fifty. And that becomes a problem when the company grows.

The big question is this. Can your current CRM setup support that growth? Not just external success but internal scale too.

Simplify Before You Add More

Once the CRM is in place, you might want to add a sales engagement platform or another supporting tool. If you are lucky, the platforms you choose will have simple integration options through native APIs. That makes life easier.

But if your CRM uses custom fields or complex workflows, integration can quickly become a headache. You might end up needing bespoke development work, which takes time and costs money.

And if you are planning to use AI in future, that brings even more complexity. AI tools need access to clean, structured data. If your CRM is full of unusual field names or inconsistent processes, it will not work the way you hoped.

So What Can You Do?

Strip things back. Focus on the basics. Your CRM should mirror the real process your teams follow. It should be easy to understand, easy to train on, and easy to connect with other tools.

Ask yourself:

• Does your CRM reflect the actual buyer journey?

• Can your teams use it without getting confused?

• Is it ready to scale with your business?

• Can other platforms plug into it without friction?

If the answer to any of those is no, it might be time to simplify.

Final Thought

Tech should not be a burden. It should support your people and help your business grow.

When your CRM and tech stack are aligned with how your teams actually work, everything becomes easier. Communication improves. Reporting becomes clearer. And yes, new tools like AI start to deliver real value.

So keep it simple. Build for the future. And make sure your systems work for the people who use them every day.