Don't buy yet.

The situation

A firm was part-way through choosing a CRM. Vendors were circling, demos had impressed, and the internal pressure to pick one was building.

What we found

The firm's contact and relationship data was scattered and unowned: spreadsheets, inboxes, one person's memory. A CRM would have imported that chaos and given it a licence fee. And everything the firm wanted from the purchase, relationship intelligence, automated briefings, AI that knows the client history, depends entirely on the data underneath being trustworthy.

What changed

We told them what nobody selling a CRM would: don't buy yet. Get the data discipline first, with a named custodian and a single source of truth, even if it starts in a spreadsheet. Sequenced that way, the eventual system works on day one, and the AI layer on top of it, the briefings, the intelligence, the automation, becomes the payoff instead of the promise.

Clean data, then the system, then the AI. The order is the strategy.