Living things are messy

If your CRM has been in use for a few years — especially by a busy team — you’ve probably seen this:

• Multiple fields that capture the same thing, but no one’s sure which is current

• Profiles created for one event, never reused, but still hanging around

• Price sets with unclear names or duplicate purposes

• Tags that aren’t used in searches or reports anymore

And you might also have started to see the problems that can come out of it:

• You start seeing similar fields with slightly different names.

• You forget which group is used for what.

• You build a report, and it misses data — because you pulled from the wrong field with the right-sounding name.

In other words: confusion when things accumulate:

One-off fields, extra profiles, overlapping tags and groups.

It's what I call "configuration sprawl."

It happens in systems that are alive — because living things grow, and growing things get messy.

This week, I want to share some thoughts on unpacking that sprawl: how it happens, why it’s hard to fix, and what you can do to prevent it from getting worse.

Because here's the thing:

Not every CRM needs to be pristine.

But every CRM deserves to be understandable.

All the best,
A.