Why is Your CRM (Not) Working? Common Lead Management Mistakes and How to Fix Them.

Do you have a CRM system that was supposed to revolutionize sales but has only become an expensive database? See how simple automations can bring it to life and turn it into a money-making machine.

9 min read

Investing in a CRM system—whether it's Pipedrive, HubSpot, or another popular solution—is often seen as a milestone in a company's growth. It was supposed to bring order, automatic reports, and skyrocketing sales. Yet, after a few months, reality bites: salespeople complain, leads disappear, and the CRM becomes a digital graveyard of contacts that no one wants to visit.

Sound familiar? The problem rarely lies with the tool itself. The best CRM in the world won't work if it's not an integral part of the living organism that is your company's sales process.

Diagnosis: Why Is Your CRM Just an Expensive Database?

Before we get to the solutions, let's identify the most common reasons for this situation:

  1. No automatic lead entry: Every lead from a website contact form, a Facebook campaign, or an email has to be manually entered into the system. This is a surefire way to cause delays, errors, and—worst of all—forgotten potential customers.
  2. No automatic reminders and tasks: The salesperson has to remember to call client X in two days and send a follow-up to client Y in a week. With dozens of leads per month, this becomes unmanageable.
  3. No lead segmentation or scoring: All leads are thrown into one bucket. Salespeople waste time contacting people who were just browsing out of curiosity, instead of focusing on the "hot" leads ready to buy.
  4. The CRM doesn't communicate with other tools: Proposals are created in Word, team communication happens on Slack, and contracts are in a separate system. The CRM is an isolated island, not a command center.

If even one of these points applies to your company, you're not using even 20% of your CRM's potential. But there's a way to fix it.

Revival: How to "Bring Your CRM to Life" with Make.com

The key to success is automation, which takes repetitive, boring tasks off people's plates and makes the CRM "think" for the salespeople. Tools like Make.com (formerly Integromat) allow you to build bridges between different applications without any coding knowledge.

Here are a few simple scenarios you can implement almost immediately:

Scenario 1: Instant Lead Handling from Your Website

This process turns a cold inquiry into a hot lead in your CRM in less than 60 seconds.

  1. Trigger: Someone fills out a contact form on your website (e.g., in Webflow, WordPress).
  2. Action in Make.com:
    • Step 1: Automatically create a new deal and contact in Pipedrive or HubSpot.
    • Step 2: Create a task for the salesperson (e.g., "Call within 24h") with an assigned due date.
    • Step 3: Send a notification to a dedicated Slack channel (e.g., #new-leads) with the message: "New lead from [Company Name]! Owner: [Salesperson's Name]".

Result: No more manual copying. The lead is in the system, the task is assigned, and the team is notified. The response time is reduced from hours to minutes.

Scenario 2: Intelligent Lead Scoring and Assignment

Not all leads are created equal. This automation will help your team focus on the best sales opportunities.

  1. Trigger: A new lead appears in the CRM (thanks to the automation from Scenario 1).
  2. Action in Make.com:
    • Step 1 (Data Enrichment): Use tools like Clearbit to gather information about the potential client's company size based on their email address alone.
    • Step 2 (Scoring): Create simple logic. If the company has >50 employees, add 10 points. If they selected "I need a quote now" in the form, add 20 points.
    • Step 3 (Segmentation): Based on the score, automatically assign a label in the CRM: "Hot Lead," "Warm Lead," or "Cold Lead."
    • Step 4 (Assignment): Automatically assign "Hot" leads to your most experienced salesperson.

Result: Your team stops wasting time on unpromising contacts. The best leads go directly to the people with the highest chance of closing them.

Scenario 3: Automating Proposal and Contract Preparation

How much time does your team waste creating personalized documents?

  1. Trigger: A salesperson moves a deal in the CRM to the "Proposal Preparation" stage.
  2. Action in Make.com:
    • Step 1: Retrieve client and deal data from the CRM.
    • Step 2: Use a Google Docs or Pandadoc module to automatically insert this data into a prepared proposal template.
    • Step 3: Generate a PDF file and save it to the client's folder in Google Drive.
    • Step 4: Attach the proposal to the deal in the CRM and send a notification to the salesperson: "The proposal for [Client Name] is ready for review."

Result: Instead of spending 30 minutes copying and pasting, the salesperson spends 2 minutes reviewing a ready-made document.

Regain Control Over Your Sales

The examples above are just the beginning. CRM automation can also include sending satisfaction surveys after a sale is closed, automatically generating invoices, or reminding about subscription renewals.

Stop treating your CRM like a warehouse. Make it an active, intelligent assistant for your sales team. Investing a few hours in setting up basic automations in Make.com can yield a return of hundreds of saved hours and dozens of won deals.