The Lead Score Nobody Trusts

Somebody sold this client a CRM with a slick feature: automatic lead scoring. Hot, warm, cold — the system tells you where to spend your time.

Except every rep on the team had quietly agreed, without ever saying it out loud, to ignore it completely. “The scoring's just wrong,” one of them told me. “I go by feel.”

Here's the thing — she was probably right. But now you've got a $30,000 tool doing math nobody believes, and a sales team running on instinct instead, with no way to know whose instinct is actually good.

That's Leak #1 in its quietest form. It's not that the CRM is broken. It's that nobody trusts it enough to use it the way it was built to be used — so you're paying for automation and getting gut feel anyway.

I know this from personal experience in a ... large company with thousands of employees using Salesforce - instead of using the built in scoring, they would meet and individually speak of their "Top Five" and so on - with absolutely no follow up beyond someone with a spreadsheet typing and retyping and none one actually using the tools that were in place.

Does your team actually use the scoring or prioritization features in your CRM, or has everyone secretly agreed to ignore them?