Five signs your Salesforce is costing you more than it earns.

1. The real pipeline lives somewhere else.

If your reps keep their actual deals in a spreadsheet, email or their heads, Salesforce is a reporting chore, not a tool. The system only works when it is the easiest place to do the job.

2. Nobody trusts the forecast.

When leadership rebuilds the forecast by hand every month, the data in Salesforce is not good enough to rely on. That usually means unclear deal stages and stale records.

3. The data is a mess.

Duplicate accounts, blank fields and old opportunities make every report suspect. People stop looking, and then stop entering anything.

4. Nobody knows how to change it.

If every small change needs an outside call or waits on one person, Salesforce falls behind how you sell. A system that cannot adapt gets abandoned.

5. You pay for more than you use.

Unused licenses and features add up. Look at who logs in, and who does not.

What to do about it.

You rarely need to start over. Start with the few changes that matter most: simplify the deal stages, clean the data, build the two or three reports your team will actually use, and make sure someone on your team can make changes themselves.

That is the focus of our 30-day, fixed-price Salesforce engagement. If you are a manufacturer, see Salesforce for manufacturers. If it sounds familiar, read how to fix a Salesforce that barely gets used.