If You’re Not Using a CRM in 2025, You’re Probably Doing Fine Without It

Chances are, you’ve built your own tools, mastered spreadsheets, or combined a few key solutions to meet your needs. If you’ve been successful in your sales process without a CRM so far, you likely don’t need to make drastic changes.

After all, if it’s not broken, why fix it?

Marketing finds leads, sales closes deals, and leadership hits its goals. Simple, right? Well, not quite. Upon closer inspection, your teams are likely experiencing some pain points. When we ask non-CRM companies how they streamline their sales process, we often hear the same answer: handoffs—whether calls, data, or anything else—are the biggest pain point, especially when one team has to transfer critical information to another.

Here are the 3 most common sales process pain points without a CRM:

1. Marketing Passing New Leads to Sales

Why is sales without a CRM painful?
Passing leads from marketing to sales is like a relay race. The handoff is crucial, and if the baton is dropped, the receiver must recover and catch up. Similarly, companies operating without a CRM have their own methods of handoffs. However, this process is often fraught with issues at any point where data moves between multiple teams and systems. Leads may arrive incomplete, inaccurate, or too late to convert. Regardless of lead quality, sales teams are still tasked with turning them into customers.

How does a CRM help?
In a CRM-powered handoff process, marketing and sales share a unified view of every lead. Details and context about the lead are stored and updated in a single system. When a lead is qualified, converted, and assigned to sales, all critical information is readily available for the salesperson. Moreover, qualification, conversion, and assignment processes can be automated, ensuring that sales has everything it needs to follow up within minutes rather than days.

2. Passing and Approving Quotes and Pricing

Why is sales without a CRM painful?
Sales teams often face delays at the pricing stage, where they depend on others’ timelines, processes, and priorities. While details are crucial at this stage of the sales cycle, speed is equally important. This process often involves long email threads with multiple versions and approvals of pricing documents or proposals. Pressure to meet deadlines can lead to costly errors in the final proposal. When issues arise—whether pricing mistakes or communication delays—sales suffers the most.

How does a CRM help?
With a modern CRM, everyone involved in pricing can collaborate and communicate within a single shared space. Relevant product and pricing details for a specific customer are accessible in the same view, along with notes about promotions or approvals. Sales can then generate quotes automatically, eliminating version control issues and reducing errors from manual copy-pasting or data entry.

3. Passing Forecast Updates from Sales to Leadership

Why is sales without a CRM painful?
Forecasting is a key responsibility for sales leadership and a critical metric of business health for the rest of the executive team. Without a CRM, sales reps must frequently share updates via email, chat, or other tools, so sales leaders can compile status updates for each deal. This method is inefficient in two ways:

1. Sales reps would rather spend time working on deals than completing internal administrative tasks.
2. During critical periods, sales leaders want more frequent or detailed updates on deals. Forcing sales teams to focus on non-sales activities during these times can be extremely disruptive.

How does a CRM help?
When your sales process runs on a modern CRM, the latest details for every deal are always accessible and up to date. Sales leadership can rely on automatically updated reports and dashboards to view real-time forecasts without distracting sales teams from closing deals. Custom sales stages built directly into the CRM also ensure that forecasts reflect the weighted expected value of the pipeline, eliminating the need to adjust for excessive optimism or sandbagging.

In Summary
Operating without a CRM might work well enough for some companies, but as complexity grows, the inefficiencies and risks become harder to ignore. Modern CRMs streamline handoffs, enhance collaboration, and provide actionable insights, empowering businesses to scale their processes without the pains of manual methods.