One to four hours a week for each salesperson, spent keeping two records: the CRM the business paid for and the spreadsheet the team trusts. The CRM is dormant, not dead, which makes it harder to see and easier to keep paying for.
Last reviewed 30 September 2026
In the strata, dormant. Contacts are in it, deals mostly are not. The pipeline that management sees on Monday is a spreadsheet assembled on Friday from the reps' own lists. The licence renews every year, usually without anyone checking how many of the seats have logged in.
The previous CRM, dead, with three years of history nobody migrated. Underneath that, a sales process that was never written down, so the CRM's stages were set up from the vendor's template rather than how the team sells.
A process fix before anything is built: agree the stages the team actually uses and set the CRM to match. Then plain automation for the parts that made the spreadsheet necessary, such as the Monday pipeline view. AI, where it earns its place, drafts the follow-up from the call notes.
Login and activity data from the CRM, used as pulled, against the observed time spent on the spreadsheet. Claims about how much the team uses the CRM are scored only when the system data agrees. How EMBR measures. This layer is one part of workaround debt; The Transect measures all of them together.
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