---
title: Stop shopping for a new CRM, do this first (then choose the software)
description: "CRM architecture before technology: how to map outcomes, audience stories and your data architecture into a requirements list, then choose a CRM platform that fits it."
---

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[Work with Beth](https://weareastral.co.uk/work-with-beth)

 10/2026

# Stop shopping for a new CRM, do this first (then choose the software)

![Picture of Beth O'Malley](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/2761c9d87ba551994b382ed8415ad538) [Beth O'Malley](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/author/beth-omalley)

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I had the same conversation four or five times at events over the last fortnight. Somebody tells me they are moving CRM, and then tells me which platforms they are shortlisting.

So I ask what they need it to do, and the answer is usually a list of software features rather than a list of outcomes. Marketing automation, lead scoring, a customer portal, better reporting.

None of which is a requirement. All of it is somebody else's name for a capability you have not yet decided you need.

Choosing the technology first is the single most expensive mistake in CRM, and it is the default behaviour almost everywhere, because shopping feels like progress and architecture feels like homework.

 

## Before you dig in, why don't you get access to RE:markable

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# The problem

## What goes wrong when the platform comes first

- You inherit somebody else's model of your business. Every CRM encodes assumptions about how organisations work. Contacts attached to deals attached to pipelines. If you are a charity, a membership body or a publisher, that model may be wrong for you before you have entered a single record.
- You buy a feature list rather than a fit. Demos are built to impress. Without your own requirements in hand, every platform looks capable, because you have nothing to test the claims against.
- You migrate the mess. With no data architecture decided, the migration becomes a copy of whatever you already had, including the duplicates, the dead fields and the contacts nobody can account for.
- You discover the gaps after go-live. The automation you wanted needs a signal you are not capturing, and the capturing needs a module you did not buy, and the module needs an integration that is not in the contract.
- And you land where you started, with better software. Plenty of businesses sit at the bottom of the maturity model holding a platform capable of the top of it. New logo, same behaviour.

 

## Key takeaway:

Technology is the last decision, not the first. It is the answer to a set of requirements, and requirements come from outcomes, stories and data.

Pick the platform first and you have answered a question nobody has asked yet.

# The order

## Four things to settle before you look at a single platform

1. The outcomes. What are we trying to achieve across the business, described from the audience’s standpoint rather than ours?
2. The audience stories. What should happen, for whom, and when? Written as scenarios, not features.
3. The data architecture. What do we need to know to make those stories possible, where does it come from, and who owns it?
4. The requirements. What capabilities does a system need in order to deliver the above? That list is your shortlist criteria, and it is the first time technology enters the conversation.

 

# Step one

## Outcomes, written from your audience’s standpoint

Most CRM projects begin with internal outcomes. Increase conversion, reduce manual work, improve reporting. All reasonable, none of them useful for designing a system, because they do not describe anything that happens to a person.

Turn each one over and write what should be true for the audience.

- Instead of: improve lead conversion. People get the information they need to decide, at the point they are deciding, without having to ask twice.
- Instead of: reduce churn. People hear from us before the renewal, in a way that reminds them what they got out of the year.
- Instead of: better supporter retention. Supporters find out what their money did, before we ask them for any more of it.

Written that way, an outcome starts to imply what the system has to know and do. Written the other way, it implies buying something.  
 

 

# Step two

## Audience stories: the most useful hour in the whole project

Borrowed shamelessly from product teams, who have known for decades that you describe behaviour before you build anything. One sentence each.

When something happens, we want to do something, so that the person gets a particular result.

 

### What they look like in practice

- When somebody downloads a guide and then visits the pricing page within a fortnight, we want sales to see it and marketing to stop selling, so that the person has one conversation rather than three.
- When a member has not logged in for 90 days, we want to send them the one thing their membership tier gets most use from, so that they remember what they are paying for before the renewal lands.
- When a donation comes in, we want to send the impact of that specific amount within 48 hours, so that the supporter feels the result rather than just the receipt.
- When somebody raises a complaint, we want every marketing and sales send to stop until it is resolved, so that nobody gets a promotion while they are waiting on an apology.

 

## Why this format works so well:

Every story names a trigger, an action and a reason, which means every story is testable. You can ask a vendor to demonstrate it, and you can tell whether it worked after go-live.

Stories also expose disagreement early. Half the value of the exercise is watching sales, marketing and service discover they have completely different ideas about who owns the person.

### Run it as a workshop, with everybody in the room

1. Collect stories from every team. Sales, marketing, service, finance, fundraising. Whoever touches the audience has stories, and the best ones usually come from the people answering the phone.
2. Write them in the audience’s language. Not in system language. Nobody has ever wanted a workflow, they have wanted to stop being asked the same question.
3. Sort them into must, should and would like. Ruthlessly. Most CRM projects fail on scope rather than software.
4. And keep the ones you cannot do yet. They are your roadmap, and they tell you which capabilities need to exist in the platform even if you will not use them for a year.

 

# Step three

## The data architecture, which is where the stories become real

Every story above depends on knowing something. Work through them one at a time and write down what each one needs, because that list is the real specification for your CRM.

 

### Direct data: what people tell you

- Form fields, preferences, replies, survey answers, conversations. Everything somebody knowingly handed over.
- Including how and why they joined. Opt-in source and opt-in type are the two properties most businesses are missing, and the two that explain the most about behaviour later.
- Ask smart, not less. Each layer of information should be earned. A fifteen-field form at the first interaction is asking for intimacy from a stranger.

 

### Indirect data: what people show you

- Page views, email engagement, product usage, purchase history, event attendance, support contacts. Behaviour, captured passively, which is where most intent signals come from.
- Each one is a requirement in disguise. If a story needs page views, your system has to capture page views and attach them to a known person. Written down, that is a tracking capability, an identity resolution capability and a storage decision, all from one sentence in a workshop.

 

### Then the questions nobody asks until it is too late

1. Where does each piece of data live, and which system is the source of truth? When two systems disagree, something has to win, and deciding that in advance is cheaper than deciding it during an incident.
2. How does it get there? Integration, manual entry, form submission, import. Every route has a failure mode and an owner.
3. Who owns it, and who is allowed to change it? Unowned data decays, and decayed data is what produces bounces, spam traps and reporting nobody believes.
4. How long is it useful for? A page view from two years ago is not intent. Recency needs to be part of the model, not an afterthought.
5. And what are we allowed to do with it? Consent, lawful basis and retention, decided alongside the architecture rather than bolted on by somebody panicking later.

 

## Watch out for:

The we will sort the data out afterwards promise. Nobody has ever sorted it out afterwards.

Migration is the one moment when the organisation has permission and budget to fix its data. Spending that moment copying the old mess into a new system wastes the only real chance you get.

 

 

# Step four

## Now, and only now, go and find the technology

By this point you are holding something most buyers never produce: a list of capabilities derived from your own business rather than from a vendor's website.

1. Turn every story into a capability line. The system must capture page views against a known contact. The system must suppress marketing sends when a support ticket is open. The system must hold opt-in source and report engagement by it.
2. Weight them. Must have, should have, nice to have, mapped to the stories you sorted earlier.
3. Make vendors demo your stories, not their deck. Send the list in advance and ask them to show you three specific scenarios in a working system. The difference between platforms becomes obvious in about ten minutes.
4. Price the whole architecture, not the licence. Modules, integrations, data volumes, the connector nobody mentioned, and the implementation effort for the stories you marked as must.
5. And check what it costs to leave. Data export, object model portability, and how much of your architecture is locked in a proprietary shape.

 

## The outcome of doing it this way:

You buy less software, and you use more of what you buy.

The implementation has a definition of done, because the stories either work or they do not.

And the people who have to live with the system helped design it, which is most of the reason adoption succeeds or fails.

 

## A quick win:

Before your next vendor call, write ten audience stories in the format above. One sentence each, half an hour, no system language allowed.

Take them into the demo and ask to see three of them working. You will learn more in that call than in the previous five.

## The conclusion

A CRM is not a product you buy, it is an architecture you design and then buy components for. Strategy, data, touchpoints and the systems that carry them, in that order, with the technology arriving last because it is the easiest part to change.

Every business I have seen regret a CRM decision made it the other way round. They picked a platform, then worked out what to do with it, and spent the next three years describing their own organisation in somebody else's vocabulary.

Forget the tech. Work out what you are trying to achieve for the people you serve, what you need to know to do it, and what has to be true for that to run. Then go shopping, with a list.

 

![Workshop  (3)](https://weareastral.co.uk/hs-fs/hubfs/Workshop%20%20(3).png?width=2000&name=Workshop%20%20(3).png)

## Bring it to your team

I run CRM architecture workshops that produce exactly this: your outcomes, your audience stories, your data architecture and a requirements list you can take to any vendor. For businesses moving platform, consolidating systems, or trying to work out why the one they have never delivered what it promised.

[Enquire about a CRM architecture workshop →](https://weareastral.co.uk/work-with-beth)

 

## Like this blog? You'll love RE:markable

 RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.

 Subscribe to RE:markable

 

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[Email Marketing](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/tag/email-marketing), [Marketing Strategy](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/tag/marketing-strategy)

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![a. final -2](https://weareastral.co.uk/hs-fs/hubfs/a.%20final%20-2.png?width=100&height=100&name=a.%20final%20-2.png "a. final -2")

Get in touch: [www.astral-digital.co.uk](http://www.astral-digital.co.uk)

Email me: [beth@astral-digital.co.uk](mailto:beth@astral-digital.co.uk)

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