“Don’t trust the dashboard.”
“The real numbers are in this spreadsheet.”
“Only one person knows how this works.”
“We’ll clean the data later.”
These types of phrases come up inside companies that are growing, but that have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) unable to keep up, says Todd Giddens, VP of Partnerships and GTM at Ground Team Solutions.
“When teams start spending hours on spreadsheets and manual workarounds, the CRM is already costing more than it returns. The root cause is almost always the same: the system stopped reflecting how the business actually operates. Side processes appear, reporting becomes unreliable, and adoption drops. If your sales, finance, customer success, or support teams cannot find every key piece of prospect or customer data in the CRM immediately, it has become shelfware,” Giddens told Hypepotamus.
In his position at Ground Team, Giddens had seen this problem play out frequently within growing teams. Ground Team, a Duluth, Georgia-based Salesforce Partner, works with VC-backed and PE-owned companies that need a custom CRM solution. Ground Team works as locally-based, onsite consultants for growing teams.
What advice does the Ground Team have for Southeast-based startups? Here’s what Ground Team’s experts want Southeast founders to know:
1. Start Thinking About Your CRM Early…But Not Too Early
“A healthy CRM creates clarity and speed. An unhealthy CRM creates meetings about why the CRM is wrong,” says Ground Teams’ Ben Fuller.
According to the Ground Team, businesses should start looking at a strong CRM option when “the business starts running on process instead of memory.”
“If your pipeline lives in spreadsheets, Slack threads, and someone remembering follow ups, the pain is already there,” Giddens added. “The sweet spot is when sales activity is repeatable, multiple teams touch the customer lifecycle, forecasting starts to matter, leadership needs visibility, and revenue operations can no longer run on tribal knowledge.”
2. Know What Data To Capture From The Beginning
The Ground Team said that teams should be focused on capturing the following:
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Accounts and contacts, with firmographic context (industry, employee count, annual revenue, location, tech stack)
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Lead source on every record
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Full sales activity history (emails, calls, meetings, correspondence)
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Opportunity stage history, so you know when deals moved and where they stalled
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Products or services purchased
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Contract dates, renewal dates, and basic financial relationship data
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A clearly defined ICP and customer lifecycle expectations (acquisition timeline, key follow up moments, renewal triggers)
“The most commonly underestimated category is historical activity data. Two years in, this is what powers forecasting, churn analysis, channel attribution, and any AI work you want to do. Without it, you are rebuilding context from scratch,” Giddens added.
3. Don’t Try To Be An Enterprise Overnight
“The most consistent mistake is trying to look enterprise overnight,” Giddens added. “Fresh funding triggers a wave of platform purchases, layered approvals, and automation built on top of processes that were never defined. Hiring quickly without a plan for how each new role drives value compounds the problem. More is not always better. Our advice for Southeast founders coming off a raise is to slow down on the tool count, invest in process clarity first, and prioritize partners who will sit onsite with your team to drive adoption.”
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The featured image was created by AI. The article was not.