Einstein Was Right: Your Company's IQ Is Its Ability to Change, Not Its CRM Features

A story about change, resistance, and the uncomfortable gap between what we buy and what we actually use

There's a moment I see in almost every CRM consulting project. It usually happens about three months after go-live.

A sales director pulls me aside and says, quietly: "People aren't really using it, are they?"

No. They're not.

And it's not because the technology is bad.

The Einstein Factor

Albert Einstein once said that the measure of intelligence isn't knowledge—it's the ability to change. When you apply that thinking to companies, something interesting emerges: The "smartest" organization isn't necessarily the biggest one, or the one with the longest history. It's the one that adapts fastest.

In the world of customer relationship management, this plays out in a fascinating way.

Your CRM system's true intelligence has nothing to do with its feature list or its price tag. It's entirely about whether your people will actually change how they work to use it.

And here's where it gets uncomfortable: Most won't.

The Ghost in the Machine

Picture this: A mid-sized pharmaceutical company invests €500,000 in a state-of-the-art CRM platform. The system can do everything—AI-powered lead scoring, automated workflows, predictive analytics, seamless integration with marketing automation.

Six months later, 70% of the features have never been touched. Sales reps log the bare minimum to keep their managers quiet. Marketing runs campaigns without checking what Sales actually needs. Customer Success operates in a completely separate system because "our workflows are different."

The technology works perfectly. The organization doesn't.

This isn't unusual. Research shows that between 43% and 75% of CRM features remain unused in typical enterprise implementations. That's not a technology problem. It's a people problem.

The Logic of Yesterday

Why does this happen? Because organizations get stuck in what I call "the logic of yesterday"—the invisible rules about how things have always been done.

• In sales, this sounds like: "I'm a relationship person, not a data entry clerk."
• In marketing: "Sales never tells us what they need anyway, so why bother asking?"
• In customer success: "We're different from Sales. We can't work the same way."
• In management: "Just give me a dashboard. I don't care how the data gets there."

Each department protecting its territory, its processes, its way of working. Meanwhile, the customer experiences all of this as fragmentation and incompetence.

When Change Isn't Just Technology

Here's what the CRM vendors don't tell you during the sales pitch: Implementing a CRM successfully is about 20% technology and 80% organizational change. Think about what you're really asking people to do. Every single customer interaction requires someone in your company to:

• Change their daily workflow. Log that call. Update that contact record. Check the system before making assumptions.
• Change their mindset. Share information that used to be "their" relationship. Trust that collaboration beats individual heroics.
• Change their habits. Stop relying on memory, sticky notes, or personal email archives. Start treating customer data as a shared asset.
• Change how they're measured. Value the team's success over individual recognition.

That's a lot of change. And without addressing it explicitly, your fancy new CRM is doomed to become an expensive contact list.

The Three Walls

In my experience, customer relationships die against three organizational walls:

• The Information Wall happens when Sales knows something crucial that Customer Success doesn't. The customer calls support and has to explain their entire situation again. Then they call their account manager and explain it a third time. Eventually, they stop calling. They just leave.
• The Process Wall appears when Marketing generates a qualified lead, but Sales has "their own qualification process." By the time everyone agrees on how to handle it, the lead has gone cold. Or worse—gone to a competitor who moved faster.
• The Metric Wall emerges when different teams optimize for different things. Sales chases close rates. Success focuses on retention. Nobody's really looking at customer lifetime value. The customer feels the disconnect, even if they can't name it.

Your customer doesn't experience "departments." They experience your company as one entity. When that entity can't get its act together, they take their business elsewhere.

What Actually Works

So how do you build organizational intelligence around customer relationships? How do you make change feel inevitable instead of threatening?

• Start with one team. Don't try to transform the entire organization on day one. Pick one group, implement one workflow, and run it for one month. Document everything—time saved, deals won, customer complaints that didn't happen. Show real ROI before demanding company-wide adoption.
• Frame it as evolution, not revolution. Nobody wants to hear "everything you've been doing is wrong." They do want to hear "we're removing the administrative bullshit that wastes your time." Connect CRM adoption to individual pain points, not corporate mandates.
• Involve the skeptics early. Your best relationship builders should define what good data looks like. Your most resistant user should help design the workflow. People support what they help create. It's that simple.
• Kill the sacred cows. When someone says "we've always done it this way," the only acceptable response is: "Does this serve the customer, or does it just serve our comfort?" Make adaptability the point, not an afterthought.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Your competitor isn't beating you because they have better CRM technology.

They're beating you because they changed faster. They broke down the silos. They aligned everyone around customer outcomes instead of departmental metrics. They built a culture where sharing information gets rewarded, not punished.

They understood that organizational intelligence—the ability to adapt—is what transforms CRM from a database into a competitive advantage.

Intelligence in Action

Einstein was right. Intelligence is the ability to change. In business terms: The smartest company isn't the one with the most features or the longest client list. It's the one that evolves how it works to serve customers better—consistently, deliberately, and even when it’s uncomfortable.

Your CRM can have all the artificial intelligence in the world: predictive scoring, next-best-action suggestions, perfectly timed sequences, automated handovers between Marketing, Sales, and Success. But if your organizational intelligence won't adapt, you're just automating yesterday's dysfunction at higher speed and with better visuals.

If leadership still rewards lone-wolf heroes instead of shared data quality, AI will just produce nicer dashboards on top of bad habits. If teams still hoard information in spreadsheets and inboxes, the smartest recommendation engine can't fix a broken culture of collaboration. If processes stay anchored in "how we've always done it," even the best workflow automation will simply calcify outdated logic.

And your customers will notice. Not because they understand your tech stack, but because they feel the results: repeated questions, inconsistent follow-ups, offers that miss the point, and service interactions that don't seem to remember the last conversation. From the outside, it doesn't look like "advanced CRM." It looks like a company that isn't really listening—and in the end, that's the only intelligence that matters.

Christian Schappeit has spent over 20 years watching companies struggle with Business Systems implementations. He writes about the messy reality of customer relationship management at CRM Real Talk and protagx DDD blog.