Why CRM projects fail in membership
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55% of CRM project implementations do not achieve their planned objectives. That figure, from 2025 research published by Johnny Grow, is the most current measure of CRM project outcomes, and it has not moved meaningfully in the last decade.
Within those failures, around 47% are linked to poor user adoption and a further 33% to lack of leadership buy-in.
Underneath both, the pattern that keeps resurfacing in the research is implementation complexity: projects that are too large, too bespoke, or too slow to deliver, so the team loses confidence in the change before it has had a chance to embed.
This highlights that technology is rarely the problem; the organisational conditions around the technology, the way the project is shaped, and the experience of the supplier delivering it almost always are.
This matters for UK membership organisations more than those figures suggest, because the sector is currently making a lot of CRM decisions. The MemberWise Digital Excellence Report 2026 shows AMS and CRM satisfaction levels improving across the sector, with 47% of organisations planning to stay with their current provider or upgrade, and 22% actively replacing their system within twelve months. At the same time, only 27% of UK membership bodies have a formal digital strategy in place, and only 20% have a data strategy.
The 55% failure rate is not a guarantee. It is what happens when organisations approach a CRM change as a procurement exercise rather than as a change management project. The membership organisations that land their CRM implementations well are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets, the most sophisticated requirements, or the fastest decision-making.
The organisations that have successful CRM implementations will tend to put the work in across three distinct phases: before procurement begins, during the procurement itself, and through the first twelve months after go-live. The shape of that work is the difference between a project that delivers and one that underdelivers.
Before procurement: Getting everything in order
Some CRM projects will typically begin with a vendor conversation. The stronger ones begin with an internal one, usually several months earlier, focused on questions the vendor cannot answer.
Question 1: Is the organisation clear about its goals and objectives?
The first question is whether the organisation is clear about its goals and objectives. A new CRM will be implemented well when it is understood as a means of achieving something specific the organisation is trying to do. It will drift when it is seen as just a technology upgrade.
What is the organisation trying to achieve over the next three to five years, and what will it cost if the current systems continue to get in the way. Answering this before procurement begins is one of the most reliable routes to senior leadership and board-level buy-in, because it frames the CRM decision as a strategic decision rather than an operational one.
Question 2: What does the new CRM need to solve operationally?
The second question is what problem the new CRM needs to solve in operational terms. A finance team spending three days a month rebuilding renewal reports from two exports is a defined problem. A membership team that cannot see email opens or event attendance in the same place is also a defined problem.
“We need something better than what we have” is not a problem; it is a feeling. Vendors can respond to defined problems with specific demonstrations. They cannot respond to feelings without filling in the gaps themselves, which is how requirement creep and feature-led procurement decisions start.
Question 3: What do the team’s processes look like today?
The third question is what the team’s processes actually look like today, not what they look like in the operations manual that nobody has updated since 2021! The exercise that brings this to the forefront most clearly is taking one membership application from website submission to welcome email and tracking every system and person it touches in order. Then taking a renewal where the payment fails, then an event booking from a non-member and finally an invoice that needs to go to a parent organisation rather than an individual.
The pattern that emerges is not always the best, but it is the pattern the new CRM will need to support, and the team has documented it before procurement avoids discovering it for the first time during a vendor demo.
Question 4: Where can the data be trusted and where can it not?
The fourth question is where the data is reliable and where it is not. The MemberWise 2026 report identifies multiple databases and silos of information as one of the sector’s top three challenges, and the practical impact of that fragmentation only becomes visible at the point of migration.
Duplicate records, member categories that have evolved without being tidied up, organisational memberships with inconsistent links between individuals and employers, communications preferences captured under older consent models, all of these carry their inconsistencies into the new system if they are not surfaced first. Cleaning the data is not the work that needs to happen before procurement. Knowing where the problems are is.
Question 5: Who owns the CRM project internally?
The fifth question is who owns the project internally. Around a third of CRM failures trace back to lack of leadership buy-in, but the more practical version of that finding is that projects drift when decisions sit unmade.
A named project lead, a decision-maker whose sign-off carries weight, and named contributors from membership, finance, and marketing, all confirmed before procurement begins, give the project the foundations it needs to keep moving when the inevitable difficult choices arrive.
During procurement: Choosing an expert partner, not just a system
Once the internal groundwork is in place, the procurement itself becomes a different kind of conversation. The question naturally moves from “which CRM has the features we need” to “which supplier understands the work we are trying to do, and will be a useful partner in doing it”.
This is the distinction that the Biochemical Society ended up drawing during their own procurement. Their previous CRM had been heavily customised, which made it complex to maintain and difficult to use from the start. As Associate Director Lorraine Reese described it,
“fields were populating incorrectly, direct debits weren’t firing, credit card payments were malfunctioning, and the sign-up process was horrendous”
What changed the outcome for them was not the procurement process itself, but what they came to value in the supplier they chose. Beyond features and cost, the working relationship itself proved important to whether the implementation delivered.
As Lorraine put it:
“Having a supplier who’s also a critical friend is more than essential - it’s a huge plus. They bring their experience of other organisations’ best practices to us.”
That in itself is what turns a procurement decision into a partnership decision, and it is the part of the process that most directly correlates with whether an implementation lands well.
Practically, the procurement conversations worth having at this stage focus on three things.
The first is whether the supplier can demonstrate the specific problems you defined in the pre-procurement work, in your context, rather than walking through a standard demo. The second is whether they push back on requirements that sound reasonable but contain assumptions they have seen fail elsewhere. The third is whether they are willing to tell you when sheepCRM, or in fact, any other system, is not the right fit for what you are trying to do.
A supplier who agrees with everything in a conversation, from experience, is rarely the supplier who will tell you the difficult truth when the implementation gets harder than expected.
After go-live: The year that determines whether the project worked
Sometimes it’s easier to talk about CRM implementation as if it ends when the system goes live. The 2025 failure research we highlighted in this blog suggests otherwise. The 47% of failures attributed to poor user adoption are not failures of technology; they are failures of the twelve months after launch, when usage patterns set in and either reinforce the new ways of working or revert to the old ones.
This is where the readiness work done at the start of the project pays off. A team that defined the problem clearly knows what success looks like at six months and twelve months, and can measure it. A team that documented their processes can identify which ones changed and which ones did not, rather than discovery at month nine that one department never moved off the old workflow.
A team that named its internal owners has the governance to make the small adjustments that every implementation needs in its first year, without those adjustments getting stuck waiting for someone to be accountable for them.
The Biochemical Society’s experience after launch illustrates what this looks like when it works. The simplification of processes that the system enabled was not automatic; it required the team to actively redesign workflows that had built up around the previous system’s limitations.
As Lorraine described it,
“The simplification of our processes was like hitting a refresh button. Our member onboarding no longer requires manual input, easing the way for our members to join and saving our membership and finance teams so much time.”
sheepCRM made the simplification possible. The team’s willingness to use the platform as the prompt to rethink the work made the simplification real.
Where to start
The wider picture for the UK membership sector is encouraging. AMS and CRM satisfaction is rising, more organisations are moving away from bespoke systems towards industry-standard platforms, and the rate of organisations expecting to upgrade or stay with their provider is higher than the rate looking to replace.
The 55% CRM failure rate sits alongside that picture rather than completely contradicting it. The organisations succeeding with CRM change are doing the work the failure rate suggests is missing otherwise.
If you are at the start of that journey, the most useful first step is not always to start shortlisting vendors. It is to test honestly where your organisation currently sits across the pre-procurement areas, and to close the gaps the assessment surfaces.
Our Membership CRM Project Planner gives you a structured way to do this, identifying where current operations are working and where more clarity is needed before moving forward.
The Planner also goes a step further, providing a framework for mapping the work between now and a confident go-live. Both are free, and both are designed to be used before any vendor conversation, including ours.
When you are ready to talk to a supplier, a discovery call is a working conversation about your situation rather than a presentation of our platform.
We will explore where your organisation currently sits, discuss what your specific context actually needs, and tell you honestly whether sheepCRM is the right fit. Get in touch with an expert today.
FAQ
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The 55% figure from the 2025 research holds across multiple decades, which suggests it is not a software problem. The leading causes, including poor user adoption (47%) and lack of executive buy-in (33%), are organisational rather than technical. Modern CRMs are more capable than their predecessors, but they still depend on the conditions around them to deliver value.
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You are in a strong position if you can describe the specific problems the new CRM needs to solve, your main processes are visible even if imperfect, you understand where your data is reliable and where it is not, and you have named internal ownership of the project. Readiness is less about being perfect and more about being clear-eyed.
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Not entirely, but you do need to know where the issues are. Duplicates, outdated member categories, unclear organisational links, and inconsistent consent records will all need decisions before migration. Surfacing them early tends to make the project significantly smoother and reduces the cost of the implementation itself.
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Most implementations sit somewhere between three and nine months from kick-off to confident use, depending on complexity. The biggest factor tends to be internal capacity and decision-making speed, not the technology itself. Organisations that have done the readiness work in advance typically land closer to the lower end of that range.
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The pattern across the research is consistent. Projects that work tend to have defined the problem clearly before procurement, chosen a supplier who is a partner rather than only a software vendor, and invested in the twelve months after go-live as carefully as the months before it. Projects that struggle tend to skip one or more of these phases.
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It is a working conversation based on your situation rather than a presentation of our platform. We will explore the gaps you have identified, discuss what your organisation actually needs, and tell you honestly whether sheepCRM is the right fit.
