Your CRM Notes Are Too Long
- No invented stats
- Written for UK readers
- 3 min read
- Published 26 September 2026
Open a deal in almost any CRM and you'll find a wall of text: eleven paragraphs of what was said on a call in March, written by someone who has since left, containing one useful fact buried in the middle. Nobody reads it. The rep who inherits the account skims the first two lines, gives up, and rings the customer to ask questions they've already answered.
The instinct behind long notes is good. You're trying to be thorough, to capture everything in case it matters later. But notes aren't a record for its own sake — they're a message to a future reader, and that reader has thirty seconds. Written that way, most notes should be about six lines.
Who the note is actually for
Three people read a CRM note, and all of them want the same short answer.
- You in six weeks, thirty seconds before a call, trying to remember what you promised.
- Your manager, in a pipeline review, trying to work out whether this deal is real.
- Whoever inherits the account when you're on holiday, ill, or gone.
None of them need the narrative. They need to know what the customer's situation is, what's stopping them buying, and what happens next.
What to write instead
A structure that survives contact with a busy week:
- Situation: what's true about their business that makes this relevant.
- Problem: what they said is wrong, in their words if possible.
- Blocker: the one thing standing between here and a signature.
- Next: what happens, who does it, by when.
So instead of nine paragraphs:
Situation: Four branches, opened Leeds in March. Two people doing stock reporting manually.
Problem: "Branch managers keep their own spreadsheets because they don't trust the central number." Month-end takes four days.
Blocker: Priya can approve up to £10k. Anything above needs Mark (FD), who she says is sceptical after a failed system change two years ago.
Next: I send one-page migration outline by Fri 3rd. Priya to get me 20 mins with Mark w/c 13th.
That's readable in fifteen seconds, and it contains the two things the long version usually loses: the exact quote, and the name of the person who can actually say yes.
Direct quotes deserve special mention. "They're frustrated with their current system" is your interpretation and it's nearly worthless. "The branch managers don't trust the central number" is theirs, and you can use it back to them in the proposal. Capture two or three of those per call and skip the rest.
The counter-argument, which is partly right
Longer notes genuinely matter in some situations. Complex deals with many stakeholders, anything with a compliance or contractual dimension, and any conversation where what was said might be disputed later all justify detail. So does a handover where the incoming rep has no context at all.
But even then, the answer is usually a short summary with the detail underneath, not a wall of prose with the summary hidden in it. Lead with the four lines. Anyone who needs paragraph seven can scroll.
There's also an honest tension with the reason long notes exist at all: they're often written to prove work happened rather than to help anyone. If your team's notes are padded, look at whether the CRM is being used as a surveillance tool. Reps write defensive notes when they think notes are how they're being judged, and no amount of template-sharing fixes that.
The practical test for any note is this: could someone who has never spoken to this customer pick up the phone and have a sensible conversation using only what you wrote? If yes, you've written enough. If they'd have to read for two minutes first, you've written too much. If your existing records are already past saving, our guide to cleaning up a messy CRM is the place to start.
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