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Before anything is configured, someone has to settle what a record is. Is the customer the company or the person? Does a household count once or twice? What distinguishes a lead from an opportunity, and who decides when it moves? Businesses that skip this arrive at a system where the same customer exists four times and no report can be trusted, and the fix later is far more expensive than the conversation now.

Consent deserves its own fields rather than a note in a comment box. Record what the person agreed to receive, the date, the mechanism — a form, a checkbox, a verbal agreement at a counter — and any wording shown at the time, plus unsubscribe events and their dates. Government guidance on anti-spam compliance makes the point plainly: keep records of consent and be ready to provide proof of it, because the onus is on the sender. A CRM designed this way answers the question in seconds; one that was not turns a complaint into an archaeology project.

Personal information in the CRM also sits under PIPEDA's fair information principles, including identifying purposes, limiting collection to what those purposes require, limiting retention, keeping information accurate, safeguarding it and giving individuals access to their own information on request. A practical consequence is that your CRM needs a defensible answer to "show me everything you hold about me and delete what you no longer need", which is a design decision, not a support ticket.

Canada's anti-spam legislation requires consent before commercial electronic messages are sent, along with identification of the sender and an unsubscribe mechanism. Consent can be express or implied, implied consent applies only in defined circumstances and is time-limited, and the sender must be ready to prove what they hold. Configure the CRM so that a mailing list can only be built from records with a valid consent basis, rather than relying on whoever exports the list to remember the rules.

If you operate in Quebec, Law 25 layers on further duties that touch the CRM directly: a person responsible for the protection of personal information whose contact details are published, an obligation to notify the Commission d'accès à l'information and affected individuals of confidentiality incidents presenting a risk of serious injury together with an incident register, privacy impact assessments for projects involving personal information, consent that is manifest, free and enlightened and requested in clear and simple language separately from other information, and, since September 2024, the right to receive computerised personal information in a structured, commonly used technological format.

Breaches are a CRM risk in their own right, since a customer database is exactly what gets exfiltrated. Under PIPEDA, an organization must assess whether a breach of security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm, report qualifying breaches to the Privacy Commissioner, notify affected individuals, and keep records of all breaches for two years. Ask your consultant how permissions, export rights and audit logging in the proposed configuration would stand up to that.

Replacement is often the wrong instinct. Most complaints — nobody updates it, the reports are wrong, it takes too long to enter a deal — come from configuration and process rather than the product, and they follow you to the new platform along with the same data and the same habits. A short diagnostic engagement that reworks the pipeline, deletes unused fields and fixes the reports frequently costs less than a migration and delivers more.

Genuine reasons to move do exist: the platform cannot support how you sell, it lacks integrations you depend on, the licensing model no longer fits your headcount, the vendor is winding the product down, or the data model is so distorted that rebuilding is cleaner than untangling. Ask any consultant who recommends replacement to write down which of those applies and what specifically cannot be done on the current system. If the answer is vague, you are buying an implementation project rather than a solution.

Agree at the start what happens when the engagement ends. The licences and the platform account should be in your organization's name with your staff holding the top-level administrator role, not the consultancy's. Losing the administrator account is the CRM equivalent of losing the keys, and recovering it from an unresponsive former supplier is slow and sometimes impossible.

Ask for a written export on request in a standard format covering all records, notes, attachments and custom fields, plus documentation of the configuration: custom objects and fields, automations, integrations and the credentials they use. Where a consultant has built integrations, establish who owns that code and confirm it in writing. Finally, agree what the consultant does with any copy of your data they hold once the work ends, and by when it is deleted.