What is CRM drift?
CRM drift is the gap that opens between a CRM and reality as the outside world changes. People change firms, funds close, investment criteria shift, portfolios turn over, and none of it types itself into the record. Drift happens even at firms with perfect logging discipline, because the facts decay on their own schedule.
Drift is different from missed logging. Missed logging is internal: a call that never got recorded. Drift is external: the record was right when someone typed it, and the world moved. A sponsor's fund size from 2024, a contact who changed banks last quarter, an EBITDA range from a mandate that no longer exists.
The visible symptom is the pre-call ritual: bankers re-check LinkedIn, PitchBook, and the firm's website before every meeting because they know the CRM lags. That is the same lookup, repeated by every banker, with the result never making it back into the record.
The fix is monitoring, not cleanup. Agents that continuously reconcile CRM fields against live sources, firm websites, filings, and the market data the firm already licenses, and stage cited corrections for a person to approve. Drift never stops, so the watching can't either.