I worked as an implementation consultant during the 1st or 2nd generation of CRM apps back in the fist decade of this century. Then, since 2010 I became a CRM end-user, mainly of Salesforce.

After all those years listening to sales people complain about workflows and broken UI/UX, I realized the perfect system for this type of user is a message driven minimal UI app.

System would send email/IM to users all day long asking questions about news leads, changes in opps stages, phone calls, contracts sent for signature etc. Sales folks would click a link, fill in a 2 field form and hit save. Call that "micro updates", if you will. The system mimics the sales manager who nudges the sales person for updates. Navigation within the app is minimal, so there is no room for alibis like: "Oh, I'm not updating it because it takes too much of my time. I was doing sales work instead."

All this would be for the operational CRM. Analytical/management parts of the system would present the typical UI/UX we all know about.