Answer
Teams often underestimate this because they scope the CRM project around contact management and then discover, once sales or service reps are using it daily, that they cannot answer a customer's question without flipping back to a green screen session anyway. If a rep cannot see whether an order shipped, whether an invoice is overdue, or that a service ticket is still open, the CRM becomes a second, incomplete system instead of the single place people actually work from. That gap is usually what kills adoption faster than any interface complaint.
The sync cadence should follow how fast the underlying data actually changes and how much it costs the business when it is wrong. Credit holds, order status, and open service issues typically need to be current within minutes, which usually means journal-based or API-driven updates rather than an overnight batch job. Static reference data such as customer master records, pricing tiers, or territory assignments can often sync on a much longer cycle without causing harm. Buyers should resist the instinct to sync everything in real time by default, since that adds integration complexity and monitoring burden for data that never needed to be that current in the first place.