Why Salespeople are bad at updating their CRM
Companies buy CRMs tools to manage their sales staff.
CRM tools at their core, are where sales people report on their sales activities so their managers can report and manage their team.
Aside from basic functionality developed in the late 1990’s there has been very little improvement on helping a sales person manage their opportunities pipeline.
All the big CRM companies are trying to sell integration with the rest of the business (accounting, inventory etc), but you are no further in helping a salesperson to sell more.
What is a CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools manage the company’s interaction with current and potential customers. It is used by both customer facing sales people and their management to improve business relationships with customers and ultimately drive sales growth.
Improvements to CRMs over the past 25 years have been incremental at best. They have gotten more sophisticated, but not better at helping us improve our relationship with customers.
For example a CRM does not help a salesperson be psychologically prepared to engage with her customers through building the following traits:
Winning
Empathy
Assertiveness
Vision
Storytelling
In addition very few companies integrate the short customer stories and other micro-content into their CRMs to help enthuse potential buyers.
CRMs do tax a salesperson’s most valuable resource - their time! But provides very little in return.
The major CRM vendors include:
Salesforce
Hubspot
Sugar
Pipedrive
Dynamics (Microsoft)
Zoho
SAP CRM
Oracle CRM
CRMs are too complex and take too much time for sales consuming to update, but most importantly don’t really provide much help to improve the salesperson’s effectiveness.
A great CRM would help the salesperson to:
Get into a positive mindset to sell. Effectiveness hinges on a positive mental state
Map the customers’ decision process (not our sales pipeline process), and suggest smart actions
Incorporate a playbook with useful microcontent.