Where CRMs Fall Short

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an absolutely essential part of any successful business. Whether you are implementing this using an off-the-shelf system, a custom system or an archaic non-automated system, if you are successful, you have a system. The advantages of a well-thought-out feature-rich CRM are many. To name a few:

• Centralized, easily accessed data
• Improved customer service
• Improved communication channels with customers
• Better pipeline management
• Increased conversion
• Better decision making

However, in our industry, even the best CRM lacks certain components that are critical to a sales organization. Let me illustrate this.

Say that Linda is a producer at Lansdowne Agency. Linda has received a lead from one of her marketing efforts. She takes the contact information and enters it as a lead into the CRM software that her agency is using. In the CRM she adds notes about the prospect that she has collected doing her initial research. So far, so good. All of the information is there for Jeff, the sales manager to review. Linda adds some tasks for herself into the system: make a call to set up an appointment, do more research, send introductory emails, etc. The system then notifies Linda of when each of these tasks is to be performed and includes this information on her calendar. Jeff can keep tabs on everything that’s going on regarding this and other prospects in Linda’s pipeline.

Linda wins the deal. In fact she beats out Lockport, the incumbent agency. She records a few more facts about the customer in the CRM.

Nine months later, Tim, another producer is working on hot prospect. It turns out that Lockport is the incumbent on this deal as well. In a sales meeting, Linda indicates that she had recently defeated this incumbent. However, two other producers say that they lost their deals to Lockport. Jeff starts to look in the CRM for information that will help him. Unfortunately, the CRM is not set up to make this helpful. He has to look for each customer where Lockport was/is the incumbent. Is that information there? Maybe. Is it searchable? Maybe. Are the tools that your organization used to defeat that incumbent readily available? No. Best case Jeff is going to be hunting through notes trying to assemble the intelligence. CRMs lack Incumbent Management. Incumbent management as I’m defining it is maintaining information about incumbents centrally so that it can be reused to win new deals when the same incumbent is involved.

Continuing with the same example here, let’s say that Lansdowne has adopted The Wedge sales process. Essential to that process is developing wedges – proactive services that we offer and do well that the incumbent either doesn’t do or doesn’t do well. Jeff wants to know what wedges worked against Lockport. Likely, if they worked in the past, they’ll work again. Again, he’s looking in the CRM and there might be some information in the notes. Now Jeff wants to find out details about the specific wedge that was used. Where are they? In a word document on the server somewhere. Which document again? Linda doesn’t remember. It was nine months ago. CRMs lack Difference Management. Difference management is the centralized knowledge of our proactive services, clearly articulated and related to existing customers as well as prospects.

While Linda has been kicking butt, Tim is just doing OK. Jeff is clear that the way to motivate Tim is through setting personal goals rather than company goals. So he sits down with Tim and maps out a future with Tim. Tim sees not only what he needs to accomplish. He also sees a way to accomplish it. Jeff records all of this information in a spreadsheet and files it off on the server in a protected folder. Two months later, when Jeff wants to see how Tim is doing with respect to his goals, he has to locate the spreadsheet, locate the sales which may or may not be in the CRM and manually figure out where Tim is. CRMs lack Goal Management. What’s needed is the ability to record these goals and have them automatically tracked based on producer sale performance. Then at any time, Jeff can instantly pull up the information and coach Tim accordingly.

There are other areas where CRMs are lacking: Referral Management, Training and Sales Meeting Management to name three. I won’t belabor the point. There’s no question that CRMs are valuable. However, how much more valuable could they be if they were really catered to our industry and processes. What would it be like to have a system that puts ALL of it together?

Funny you should ask. http://www.thewedge.net/iwin