How Your CRM is Secretly Driving You Crazy

I get a lot of requests for CRM recommendations, often from people who already have one. “Our CRM is driving us crazy,” they say. “Can you recommend one?”

Well, I can’t give you a surefire recommendation – no one can – because the way you want and need to use CRM is unique. But I can clue you in on the real sources of aggravation and that will help you make the right choice.

A brief history of CRM and why it matters

When these programs first popped up, “CRM” stood for “Customer Relationship Management.” That’s customer as in after the sale occurred.  At some point, CRM companies realized expanding their target market to sales-users would bring in a nice revenue stream. They adjusted what the “C” stood for, added some features, and successfully transitioned their product. However, the customer-focus legacy is one of the things that often turns a helpful tool into an annoyance.

Most CRM include fields galore. You can input name, position or title, industry, fax, company, parent company, email, office mobile and home phones, name of last-born child, etc.. Most of the data that goes in these fields makes people in account management very happy. That’s how all those fields got in there to begin with.

However, when it comes to prospecting and selling, a lot of the data is not relevant or will not be uncovered for some time. Unfortunately, most CRM don’t make it easy to ignore all those fields. The user has to tab through extraneous fields, wasting time and adding hassle to their work. The hassle factor gets worse when the powers-that-be try to require users to input data for all or most of those fields. The result? Management frets over poor “adoption” of the CRM and sales reps grind their teeth over time-wasters.

Big on selling, not so much on prospecting

The customer-focused legacy is particularly glaring when it comes to telemarketing and other prospecting activity. Prospecting needs CRM that’s streamlined and few meet that requirement. But let’s put that aside and stick with the secret sources of frustration in the selling arena.

Whose sales process is it?

Where a lot of CRM shine is as follows: When selling to very large organizations on an enterprise-wide basis, once we’re past prospecting and early phases of selling. This is no accident. The most popular big-name CRM companies base product design on their own sales process for their own target markets. For example:

• These CRM companies’ typical sales process involves submitting a proposal. For them, if things hit proposal ‘stage’ the probability of a sale is pretty good. And so the prospect rating function in their CRM duplicates that.
• Big-name CRM companies also put a lot of effort and resources upfront into looking for prospects they’d like to do business with. They call this “qualifying” and their funnel graphic shows a large chunk of it above “discovery” — the part where sales rep and prospect actually explore the potential business fit.

There is nothing wrong with the above…unless your sales process doesn’t happen to match theirs. If it doesn’t, you either won’t use those features or you’ll waste time trying to get it to work with your actual sales process. Sadly, too many people and organizations take the latter a step further – they try to adjust their sales process and rating systems to fit the CRM. This effort rarely works and instead generates a plethora of problems; including reinforcing ineffective prospecting and selling practices, and being unable to see and analyze your true sales pipeline.

Service so good it’s bad for you

It’s only human to believe you should follow the lead of the CRM. The big-name CRM companies are clearly successful and so the process in their program represents best practices, right? Well, yes, that’s right for some companies but not necessarily yours.

In fact, there’s a very good chance the big-name CRM companies didn’t intend their products for you. Their target markets are usually very large organizations whose sales process is indeed similar to their own. Of course, if you want to buy and use their product, they’re not going to stop you and will even help you do that. Which leads us to the last way your CRM can drive you crazy: You make it work.

Go away, Tim

Fans of “Project Runway” have heard Tim Gunn say, “Make it work!” hundreds of times. Designer contestants have their assignment, they’ve already bought fabric and they’re stuck with it. If things aren’t going smoothly; well, they just have to make it work.

That’s exactly what people often do with their CRM. They bought licenses, they’ve spent hours trying to figure out what goes where, they’ve called support a thousand times, received assistance, and it’s finally working. Sort of.

The CRM is sort of working as in the fields you need are there and you just have to skip over all those blank ones that have no relationship to your selling process and data needs. It’s sort of working in that you finally got the sales team to agree what “lead” and “opportunity” are and everybody follows the guidelines. Most of the time. Part of the time. When management checks on it.

You’ve gotten used wading through five clicks or a long scroll to get information you really wish was there at a glance. And even though it’s often faster to re-enter data than it is to move records and you can’t see what subordinates are doing because the reporting functions don’t fit their activity…you’re used to it. Sort of.

A strong work ethic, and becoming accustomed to the hassle, can make it difficult to recognize just how badly a CRM fits. However; that’s only part of a surreptitious trap, the rest is similarity.

Years into CRM as product, we have lots of companies to choose from. Yet many CRM look the same. Lots of fields. Same number of contact groupings and with similar or identical titles. Same funnel masquerading as a “pipeline” and linear stages. Cute little graph and pie chart options. Nifty reports. The lack of distinct options from CRM to CRM camouflages the sources of what’s actually driving you crazy. The only way to avoid continued frustration is stop assuming that what you see is what you should get.

Appearing next: How to shop for a great CRM.