How to get the most out of CRM Systems without breaking the bank.

Author: Chuck Ingram

What’s the key to a customer relationship management (CRM) system that works? Reliable data. But gathering that data has proven to be more challenging than anticipated. Enter the unicorns—like Outreach, Sales Loft, and Gong—add on solutions built to help you with your data collection problem. Unfortunately, it often takes more than one solution to accomplish what you need, and

sooner or later, you’ll end-up with an expensive herd of unicorns on your hands. We’re here to tell you there is a better way.

 

What We Learned

Customers want technology to help them grow revenue as efficiently and effectively as possible, but it’s hit or miss if the CRM system they’ve invested in actually helps them accomplish this goal.

In talking to hundreds of companies, broadly speaking, I can say they exist on a continuum. On one end, companies have bought their CRM software alone. Those companies tend to be a little less happy…or even really unhappy. In fact, according to Gartner, 51% of CRM users are unhappy. On the other end, you’ll find the companies who accumulate those expensive unicorn add-ons.

Simply put, CRM is a relational database with forms over data. In our day-to-day jobs, we do not want to “do CRM.” We have jobs that need to be done, and keeping the CRM up to date becomes more of a nuisance than a priority. Take sales, for example. Sellers do not want to “do CRM,” such as adding accounts, leads, contacts, opportunities, and activities. They’re busy doing what they perceive as the most value-added activities: planning their week, focusing on their most profitable customers and prospects, preparing for meetings, following up on meetings, and creating proposals and forecasts. Time “doing CRM” just doesn’t make the cut.

 

Enter Bad Data

The CRM users who don’t invest in a unicorn product to help with data collection are often the least happy with their customer relationship management solution. In fact, according to Salesforce.com, 91% of CRM data is bad. Worse yet, that data decays by 70% a year.

The data is bad because those processes likely do not live on a form over data. They involve humans doing stuff—emails, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and using other systems. Because people kept buying Salesforce, nobody changed. Hence the birth of the unicorns.

 

Birth of the Unicorns

Outreach and Sales Loft were built to help people prospect. Gong transcribes phone calls so you can focus on the person on the phone. Seismic and others help salespeople organize content and present it to customers in an elegant way across the buying committee via digital sales rooms. Clarity helps people do a better job of forecasting.

The good news is that the companies who invest in unicorns are significantly happier with their CRM “stack.” And this is how they become unicorns, achieving multibillion-dollar valuations headed to lucrative IPOs.

The bad news is that the IT team can sometimes get stuck with creating integrations for all of these systems. Plus, logging in and out of them can become a pain for many users. More bad news is the Chief Financial Officer who thought they were buying into a solution between $100 and $200 per person, can often end-up paying $400, $500, $600 or more per user.

Since these companies were essentially created to solve a crack in CRM, they end up adding many features that often overlap with the functionality of the other unicorns in the stack or even things

the CRM itself does. As Ray Wong says, “they started as a feature company, they must grow their feature set.” It ends up getting so feature-rich that they become a bit like my Excel skillset: I love it but only use 10% of it.

 

Our Strategy

Sometimes businesses are like consumers. Some people like an Android, where they can customize things, and some like an iPhone, where things work but you can’t tweak it exactly how you want it.

That is where AI comes in. We can use AI to tie all those jobs together in a single, fluid, intelligent process. People do not have to “do CRM” anymore. Just like a smartwatch automatically records when you’re walking, AI can automatically determine which of the zillion emails you’re getting daily are relevant.

 

What About Those Pricey Unicorns?

Influenced by thought leadership folks like Ray Wong and the amazing folks at Winning by Design, our company congruentX looked at many of those expensive unicorns and built an AI-Fueled Revenue Accelerator.

At a high level, we thought about the people who used the solution, what they were hired for, the jobs they must do, and the friction they ran into daily in their roles. We wanted to take all the friction out of data collection and turn it into fuel by delivering it back into contextual experiences.

 

These Experiences Can Look Like:

· Insights at the right time, like a pre-crafted follow-up email with the attendees that includes the topics covered, the pains, and the follow-up items—this can save 23 hours a month for a sales leader. It could be creating playbooks that help lift 40% of the sales team who are underperforming. These insights make it clear in real time what is working and what is not.

· For the Go-to-Market Leader, it can be diagnosing their customer’s journey on both sides like a bow tie, with the constraints and opportunities identified and solved.

· For IT, it can be one management platform versus trying to keep up with six or seven or even eight platforms along with all the spaghetti under the covers.

· For Finance, it can be a reduction in per-user cost of two to three times the current spend.

 

Go Do

Get your business folks, your IT folks, and your users all together. Instead of talking about requirements, talk about the jobs they need to do aligned with the business outcomes they are looking for and see what is getting in the way.

Configure something fast that delivers rapid impact to gain momentum. Prioritize the next wins.

If you need help, we have built this and can get you there faster than if you built it yourself. We’ve also got a set of structured AI-Fueled workshops that will get you there even faster.

If you are tired of consulting companies putting all the risk on you, ask how we can stay in the boat with you and guarantee (yes, guarantee) business outcomes. Together, we can stop wasting money on a herd of unicorns and start on the path to simplifying your processes and accelerating your revenues.

 

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