You have Earned the right not to “Do CRM” (before now)

My friend Scott Millwood – co-founder of Customer Effective and more recently Yesflow – started saying something several years back that still I repeat.  He said people don’t want to “Do CRM”.  He said it in trying to make a point that CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software should serve the users not the other way around.

Thinking of Scott’s point evokes an image of a rep sitting at night looking at meeting notes, transferring them into a CRM database and updating deals.  All the while the same person is catching up on emails and trying to build proposals that drive credibility with clients.  Yes, the sales rep is “Doing CRM” but its required, the rep is new, and all is good in the world.

After some time and with some success – that rep is gradually “let off the hook”.  The sales rep updates their CRM pipeline (worse yet a disconnected spreadsheet) on Thursdays before the sales meeting on Friday.   “Dude I don’t have time – I’m too busy with prospects and customers.” “My Inside Salesperson uses that”

Well….   Here we sit.   External events have changed the way we work for now – if not for a long time. Many folks like me sit in a spare bedroom on video calls for many hours on end – playing with virtual office backgrounds.   Its not ideal but we hope and pray that is the only change to our “normal”.    The new normal provides us many less excuses not to use internal tools like – well – Customer Relationship Management software.  Reintroducing ourselves to these solutions and being at home – invites comparisons to the way we do things – – at home.  Those applications sure seem different and difficult since we are all Inside Sales Now.

We have all heard that there that there is a 50% chance companies aren’t satisfied with their CRM outcomes.   Having to use CRM at home all day now and compare it to other consumer-based tools – 50% satisfaction may seem pretty generous.

Do I really Need a 360 Degree View of My Customer all the Time?

Over the last 20 years – I’ve managed to hear a lot of “I need____” related CRM conversations.   The fill in very often is something like – “We need a 360-degree view of my client”.  Sometimes its phrased differently.  We need a “single pane of glass” to work from.

Do we really?  Time shows the opposite is true.  Let’s think of some examples from real life.  When I walk in my kitchen early in the morning ask Alexa “What’s the weather today”.  I’m not asking for a 360-degree view of the weather and all the history of the weather.  I’m asking for context and I’m asking for insights. 

When I’m getting ready for a meeting – I don’t need a form full of fields that looks like a mortgage application form.  I need to know what they do, who I know there, if we have worked with them in the past, how it was, and what they are up against these days.  As you can imagine – that contextual view looks much different.

If I am walking my dogs and I think of something I need to do – I say, “Siri take a note”.    If I just left that meeting and want to put some notes in CRM (while I’m joining the next call), I’m generally headed for a clickathon surrounded by a lot of irrelevant information.   

What’s the point of all this?   Sometimes the giant forms that well-intentioned big CRM projects produce – are often exactly doesn’t what help people do their work vs “do CRM”.  For sales – a rep generally does things like prospect, get ready for meetings, plan post meeting, manage pipeline, and forecast.  Doing CRM isn’t on that list – but CRM can help.

Questions We Should be Asking Instead

Tony Robbins says the quality of your life equals the quality of the questions you ask.  If it works for life – it sure seems like we could apply it to CRM.  Here are some questions we can ask as starters.

  • Define a process.  Let’s take sales for example.  Can we define the steps?
  • At what points does the team member need to get information, make a decision, or document something?
  • Where are the biggest constraints in our process?
  • Considering our process and the constraints – Are there smaller pieces of CRM – like apps that we can give them instead of big forms?
  • Can we intelligently aggregate information in a way that helps the team member make decisions or support the client?

Stay Tuned

Since we are all Inside Sales Now – In our next few blog posts in this series we will start to unpack more of how to make your CRM serve your users vs the other way around – without starting over.