The Challenge of Over-Automated CRM Systems
You juggle many aspects of your sales job including outbound calls, email campaigns, tracking prospects, sales meetings, and on it goes. On top of that, if you're a manager, you also have a great responsibility to keep a finger on the pulse of all sales activity of your team, as well as your own accounts and managerial duties. -All this, while knowing your number one goal is connecting with your buyers.
At Sales-Link, we regularly hear about the challenges many of our potential customers are experiencing making connections. Even more often, we hear about the frustrations and disappointments salespeople have with their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems .
Your CRM should feed you rather than you feeding it!
I don't want to take credit away from any company that works hard for their customers, but there is a huge difference between those companies who make CRM system claims that they actually can deliver, and those who are essentially all talk; no action (or the wrong action).
Would you buy a BMW Mini Cooper for a family of 10? Of course not. Right size does matter!
Would you add an attachment to the BMW Mini to fit your larger family? No, because you would buy an appropriate car with features built in, to carry your growing family and their needs. You should buy a CRM system based on the functionality you know you need and can handle.
Once the appropriate size and functionality of your system are in place, you can then focus on the business at hand. For the sales manager, it is finding the proper balance between hunters and farmers for their team.
For the sales team, the challenge is often using systems that are too robust, and require a small army of programmers and work orders to make them functional. Vendors will convince you that customization is needed because of your specific needs, but quite frankly, what they are really saying is that their dinosaur can be made to fit today's needs, and once you pay for it, they will deliver it to you. That's the first sign to get the heck out of there!
Big-name companies who really aren't experts in sales and lead gen processes, but rather specialize in systems, will create a tool with so much automation (Big Selling Feature in today's world) that you will be up to your neck with flow charts and decision points for even just a simple email campaign, that it will make you choke. Over-automating pulls your sales team further away from actually communicating with customers. -Nothing like promoting automation that keeps you from speaking to your customers...bad, bad, bad.
If reports are what your management likes about the dinosaur system, it may be as simple as creating your own dashboard (soon to be covered on our website) -a much easier, and far less costly solution.
Remember, the system should be feeding you,
rather than you feeding it!