CRM has many functions, but it isn’t always ideal for the sales process, as many sales people will adhere to. Is it time for a CRM switch?
It’s 8:50 AM Monday morning. You’re about to go into your weekly sales meeting. But first, you quickly feeding the CRM with last week’s data just to be up to date for the meeting.
The truth is, you haven’t been updating the CRM all week because you don’t like using it. The CRM is wasting your valuable time and distracting you from what you should focus on: closing more deals and generating leads.
What’s needed is a change; a switch to an easier, painless tool that will actually benefit you.
But how are you supposed to tell your boss you don’t feel comfortable using the deployed CRM?
How should you hint that you’d rather use a different tool? Here are 7 good reasons to convince your boss why thinking about a CRM switch might be a good idea:
n°1 Nobody uses
the CRM (except on Monday morning)
To start with, that’s probably the most important reason of all. The Customer Relationship Management tool is just not being used by its first users – sales people! Due to the complexity of traditional CRM systems, especially smaller sales teams often only update the system right before their about to enter a meeting, which has a rather contra productive effect.
When a company decides to deploy a CRM system, the people in the sales team who are supposed to work with the tool in question on a daily basis, are not asked. Neither were their needs or demands taken into account. Reality is, they are forced to work with such a system and get used to it even if they don’t like at all. As CRM tools were originally built as contact databased for the marketing department to compile reports and extract data for campaign monitoring, they were never meant for sales reps on the field in the first place and fail because they can’t be
adapted correctly.
Instead of going over the heads of the people using the tool, implementing a Customer Relationship Management System should be a joint decision and Sales Managers need to make sure that the sales team feels comfortable using the selected tool. Therefore, everyone should be consulted should a CRM switch occur.
n°2: You’re wasting your time filling out
forms.
Before you even get started, the implementation process of such complex tools usually not only occupies your work for next two weeks, but is also a very wracking and unnecessary procedure for the sales person sitting in front of the screen trying to work their way through. Once that has been done, spending hours of valuable time entering useless data in a CRM system is not what’s so called “optimizing your day to day work”. On the contrary, sales reps are often asked to create an entire company record, source company details and add multiple contacts, before they can actively start prospecting and adding Deals and To do’s. They do all
that without any assurance that the painfully entered data is of any value to the company or even qualifies as a potential prospect.
As we all know, time is very limited, hence why sales people should not be wasting their valuable time filling in useless forms where they could be thinking about the next action on their lead instead, in order to successfully push the lead through the sales funnel.
What’s needed is a user friendly tool that doesn’t require any implementation process whatsoever and allows sales people to start working on their Leads straight away. Creating new Leads should only take seconds. If it’s the case salespeople will have their CRM up to date as it will help them instead of being a constraint.
N°3 Your CRM has no (or low quality) Mobile app
Sales people are often out on the field either in client meetings, in product demos or just networking as much as they can. They spent a reasonable amount of time travelling and need to have access to all key client information easily and effortless on the go. There simply is no time to get the laptop out just to add a new Lead into the System or check the status of an existing one. It’s crucial
that any sales application used by sales reps also offers a mobile compatible app, in order to stay updated even when the office was left. Having your CRM on your phone, helps you save time so you can focus on winning the lead and prepare for the meeting. But not only will you need to have a mobile version, you also need a great mobile version that gives you access to your key lead information and allows you to call or send them emails in one click.
Some CRM also have great mobile features such as voice recognition and business card scanning. These features come in very handy when you’re rushing into the next client meeting but still need to log the information from the first meeting. By simply recording your speech with the in-built voice recognition function of your phone, the system transforms that into a message, saving sales reps time typing out the information gathered.
Some mobile supported CRM systems even offer an offline working mode, so you can update your sales pipeline even when you’re not connected to the internet. This is crucial, when you’re travelling by train or by plane but still need access to your sales application.
As we mentioned earlier, time is very limited for sales people, hence why their current CRM system should allow them to take pictures of business cards and create leads out of the content captured in just seconds.
These features might seem minor at first, but they will improve your work on the go a lot and allow you to concentrate and focus on your work without having to worry to forget vital client information.
N°4 There are no team collaboration features
Once sales reps have worked their way through the complex data acquisition program and got round to the point where they can actually start working on their Leads, they’re facing another issue: the lack of support from team members or managers, which is crucial in order to improve their performance. Receiving feedback and being able to motivate your team has to be an integral part of every sales – oriented tool.
They need to provide visibility and allow team members to interact with each other. It doesn’t help anyone if managers need to chase their sales reps via email for updates on leads and dig deeper into any won or lost clients. Having all key customer interactions stored in one place, displayed on an interactive activity feed where all team members can discuss and give advice, is the key to success.
N°5/ Data in your CRM has become crappy
After several years of CRM usage, you will find yourself looking at outdated customer information which is of no use for the current sales process. Not only will you find old, irrelevant data, but also content which is not relevant for the Lead you’re working on.
As CRM tools focus more on the data acquisition side, it’s often forgotten that sales people on
the field do not require the same information as the marketing department needs for reporting purposes.
With time the CRM becomes full of data of old customers, or is filled with bad contacts. It makes the product messy as the important information on active leads are hidden under tons of info on past leads and customers. In other words, another key reason to think about a CRM switch.
N°6 Your current CRM is of no help in your day to day sales work
Customer Relationship Management Software were meant to support in the day to day business, helping sales people ease their work flow. But as experience has shown us, unfortunately the opposite is the case. Sales people do not update their tool regularly, simply because it does not help them with their day to day work. They see it more as a constraint, hence do not bother wasting their time filling out forms. The acceptance of every good software highly depends on its interface. If the user is not satisfied, he will not use the tool again. Keeping a clear overview of your data and sales pipeline is already a difficult and time consuming task by itself which should not be made worse by entering useless data in a system they are not using anyway. In order to break through this vicious circle, a tool is needed which helps sales people organizing and
structuring their work.
N°7 Lack of Integration with 3rd party SaaS apps
Being able to integrate third party applications with your existing SaaS System is crucial nowadays and should be possible with every sales application. Integrating external applications can be of great help for your business. It starts by simple integrations like your Google Account for calendar synchronizations or Email marketing automation and can go up to integrating other services such as Accounting or Invoicing systems. As CRM should be your main tool to work from, it only makes sense to have all the other necessary applications you need in one place, all synchronised so you can rest assured you will never forget a thing. It also saves you a lot of time and hassle, switching between different software you’re using. A connection with services like Zapier is a minimum and will, enable you to integrate with thousands of third party apps
which are relevant for your business.
Conclusion: It’s time for a CRM switch
We at noCRM have come to the conclusion, that sales people don’t need a tool to manage customers, they need a tool to turn their prospects into customers. Hence why we built a Lead Management Software, enabling sales teams to create Leads in just seconds and manage them on an interactive feed easily accessible from anywhere.
After having read the above, we hope you go into your next sales meeting with great confidence, pitching your boss why you feel switching to a different CRM would help improving your workflow and close more deals.
noCRM can be tried online for free and testing it could show you the philosophy switch of choosing a lead management software (some call it a “sales CRM”).
Thousand of sales people around the world are already using our SaaS solution and enjoy the
benefits and the simplicity of our system. We hope that you’ll like it and that it will help you optimise your sales processes and increase your revenue.
