Don’t get me wrong. I like technology as much as the next guy, but I’ve been writing about – and hearing complaints about – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for the past five years and have come to the conclusion that this is one technology that's got a lot of problems. For those not yet blessed with the CRM experience, it’s software that’s supposed to help sales reps sell, but in most cases it’s more like a contact manager on steroids. If what I hear from some sales pros is half true, it’s also a giant pain in the behind. The following five complaints keep surfacing:
- “If I wanted to be a data entry clerk, I would have applied for that job.” With many CRM implementations, sales pros are expected to spend an hour (or more) after each customer meeting, entering excruciating detail about exactly what took place. Most of the time, the requested data has nothing to do with actually making the sale.
- “If I leave the company, they’re going to steal my contacts.” Sales pros often come into a firm with a “Rolodex” full of contacts, all gathered over a lifetime of sales. With CRM, though, it’s not clear who owns contact data once it’s been entered into the system. In fact, if you enter the contacts that you brought with you when you were hired, and don't keep copies, your new employer might not let you have them back when you leave.
- “All this micromanagement is driving me crazy!” Now that CRM has been integrated with the new breed of smart cell phones, some sales managers want to track the hour-by-hour location and activities of sales reps when they’re not in the office. In other words, if you make your quota by mid-afternoon and take the rest of the day off (a time-honored privilege for a sales pro, in my view), you might find yourself called onto the carpet… or given a bigger quota.
- “The computer thinks it knows how to sell better than I do.” CRM is supposed to help sales pros follow a sales process – a set of steps that leads a prospect from first contact to writing the order. But many CRM implementations hardwire a sales process that only a programmer could love. Making a sale can require subverting the system by entering bogus data – just to make sure the customer gets the order.
- “Why learn this turkey when we’ll have a different turkey next year?” According to some sources, the average tenure of a sales vice president is about 19 months. A change in management often means that the CRM software that the outgoing manager liked will be replaced as well. So why bother to get proficient?
This is not to say that there aren’t happy CRM users. (I run into them from time to time.) But there’s something fundamentally wrong with a technology that you still have to FORCE people to use. Even today, some CRM vendors tell sales managers to deny commissions to sales pros who don’t do their electronic busywork.
Next post, I’ll let you know what you can to keep CRM from driving you batty – and maybe help your entire team be more productive as well.
