CRMs and Connection

Most CRMs will highlight how they enable you to connect with your prospects and customers better. They help you ‘engage’.

This can be good and bad.

On the good side, it can keep you organised, so you’re freed up to care about people and provide value.

On the bad side, it promotes an attitude of insincere activity – in the name of ‘staying connected’.

Example: my mortgage broker – who I have a strictly professional relationship with – sends me an automated text on my birthday each year. Seriously. Someone, somewhere, decided pulling my DOB out of a loan application and putting it in their CRM to action this was a good idea.

Counter: my boss from a company I worked at 15 years ago, still texts me each year on my birthday, with a genuine message, always different, and for no benefit for himself. He’s just a thoughtful person.

One of the above is genuine and caring. The other is misguided.

I’m all for systems – I love them.

But not systems that scale insincerity.