Re:Think: The fallacy of CRM systems in sales improvement

Every IT person finds his bête noire in Sales Teams. We have a relationship that is perpetually about to snap.

Speak to any IT person, they dislike sales team stating that sales teams absolutely have no clue on how to use IT or the CRM system effectively. The sales team will perpetually tell that the CRM system is useless and IT have no clue on how sales happens. The sales team’s biggest frustration is that IT people do not understand that sales do not follow a defined process.

If we re:think the CRM system as an example of alignment with business objective, they will provide a massive learning for IT systems on the way forward.

If we even take the requirements gathering for a CRM system, usually Sales and Marketing teams provide about 10 to 30% of the requirements, assuming they are even approached for their requirements.

About 10 to 20% come from Sales and Marketing Management specifying the type of reporting they would like to see, leaving it to the requirements gathering team to loop it back into their basic requirements.

The rest of the requirements primarily come from other departments like finance, risk, legal, production/delivery, procurement etc., who specify the type of information they would like to see from CRM system for their own functional efficiency. The CRM system had its usefulnesss in ensuring a proper bill of materials, ensuring proper pricing, etc., but these form a small but significant step in the sales process, and removed a major irritant for the sales person.

Even the requirements teams find it convenient to speak to Sales and Marketing management, and other functional managers than speaking to sales. Due to the historical precedence, sales are approached with an inherent attitude that they can rarely provide the requirements and anyway, they will never use it effectively. Scott Adam’s Dilbert’s reaction to sales biases the requirements team, dooming the implementation of CRM system.

Aiding to the confusion is the gap between IT Requirements teams and marketing teams, that increase gaps with sales teams. If we look at CRM as a marketing and sales tool, the gaps between sales and marketing within the CRM will put the mariana trench in pacific ocean to shame!

A good illustration would be, how many of us have received multiple calls from our bank asking us for a credit card even though we have declined it. There is no feedback loop mechanism in the system to tell the sales person or telecaller that the user has already declined. Similarly, how many us have received a request for a car or house loan even though we have taken the loan just a couple of months back from the same institution. A simple rule that feeds the CRM integrated with the marketing database would have informed the sales person/telecallers that the specific customer has already taken a loan recently, and should have an inbuilt rule to not approach for a specific period of time. The same frustration is exhibited by enterprise sales people. Many sales people are provided information of a potential prospect for a CRM system, though the customer would have just bought a CRM system, and the implementation contract is issued.

It is quite common for us to hear the primary reason of success of CRM implementation depends on the rigor the management has applied to CRM data and reporting.

Most sales people also look at it as an organizational requirement, or at best a documentation tool. They barely or never acknowledge that CRM system can support or aid in improving their sales or increase their success in sales. This is in spite of multitude of articles that provide insights of how CRM systems have provided 30 to 40% improvement in sales etc., etc., and many examples in other organizations provided by consultants. They work everywhere expect for us!

It is also not uncommon to find duplicate data in many applications belonging to other functional units purely due to management pressure or due to lack of proper application integration or exchange of data. In some cases where application integration has been achieved, they are still duplicated as an audit or quality requirements!

During these uncertain times, we all need to re:think on how we can align our CRM systems to increase sales, and support the sales team during one of their darkest hours.

(note: This is the second of three part series as we explore it in more depth)