Organizing your sales prospecting is not an easy task. Everyone has built their own experience that generally starts with paper (a notebook rather than loose sheets), goes through the Excel file, then through a CRM tool. Over time, unfortunately, this beautiful organization often returns to a hybrid state between CRM, Excel and the post-it which has the effect of putting its manager or CEO in a state close to dementia.
Why are CRMs so difficult to get the sales team to adopt? What are our real needs? Here is the beginning of an explanation in 5 points, through a biased and opinionated article.
Point #1: the name
CRM! Customer Relationship Management! What does peru mobile database customer relationship management have to do with customer acquisition issues?! Not much. At least not until you have a large customer base that you can regularly activate through marketing operations. From the beginning, CRMs were designed for companies with many customers, often recurring. They were designed as tools to manipulate structured databases, which can be segmented and on which many statistics can be performed.
Point #2: Usage
Salespeople don't do statistics, segmentation, or even listen to what marketing tells them. Salespeople are busy people, focused on efficiency and focused on one thing: winning their deals and reaching or even exceeding their goals. They prioritize their time and will only listen to you if you offer them solutions that are easy to implement and that help them. However, the tool they are asked to use was not designed for them, it was designed for marketing or for management who want visibility on the activity. CRM is therefore perceived by salespeople - and rightly so - as a constraint and not as a tool that helps them in their work. It is often updated, not during prospecting, but before the sales meeting. It is not for nothing that we often hear "Have you filled out the CRM?" or "Have you updated the CRM?" and not "Have you used the CRM?" or "Have you used the CRM?"
Point #3: Contact
CRM places contact – customer or prospect – at the heart of its system. CRM is therefore above all a database of contacts, people, companies, prospects, customers, with whom we interact or have interacted in the past. This design, which may seem natural at first glance, has a cost: before starting to work on a prospect, you will have to create a company file, then a contact, then add an opportunity and finally define a task. What a waste of time for an opportunity that may never come to fruition.