Sales are the life blood of all organisations. If you don’t sell, you don’t eat. Therefore, when it comes to investment sales get a fair chunk of the spending. If you like spending, then there is no better way to invest those hard earned dollars than to throw them into a corporate CRM system. To steal a few words from a great man… Never in the field of sales has so much been given, by so many, to so few. It’s mind boggling the amount of money that is spent year after year on CRM systems and for what return?

I’ve just received an email flyer from salesforce.com looking to drum up interest in their products – the very first bullet point they list is… ‘Implement a solution your people will actually use’… and there we have it, from the horse’s mouth… the problem with CRM… it’s not really used. Why is this?

The people who buy CRM are the top dogs; they control the budgets and have a thirst for information. They believe the all encasing CRM philosophy is a great way to go. It is claimed by those who peddle CRM that all departments within a business, including finance, human resources, manufacturing, R&D, logistics, support and sales benefit from CRM. Here is the problem; it is all things to all people. No ownership. It reminds me of the story about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody….

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done!… ownership of data in a corporate silo of information is always and will always be a problem. MRP, ERP, CRM, Knowledge Management Systems all suffer from the same problem.

I had a conversation a couple of years back with the UK sales management team of a very well known global company. This team were several layers of management above the field sales guys. This company had implemented Siebel and were very proud of what they had achieved, but these guys admitted that they did not have all the sales information in the system, however, they had enough. I made the mistake of saying that their role was to improve sales, no was the reply, our role is send sales numbers to the states and with Siebel we can do that! Unfortunately they meant it.

So this leads me to my next question… Is the objective of CRM to help sales reps hit their number or to supply sales data to all other departments within a business? Notice I did not say to improve sales, rather to help sales reps hit their number. There is a very important distinction between the two.

At the end of the day CRM requires sales reps to maintain it, yet CRM delivers the least value to sales reps, everyone else may think it is great, yet the guys who are expected to keep it updated are the ones that get the least from it. CRM does very little to help the sales guy achieve what they are paid to do… hit their target. Is it no wonder they don’t like using it, all pain for no gain.

Now, while the market is buoyant sales targets are generally met. Sales look good. There’s no problem with sales, sure we could improve, but overall there’s no problem with sales and so that CRM system must be doing its job. Well, there’s a downturn coming and when that hits the flaws in CRM will show even more. So, what will be done to ride the storm? More training or maybe hire the best, get rid of the rest or then again maybe invest more in CRM or if none of that works change sales management. If nothing is done, sales management will be changed. The worst thing to do would be to invest more in CRM and here is why…

CRM does not hep sales reps to hit their number and it’s because CRM is all things to all people and consequently the focus is not on hitting the number.

CRM does not reflect the way in which most corporate sales are achieved. First of all, CRM systems are silos of data within the organisation. There are even silos within silos. Feed it at the bottom and report it at the top. Effective selling is not achieved in silos. It is often not even achieved using resources from just within the same organisation. There is a whole sub culture working together to get the job done and all this is outside of any system.

CRM’s claim to fame for sales is the corporate pipeline. Corporate pipelines are so yesterday…. first of all the steps in the corporate pipeline are wrong, the pipeline is probably factored which is also wrong, it doesn’t reflect reality and there is only one instance of the pipeline and that is also just so wrong. It’s time to move on to something that does the job.

CRM does not provide help in how to close deals. Following the steps in the pipeline is not going to do this. Recoding who you are seeing, what you have done and what others think you should be doing does not help that much either. CRM is a content free database that sucks in data and spews it out in various ways, none of which helps the individual sales rep hit their number.

Having spent most of this post bashing CRM, I should make it clear that I’m not saying CRM is wrong, it’s just not right for helping sales reps hit their number. Following this statement, the next question has to be… so what is right?… and the answer to that question is that you are going to have to wait and see. The answer is radical, different and turns the whole subject of systems on its head.

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