What’s missing from our CRMs?

During the interview process, we are often asked about our experience with XYZ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Some are intricate, some are good, others are terrible, but the key concept of a CRM is to help us stay organized, track data, and plan accordingly.

Before a CRM existed, we had excel sheets to track all of our data. And before that files in a computer, and physical spreadsheets to track it. It can be overwhelming at times to track all of that data by yourself, set up reminders, correlate data, and communicate key information amongst multiple people in the organization. Alright, I’m done pitching.

What makes a great CRM?

There are tons of CRMs out there like Salesforce, who has dominated the market and our time in submitting key metrics, hubspot, which has shown helped visual people track their deals while making it impossible to tag key metrics, and others. For the record, I currently use Hubspot for multiple businesses however I clearly recognize the limitations. So the key question, what would make a great CRM?

I’ve built small businesses, been an employee of large entities, and been brought on as a VP of sales at seed funded startups, and I find that there are key problems in the market. To leverage the most in depth CRM that has integrations across the board, can track everything, Salesforce is as deep as it gets. However, with that product feature depth comes a hefty price tag that prohibits small businesses from investing a significant portion of their income (or lack thereof) into the solution. Hubspot is another I’ve addressed above, one which I have over 5 years of use with. That said, I would not say that I am a Hubspot sensei by any means.  Hubspot allows you to easily track deals in a visual sense, leave custom comments that can easily be seen and accessed, and is definitely faster than other CRMs. That said, missing tons of functionality and is best as a marketing tool. 

The one area that drives sales reps crazy with CRMs is the amount of time admin work takes, and the lack of ease in searching for keywords. Take this example:

It’s Q4 (because there is not Q5), management just revealed a new promotion to bring old deals back to life and potentially close during Q4. You’ve built this pipeline all year with different prospects, however the promotion is extremely specific to prospects using ABC tool and have XYZ problem. While that wasn’t a key driver during your initial conversation it has become an issue with recent news of a massive problem at that tools company. Unless you specifically tracked every data aspect during your conversations and entered it into a trackable field, you’ll have to dig through every deals notes to find that information.

If a CRM had that capability or there was a partner solution available to do so, think of the possibilities for marketing and sales teams to find old deals and bring them back to life. Marketing could send out more targeted emails and get you better meetings, your nurture emails could be personalized, and you could find that needle in the haystack opportunity that is just waiting for a phone call. 

If there is a solution like this out there please let me know, my hours of research have left me with no answers. If this solution does not exist, and you build it, please provide me credit. 

TLDR

Prepare ahead of time for the potential deals to fall from the sky, the best way to do that is by having your opps organized and the data easily identifiable in the future.