Where Is CRM Failing?

Monday, April 20 2009

Here is a forum entry I made today on a highly relevant subject:

Whilst I’m not quite as old as Neil (sorry Neil!) but going back to the early 80’s, I was working for a US CAD/CAM start-up company with 35 European employees. When I left almost 5 years later they had just under 3000 European employees. Obviously, to achieve this level of growth each sales person had to meet or exceed pretty aggressive sales targets. This meant working in a highly structured manner, which we did with the help of a mini-computer based system but prior to this, it was all recorded manually with the help of diaries, wall-planners, Post-It’s and Rolodex’s.

If you could take yourself back to the early 80’s and imagine using a keyboard for the first time (with no typing experience) no mouse, no Windows and no drop-down menus – just use of the Tab key! This is second nature to us now, but back then it was like learning to write again.

Bearing all this in mind you can see the resistance to using such a system, but even taking into account the time required to enter data, it quickly caught on as the top earners demonstrated what could be achieved by using the system. This then had a snowball effect throughout the organisation and as I recall we had great fun too.

Since those days I have used a number of CRM systems and contact managers such as GoldMine (but I’ve not come across Matrix, Shari), and found them all wanting in one way or another. The best system I ever used was the DOS version of Sage Telemagic, now superseded by Act. It was very simple, fast and effective. It was one of the few programs affected by the Millennium bug where the year 2000 became 1930! I never found a system to match it so that’s why we developed virtualCONTACT.

Clearly speed, ease-of-use and simplicity are major concerns for sales teams and are key areas that we have addressed in our software. Sorry about the plug, but I would very much like to open up the discussion once again on this very important topic for sales guys. Please take a look at our website (http://www.virtualcontact.biz) and let me have your thoughts: good, bad or otherwise.