Your CRM is crap when marketing ….
Your CRM is crap when your marketing dept. issues a procedure on how to upload contacts using a spreadsheet as this indicates:
- Too many useless fields are required to be entered
- Contacts can’t be entered without a project set-up
- Spreadsheets are already in use as CRM by sales people instead of the CRM
- The CRM sole purpose is marketing not sales
- Sales are using a different system to keep track of their contacts and customers / leads
- The CRM has no significance for the salesman
The result is that the CRM is not supported by the employees, especially not the sales people.
They find the CRM crap as it sucks.
The main danger and cost is the existence of spreadsheets in use as a CRM by the sales people: there are at least 2 sets of data exist within your company (data redundancy – data duplication). This increases the cost of maintaining the data: in the spreadsheets and in the CRM.
Instead of issuing a procedure for uploading data using a spreadsheet into the CRM, marketing should investigate how to make:
- The input into the CRM convenient and effective
- The CRM useful for sales people
One of the main objectives should be that the CRM should become a source of information instead a data entry system for marketing and management purposes. There is enough data available in the company and on the Internet to make a CRM an interesting source of information to sales and marketing.
This will allow having the CRM supported by the entire company.
How crappy is your CRM?
Where did it fail?
