There are no CRMs out there that is good enough to serve my lazy ass. CRMs require discipline, and if I have to take N minutes of my day to maintain my CRM, I will not use a CRM. Also, if I cannot even be bothered to do it, how can I expect my staff to do it?
CRM means customer relationship management
The CRM is a glorified contacts app for the company. And it solves the following problems:
- A new sales staff coming into the company should have a clear idea of who has been approached, and who hasn't by searching the CRM.
- A sales staff that is taking over another sales account should immediately be able to jump into the account with full vision of the conversation history.
- The VP of sales should have a birds-eye view of the flow of his entire sales team.
These problems can be solved with CRM
IF every sales staff is diligent in inputting every event that has happened:
- Say a phone call has been made to a contact, the sales staff should input the call event and summarize the contents of the call.
- If a sales staff connects with a new contact, the sales staff is expected to input this information into the CRM.
- Contents of email correspondences are added to the CRM
The thing is, humans are leaky and unpredictable which in turn makes the CRM leaky and not reliable.
Zero-Input CRM
I have tried many CRMs, and the closest CRM that has nailed minimal input is possibly Streak CRM because it sits in my Gmail and that means it has all my emails and email contacts automatically added as data for the CRM.