Picture this:
You’re sitting in a business review meeting with the company’s managing director.
The sales director presents a pipeline summary in PowerPoint.
The first things you notice are that it includes an opportunity that does not appear in the CRM and that next year’s pipeline is nearly empty.
The finance director then presents a forecast that is not aligned with the sales department’s.
Next, the marketing director presents the results of the latest lead generation campaign. The campaign was successful, but everyone notices that the leads are nowhere to be found in the pipeline.
Three parallel universes built around what should be a single source of truth: the pipeline.
True story.
Not a company that is failing. Just a company that has not treated its CRM as a true business platform, an investment designed to support the business.
As a result, massive amounts of effort are spent finding the right data to make the business a little more visible and a little more predictable.
Every company I’ve worked with had a CRM.
And yet, some of them had the same problem when it comes to the CRM.
Not a technology problem. Not a budget problem. Not even a training problem.
A process and alignment problem, highlighted by a piece of software which is too often considered a ‘for-sales-only’ tool.
Eight departments. Eight perspectives. One broken system.
The good news: I’ve seen small, targeted actions bring immediate improvements and real ROI.
When CRM don’t fulfil the role they should play, let me highlight two findings that are most common to all cases:
The ‘It’s a sales tool’ syndrome.
As long as this is printed in everyone’s mind, it will not be considered a corporate platform. A tool to track sales activity, yes. A tool to track activity KPIs (# of calls, # of meetings), yes. But a corporate platform to help the business become more visible and predictable, helping challenge the strategy, it will not.
Poor sales adoption is tolerated.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but when the sentence ‘our sales people don’t fill the CRM with qualitative data’ is heard from January to December and shows no progress, it seems like a given.
In this case, you can forget any of the benefits (features and business) the platform can bring you.
On this item, a key learning that always proves true in the environments I’ve been engaged in: the CRM practice is the mirror of your sales practice.
Let’s review together what I hear often when the CRM is not used at its full potential.
By not used at its full potential, read the CRM is clearly a cost rather than an investment.
Spoiler alert: every sentence in this series is something I heard in the field. Word for word.
Meet your teams (not just the sales department). Ask the right questions. The rest comes on its own.
𝗖-𝗦𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗲
- I only rely on forecasts that come from the finance department
- We invested a fortune in this platform, I’m not sure we’re getting the return
- I have no real visibility on the pipeline unless I ask for a manual update.
Sales leaders
- I’m close to the business so I’ve got the pipeline in my head
- We have no set rules, each salesperson is free to adjust their data
- I spend more time compiling data for my senior management than coaching my team.
Salespeople
- It’s a tool for management. No matter how much time I invest, nobody checks anyway.
- It’s an administrative job, let me focus on sales
- Nobody ever showed me how it actually helps me close more deals
Finance
- The information from the sales team is not reliable
- Our budgets are based on our own financial projections
- We’ve stopped pulling reports from the CRM, we rebuild everything in Excel
IT
- The technical implementation was a success and the functionalities are operational
- We did our job, adoption is not an IT problem
- We can add features, but first someone needs to tell us what the sales team actually needs.
Marketers
- We use the CRM and its functionalities for all our campaigns, we even ordered add-ons to the platform
- We have no visibility once we hand off a lead. Many go unfollowed
- We’re measuring campaign performance, but we can’t measure revenue impact.
Operations
- Sales reps chase opportunities we can’t fulfill, we overpromise, then underdeliver
- If we had access to the CRM, we could have planned ahead and allocated the right resources
- We’re being asked to work on opportunities that don’t even appear in the CRM.
Sales enablement
- Some opportunities shown during business reviews don’t even appear in the CRM
- The CRM gets filled in the day before each review
- Critical data is missing, reps fill in the bare minimum.
Heard any of these in your company?
Your CRM isn’t the problem. The alignment around it is.
Want to see where your organization stands? Let’s talk solutions. Big results don’t need big transformations. A few targeted moves. Immediate ROI. Let’s talk.
