5 reasons you should dump your old CRM

More and more organizations are coming to terms with the fact that traditional CRM has simply not lived up to its promises. Touted as a powerful sales performance tool, in many organizations it has turned out to be an unwieldy tracking and reporting tool, a glorified Rolodex that salespeople resent while sales managers wrangle to get them to use it at all.

That’s why many organizations are abandoning the traditional CRM for true sales effectiveness platforms like Membrain. Here are five reasons you might want to do the same.

One: Your sales process needs better support

How many organizations hire a consultant to come in and develop a better sales process for them, and then stick the process book up on a shelf to gather dust? So many, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

Unfortunately, traditional CRM provides no remedy for this problem. Certainly, if you buy the right plugins and invest in massive customization, you can get a CRM like Salesforce to bend to your will and provide actionable process support for your salespeople.

But what if (when) the sales process shifts? How many technology gurus does it take to make your CRM installation shift with it?

On the other hand, software options like Membrain provide a flexible platform for building sales process directly into the sales team’s daily workflow. Instead of simply collecting data for analysis, it guides salespeople and their team members through the process, helping them maintain communication and access support at each stage, and providing all of the relevant information they need directly inside a single online workflow that fits on a single screen.

Two: You don’t have time for complicated work-arounds

Most traditional CRMs don’t provide all the functionality your team needs for keeping track of buying committees, tracking playbooks and org charts, accessing sales enablement materials, and organizing the many spreadsheets your team uses. So you build complicated work-arounds to make sure all those materials are accessible to your team.

But they don’t have time for that, and neither do you. A true sales effectiveness platform builds all of that functionality directly into the salesperson’s workflow, so they never have to leave one software to go somewhere else to find out what they need to know.

Three: Your team deserves an intuitive and actionable interface

Traditional CRM is great at collecting data… not always great at separating relevant information from “noise.” Salespeople complain because recording and accessing information requires complicated knowledge and multiple clicks, and is not always intuitive. Likewise, accessing relevant data sometimes requires more thought work than it should.

Your team deserves to be supported by a technology system that makes it easy, intuitive, and fast to access exactly what they need when they need it.

Four: Your salespeople want stronger customer relationships

When your team is using a traditional “Rolodex”-style CRM, it can be tough tracking relevant data across accounts and contacts. Worse, it’s easy for sales teams to get tangled up with each other, contacting the same individuals and stepping on each other’s toes. This adversely affects customer relationships, limiting overall effectiveness.

With a true sales effectiveness platform, it’s easy to track relevant data and collaborate effectively with others on the sales team. For instance, Membrain’s interface makes it easy for team members to see exactly what is happening with any given prospect and what needs to happen next. Membrain captures detailed information making it possible for sales team members to ditch generalized communication for personalized conversations.

Five: CRM user adoption sucks

Because of the above four reasons, user adoption for most CRM implementations is abysmal. The fact is, salespeople, on the whole, simply don’t like CRM. They see it at best as a necessary evil, and at worst as a significant productivity drain.

It doesn’t have to be that way! When the technology truly enables salespeople to get more of what they want and to be more efficient and effective in their daily work, adoption soars. Combine effectiveness with a user-friendly mobile interface, and adoption is a no-brainer.

Wondering if it’s time for your organization to ditch the CRM? Before you do, download this case study to see what happened when Skender Construction did it.