“I Didn’t Know How Spoiled I Was”

Periodically, I reach out to people who used to be Membrain customers and are no longer. Sometimes they left Membrain when their company was acquired by a larger company; other times, they just lost out on a strategic decision made by someone higher up.

I like to find out how things have gone with their transition to another platform, where they’ve seen wins and experienced losses. Consistently, some themes emerge from these calls that I thought you might be interested in. While they sometimes express a few wins from switching to another platform, the primary theme I hear is:

“I didn’t know how spoiled I was.”

When Companies Leave Membrain, Users are Losers

The most common platform companies switch to from Membrain is Salesforce. When this happens, users are the ones who lose out. Salesforce simply was not made for the user.

It’s a legacy platform with a generic interface designed to collect data, not to serve the sales professional. In its basic form, it’s useful for data collection but not much else. In a highly tailored form, it can do many of the same things that Membrain can, but with every add-on and customization it becomes more and more clunky.

Salespeople often complain that using their (non-Membrain) CRM feels like an exercise in data entry. There are too many useless mandatory fields, and some of them have mandatory word counts. In one case, the user explained that it was standard practice on the team to copy and paste generic content from a form to fill out mandatory 500-word fields at opportunity creation. There was no way they could add that much meaningful information at that stage, and they were convinced that it would ultimately be ignored anyway, so the copy-and-paste trick was their workaround...

Senior salespeople who started their careers with the Membrain platform say that if they’d had to start out with Salesforce, they “would have been lost.” There’s nothing in the platform to guide them through the process and help them get good at their job. In these environments, the senior salespeople and managers spend a lot of time training and coaching new people to get them up to speed, where previously Membrain had done a lot of that work for them.

Managers Lose Too

Because there’s nothing in the standard Salesforce platform to effectively guide new salespeople through the sales process, trainers and coaches have to do a ton more hands-on coaching and training to make up for it.

This sometimes forces them to adopt a more industry-standard “sink or swim” approach to hiring and firing. Instead of hiring good people and supporting them to become excellent salespeople, they have to bring in a lot of junior salespeople and hope some of them succeed. Most of them fail.

Managers just don’t have the time to devote to supporting new people at the level that would help them get good. This is costlier than implementing robust onboarding and coaching programs, but Salesforce simply doesn’t provide an effective platform for this latter approach.

Managing pipelines is another place that managers struggle with the switch to Salesforce. Because there is no consistent way to manage the inputs into the pipeline, pipelines quickly become bloated. It’s impossible to judge at a glance the quality of opportunities in the pipeline, necessitating a lot of conversations and guesswork to try to make the forecasts make sense.

Sales coaching is a bigger challenge, too, even with established salespeople. Salesforce only provides rear-view mirror data about how salespeople are performing. Managers can see generic data like their win/loss rate, quota attainment, and so on. But they can’t see trendlines, pipeline replays, or drilled-down info about where in the sales process a salesperson is getting hung up and can use more coaching.

Leadership Pays a Hefty Price, Too

When I speak to leadership about the switch away from Membrain, the consistent refrain is that they “wildly underestimated” what it would take to “tame the beast.” The time, effort, and money required to mold the huge dinosaur of Salesforce is much more than they anticipated.

They want something that helps their business, makes users and managers happy, and helps them execute strategy in a good way. Getting Salesforce to do all this is a massive undertaking in its own right. And it’s a costly one. To get Salesforce to do what they want it to do, companies end up investing far more than they initially anticipated.

If you’re wondering what the “wins” are that they sometimes cite: Primarily, some salespeople are happy to be able to see data from other platforms that give them more information about customers. For instance, ERP integrations can enable them to see what other products a prospect has purchased in the past.

Unfortunately, the complexity of these integrations rarely makes them accessible immediately upon implementation. And even when the integration is complete, the data is often wrong. At Membrain, we’re considering options to simplify this process so that we can provide the same functionality in a streamlined manner.

It’s not unusual for some of these companies to come back to Membrain after trying out Salesforce for a few years. Obviously, this is an expensive endeavor, to switch CRMs twice in a matter of years. We consider it a great testament to our platform when they switch back to us anyway.

It has always been our guiding principle to elevate the sales profession, and for us, that means creating a CRM and sales enablement platform that actually helps salespeople, managers, and sales leaders with what matters most to them: growth. I’m proud to say that these conversations confirm that we are on the right track.

What about you–have you ever left one CRM platform for another and regretted it? What was your experience?