It may seem obvious on the surface what the purpose of your CRM system is. It’s to help your teams increase efficiency, provide insights into data, drive behaviors, and improve overall sales effectiveness.
But what if the purpose of a CRM system is not what we want it to do, but what it is actually doing? Would you still say that the purpose of your CRM is to improve the effectiveness of your teams?
In an address to the University of Valladolid in October 2001, Stafford Beer proposed a new way of thinking about the purpose of systems. Instead of asking why systems aren’t operating the way we want them to, he suggested that we recognize that the system is in fact operating exactly as its purpose indicates, because “the purpose of a system is what it does.”
This way of thinking takes the lens off of what the creators or sustainers of a system want from the system and views it through the lens of the system itself. It also enables a more practical way of approaching systems change. Instead of trying to chase down why a system isn’t living up to our expectations of it, we can now understand the system exactly as it is, and then seek to change it with interventions targeted to how the system actually works.
If you look at your CRM and sales technology “stack,” can you honestly say that it is improving your sales effectiveness? According to the data available, industry-wide sales effectiveness does not improve much year over year (and often declines), despite the constant influx of new technologies. This would indicate that the system of technology we’ve been sold is not actually improving effectiveness.
Seen through the lens of Beer’s insight, the purpose of a CRM system is not to improve sales effectiveness. It is something else.
If we go back in time by twenty-five or thirty years, to the history of CRM, we can shed some light on the intended purpose of sales technology systems. Systems like ACT! were not created to improve effectiveness. Their purpose was to record and store data.
When Salesforce came on the scene, their goal was to take that same purpose and put it in the cloud, so more people could access the technology without needing onsite servers and staff to maintain them.
While this was certainly useful, it missed a critical point about humans. It assumed that salespeople always know what to do and would do it. It placed data in their hands and asked them to input more data, hoping that they would know how to use it.
If your people are frustrated with your CRM, not using it, or feeling bogged down by it, then its purpose is to frustrate, drive away, and bog down your people.
This historical fact about the creation of CRM systems sheds light on the present state of things. As CRM grows increasingly complex, its purpose hasn’t changed. It still, at its core, operates as a way to track and understand data.
Worse, if we truly look at systems like Salesforce through the lens of “the purpose of the system is what it does,” then we have to admit that what Salesforce does best is make money for Salesforce. That’s a purpose it’s very, very good at.
If we want to actually improve sales performance, we have to stop trying to tweak systems that don’t serve the same purpose we want them for. If our purpose is improving sales effectiveness, we can’t implement a CRM system whose purpose is something else and hope it works.
We must build and choose systems whose purpose is the same as ours. Systems that are designed not just to track information, but to truly support the humans on our sales teams in becoming more effective at their jobs, more effective at helping buyers make good decisions, and more effective at developing profitable revenue for the company.
Tell me. What is the purpose of your CRM system? If your sales team is frustrated with it, not using it, or feeling bogged down by it, then its purpose is to frustrate, drive away, and bog down your sales team. Is it time to consider changing your system to better suit your own purposes?
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
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