Why CRM becomes a liability after two years!!

As your business grows, the most important activity to grow is sales!! Whether it’s managing a pipeline, monitoring sales metrics, or evaluating Read Me your sales team’s performance, XLS makes it all feel good to handle. A CRM is essential. Generally, SMBs go for SaaS CRM which provides value for money and no capex. Makes sense…right?

Fast forward a few years and CRM usage is low. Management doesn’t get accurate pipeline information or sales metrics and worst of all… data is pulled from CRM into an XLS sheet.

Back to the XLS-world after 2 years of CRM implementation!!

In other cases, data is pulled from the CRM system and loaded into a data warehouse to derive actionable insights.

On the other hand, marketers hate using CRM. They find it too cumbersome and difficult to follow. CRM systems don’t provide actionable insights that help them sell more. No wonder they have no incentive to use the software, other than a push from management.

Why does this happen?

 Is it the CRM software or the company’s fault? It could be both, but let’s focus this topic on CRM error.

The 3 most important things people miss when evaluating CRM are as follows:

1. Data Governance Capabilities

Most CRMs, focused for SMBs, are designed for ease of use and give the user a lot of flexibility to enter any data. This is mainly done to avoid any complaints about the software and to reduce the complexity. This approach is completely wrong. A sales person can enter any “deal phase”. Assume that all sellers can enter new deal phases as they wish. After a few years you might have 40-50 deal steps. In such a situation, meaningful pipeline analysis cannot happen unless you take the data into an XLS sheet, summarize the deal stages into roughly six steps, and then analyze them. This is a data quality challenge that many organizations face.

zigihub has strong data management capabilities. Only admin can add master data like deal stage, lead stage etc. This ensures the cleanliness of data regardless of how long the platform is used or how many people use it.

2. Master Data Management (MDM) capabilities

Managing master data is critical to achieving meaningful analytics for any business. A CRM system is one of these critical systems where master data such as account, campaign, customer, demographics etc. is integrated. If a CRM system is not built on MDM principles, data quality will deteriorate very quickly, rendering it useless. The most common example might be an account name. Different marketers can log into the same account with different names like “Microsoft” or “Microsoft Inc” or “MSFT”. In such cases, it is impossible to create a single view of the account.

zigihub has strong MDM capabilities.

 All critical master data is generated with MDM principles, which ensures that there is no duplication of recorded data. Master data can only be changed by administrators, so this is the desired control.

A CRM system should be able to provide actionable insights rather than just a data entry and reporting system. This can only happen when the CRM system keeps a historical record of all necessary changes and activities to provide actionable insights based on past learnings.

If a CRM system doesn’t provide analytics, it won’t help a salesperson sell. In that case the sales person has no incentive to log into the CRM system, resulting in low usage and minimal adoption.

zigihub is the architect of analytics. Historical information and changes are tracked and available, and machine learning algorithms use this information to provide actionable insights to sales people. They are informed about which customers to focus their efforts on, which items to pursue and what steps to take to sell more.

Summary

Purchasing a CRM is an important decision an organization makes to grow its business and must stick with it for years to come. Focusing on the true data and analytics capabilities of a CRM system will go a long way to ensuring that it continues to deliver value in the long run.

About GigiHub

zigihub is a unique and integrated CRM and marketing automation platform. It has strong data management and analytics capabilities that SMBs need.