CRM has become the largest enterprise software category in the world. The term is arguably as ubiquitous as sales itself. Yet one-third of modern CRM implementations fail. Most companies today still reportedly work for their CRM, not the other way around. Why is that?
At its core, a CRM is just a database. However, no one manages a database for the sake of managing one. The value of doing so lies in what you can do with that data—make better decisions, uncover hidden opportunities, invest in the most important relationships and, ultimately, close more deals.
The problem is that most of the time and energy organizations spend on CRM goes into entering data rather than getting value out—which defeats the purpose of having a CRM in the first place. When that happens, everyone from sellers to executives in the C-suite finds themselves working for their CRM when it should be the other way around.
The value of a CRM
A CRM is only as valuable as the data that goes into it. Legacy CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle were built on a need for human data entry. However, people generally hate entering data and are prone to error. When sellers don't keep their relationship data up to date, their CRM becomes stale and useless. They become even less likely to maintain data entry standards, and the downward spiral continues.
Sellers end up disliking the CRM because they perceive it as busy work that never comes back to help them build pipelines, prioritize accounts or close deals. Leadership feels the same because the CRM is never accurate enough to understand where the bottlenecks are, how to coach teams, where to unblock strategic deals or how to implement performance management. Everyone loses.
To this day, many of the world's largest relationship-driven industries—from investment banking to professional services—still make decisions about their relationships and deals by either guessing or using their gut rather than by having truly reliable and rich data in their CRM. They will either be lucky or wrong.
The need for CRM automation
The solution for relationship-driven industries is to eliminate the need for—and inherent risk within—human data entry altogether through CRM data automation. So how can organizations create a CRM automation strategy? When transitioning to an automated strategy for your CRM, ensure you consider these four pieces of guidance.
• Make it easy to use, or risk your team not using it. The purpose of CRM automation is to give sales teams more time for activities that drive deals forward. Any changes to process or tooling must have a minimal impact on existing workflows to be effective while delivering comprehensive data that sellers and sales leaders can trust.
• Consider integrations and extensions to help surface data proactively. Customer data exists in many different places, from email to marketing analytics tools and third-party datasets like Crunchbase. The more of this data that can be automatically gathered into one place via integration, the more useful it can be for prospecting, reporting and forecasting purposes.
In addition, extensions make it possible for sellers to access customer data insights at their fingertips right when they need it—and sometimes before they even know they do.
• Don't overlook standard processes. For data that can't be automated through integrations, you can still maintain data uniformity with clear guidelines that include rules around manually logged notes and custom-built friends. Setting policies like opting for drop-down menus rather than free-flow text boxes will help to reduce errors and inconsistencies.
• Organize training to keep your team aligned. Few tools in the enterprise tech stack are truly "set it and forget it," and training will help ensure the widespread adoption of CRM automation practices. Training can include workshops and Q&As as well as user practice sessions if available through any external vendors you partner with.
Put data entry on autopilot
In a survey our team at Affinity conducted, 69% of sales and operations leaders said their team spends four or more hours per week updating their CRM. This drain on productivity is no longer necessary. CRM automation principles and solutions can put much of an organization's manual data entry on autopilot, unlocking more time for prospecting, nurturing and closing deals.
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