4 Reasons Why You Hate Your Sales and Marketing CRM Software

Many marketers have issues with their CRM software. Here are four things that may be bothering you and what you can do to fix the problem.

Recently I had the pleasure of teaming up with media pundit and technology consultant Gene Marks on a Google Chat with Profound Cloud. In our discussion we talked about why so many business owners and managers are so unhappy with their customer relationship management (CRM) projects.

I’ve talked with many business owners who find that what they thought would be CRM bliss was in fact a frustrating experience at worse, or at best they just weren’t using the software.

So, how can you prevent this problem – and if you’re IN this kind of problem what can you do about it?

Here are a few things to consider:

  1. What are you most unhappy with in your CRM installation? I bet overall you’re not seeing the results that you expected and that you paid for. Make sure you’re working with a local CRM expert (or the vendor themselves) who can listen to YOUR needs and provide you with a clear road map to success.
  2. Is your team resisting using the CRM system you’ve spent weeks implementing and thousands of dollars installing? Instead of forcing them to use your new system, how can you make the new system fit their needs? For one of Gene Marks’ clients, he just had them call a number and verbalize their customer notes and interactions. Marks’ client then hired a junior person to do low-cost data entry to get the precious customer data into the system. Don’t always try to get your employees to use your system – get your system to conform to them.
  3. There are many business owners I speak to who find that they need some custom work done on their CRM systems. They buy the CRM system and start to pay the monthly fees, but then find they need to tweak it a bit and get it to work in their environment. If you’re not geeky, you should expect to hire someone who can help you customize your CRM system for your needs.
  4. Lack of integration in their CRM system is another thing that causes angst for many business owners. Here’s another way that an IT expert can help. Ideally, and to operate most effectively, you should enter data as few times as possible. For example, once one of your sales teams enters a new customer’s information – your marketing team and accountant should not have to enter that information as well. Maybe they’ll need to add to it or edit it, but the core information should only be entered once.

One thing we’ve learned at Infusionsoft is that just getting our customers to START on the right foot is so important to their future success. So we’ve made a huge push to get customers started. It sounds simple, but it’s important. If you find you’re not even using your CRM system, then work with a CRM consultant or your vendor to at least get you up and running so you can start to see some of the success you can have with CRM.

Image via Shutterstock.

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