Leadership 101: CRM: Customer Relationship Manager or Career Ruining?
I’ve gone through a few CRM builds in my career and I can tell you one thing, do it right and you have an invaluable tool. Do it wrong and the losses could be substantial.
Here’s a newsflash. The CRM doesn’t turn bad sales staff into good ones, but it can turn good ones into demotivated staff in a hurry. The CRM is a great tool. It can provide easy access and control of leads, it can allow you to store documents, processes, scripts and templates. It can even give you great reports, assuming it’s not garbage-in-garbage-out, which is often the case. But the CRM cannot create self-motivation. It can’t create personality or intelligence. It doesn’t replace coaching or common sense. The most common mistake made in the implementation of a new CRM is the attempt to create perfect outcomes by micromanaging the behaviour of your staff.
One of the cardinal rules in business is that micromanagement kills job satisfaction.
If you want to take all of the pleasure out of someone’s role or job, just take away all their decision power. One of the cardinal rules in business is that micromanagement kills job satisfaction. Having someone stand over you, telling you what to do every second of every day makes you spend a good portion of your day looking for alternative employment and there is no better example of that than a CRM designed to micromanage all the behaviour of your staff.
I have made that mistake. I recall the experience of spending weeks building a CRM. The perfect CRM. I mean this thing did everything but make drinks for you. Would tell you everything to do in every moment of the day. Even tell you how to do it. Kinda like your spouse! Workplans that laid out the perfect follow up schedule for every prospect. How many calls, texts and emails a day that were required for every type of lead and prospect. What those calls, texts and emails should say. How long you should be chasing each prospect. Until they buy or they die is a very long time!
I was super proud of that machine; I mean it recreated the perfect process that I would follow in every possible scenario. How could it possibly go wrong? But here’s the thing, staff would arrive each day to a giant list of tasks on their computer screen each morning. If they missed a few tasks the day before, the list was even longer and giant red flags would flash across the screen, and the screen of their manager, who also had a giant list of tasks! I even thought that having a manager tasked with making calls to lost leads was a good idea! A manager making calls! Like that’s going to happen.
If you’re not self-motivated, then no machine will ever create that in you.
I forgot the one core truth about success in sales. If you’re not self-motivated, if you’re not absolutely driven to chase down that sale, and that dollar, then no machine will ever create that in you. Ever. But it can take it away. Trying to manage all the behaviour of your sales staff by building a CRM that micromanages all of their work day, and work plan is a sure way to kill off any self-motivation they have, and the result can be very costly. Demotivated staff. Staff that leave. Lost sales and lost gross.
If you’re building out a CRM remember one key thing. It should be designed as an assistant, not a manager. It’s there to provide the tools to make follow-up easier and more professional, not to stand over their shoulder and order them around. It’s there to make sure you don’t lose leads or customers by creating awareness, not drive them away when your sales staff turn into robots.
The bottom line is this, if you’re looking to acquire and build out a new CRM, don’t bother trying to create something that manages all the behaviour of your staff, resulting in robotic demotivated salespeople. Build out the best helper money can buy, then plug in some motivated staff that will use it to make themselves better. Good luck and good selling!
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