It seems like established fact in today’s business world that every company needs a CRM. When new leadership is either starting a new company or taking over an existing company, a CRM is always a part of the Sales discussion. But do we know the reason we need one? Is it to help our sales leaders and sales teams do better? Is it for improving our marketing outreach and strategy? Is it better than nothing? These are a few questions I’d like to address and challenge as if we are just implementing CRMs because everyone says so, then I think we aren’t getting anything from that investment.

Contact Management Software (CRS) was originally supposed to help catalog the contacts and contact information one would have found in a rolodex. ACT! was one of more successful tool created in the beginning and it did the job. It also created the concept that not only do we have contacts, but was also have accounts. Many implementations of CRMs today don’t actually do much more than this. You can use modern email tools to effectively achieve the same result and that’s not very useful.

CRM was supposed to expand CRS’s basic function by adding opportunities (deals) and leads (for marketing automation). This was a great evolution and was very effective once your sales and marketing teams started to understand how it work. Leadership enjoyed adding these new elements as they allow the manager to track how deals were progressing and how well marketing was generating leads. Two major reports arrived, the marketing funnel and the deal pipeline. Everyone was rejoicing except for sales individuals as it was more work that had actually nothing to do with gaining or keeping a client. Also by servicing both marketing and sales together a new issue of data overload started to occur because of too much stale and inaccurate data.

Since then all manors of tools have been created to either improve the marketing funnel or the sales pipeline. Email Market Automation (Hubspot, Marketo, etc.), Sales Enablement (Salesloft, Brainshark, Showpad, etc.), and many others work with the CRM to improve the effectiveness of the funnel or pipeline. Salesforce of course has a tool for all of these, so you never have to leave its ecosystem. Initially these tools were highly effective, but over time it has become apparent that they don’t have the same result as they used to (I mean when was the last time you got a cold email and thought, “Gee that’s really helpful”). Very often these tools still struggle to help the individual sales person, in some cases they just again provide better reports for leadership.

So then why do we need a CRM? Are they effective? Not so much. Are they helping Sales individuals? Never really have. Are they making marketing better? It used to, but now it’s limited. Are leaders happy? That might be your answer, if they don’t have one they may get fired. So are we really just spending 64 billion dollars a year just for job security?

I am going to propose that the need for CRM is real. Leadership, marketing, and sales all have specific issues that it’s supposed to fix. I believe that a new technology is needed that doesn’t just sit on a legacy of bad practices, bad data, bad software, and terrible usability. It needs to integrate and segment data in ways that make everyone more successful and do it much more easily. It needs to actually improve customer relationships, work within a users actually workflow, and help identify potential actions that advance an individuals’ success and therefore the companies’ success.