Why Most CRMs Fail and How Automated Data Systems Solve the Problem

Not only do I agree that CRMs are data graveyards, I’d take it a step further and argue that they are the graveyards that never get any visitors. In other words, I have yet to find someone that loves interacting with their CRM. Part of the problem is how cumbersome it is to feed data into CRMs, and part is how cumbersome they are to interact with once you somehow wrestled it in there. I ran into this exact problem in every role I’ve held throughout my career. No rep / CSM wants to update the CRM, and therefore you can’t trust anything. Incentives or punishments would work briefly, but all they would usually do is motivate people to do the absolute minimum and unless you had infrastructure to constantly police this, behavior would revert back to the prior mean. Anyways, I finally realized that the issue shouldn’t lie with the people, but with the infrastructure. So, in my last company I solved this by looking at various systems that will automatically assemble all the interaction data and intelligently score it in the background, while making it very easy to “ask” questions of the data, both interactively and systematically. We ended up going with BackEngine for this and it delivered highly accurate results, somewhat to the surprise of AEs and CSMs as it found both risks and opportunities that they hadn’t picked up on.