CRM Malaise Not Restricted To Reps

I am really made up that I’ve just hatched a new product idea, given the experiences from two of my customers recently.

Both have around 20 sales people in the UK, strewn all over the place.  One has Goldmine as their crm – the reps only use it when they want commissions as they ‘back-fill’ data into it then – and the other has always resisted getting the German parent’s system imposed and prefer to have nothing.

Both have more post-sales resource than pre-.  Yet both realised that a wealth of intel was being missed out on.  The post-sales experts were party to wonderful insights that the salespeople never got to build on or use.

The logical answer was to use existing systems to capture it.  But as you can imagine, trying to cobble a crm to capture this was a non-starter.  Then they tried to issue word docs to the post-sales people, so they could fill them out, and send them back into HQ.  Again, disaster.  Amazingly, installation and consultative service guys turned out to be as anti-filling in boxes on screens as their sales colleagues!  Does anybody, anyone at all, use sales software?!

Regardless of this, there is probably a ton of intel your post-sales guys gather, yet you never get to learn about it.  Don’t rely on some central function to unleash it.  Instead, make sure you create a routine to catch it yourself and keep to it so you become even more of a winner.