Does anyone love sales software?

With one of my boiler roomers recently becoming pregnant, I was sent into the cauldron of a new business first meeting yesterday.  Having plenty of time on the train to prepare and dust off the festively enduced cobwebs, our meeting began with a discussion on the delights of crm.

This furniture vendor currently use Act.  Or more accurately, do not use Act.  According to the guy in charge of sales I met, the reps ‘don’t even enter a one-liner about when they should speak to the prospect next and what about’.  And he found it no different when he was in previous roles where his guys used Maximiser and Pivotal.

So, why exactly then do people buy what’s now generically termed CRM?  It really is a mystery sometimes.  The two main reasons in reality are:

• Policing – management want to have a closer eye on what everyone is upto, whether on an activity tracking wavelength or forecasting slant
• Paranoia – and if someone leaves, you wouldn’t want to lose all knowledge of their contacts, would you?

Yet so many other options for solving these two issue exists…..

And feel comfortable in the knowledge that this malaise is not unique to crm.  My guy yesterday inherited some quote generation software (incorporating space planning kit).  It cost roughly £400 per person per month, and isn’t even “on-demand”!  Anyway, he’s canned it now, mainly because of two reasons; it was taking up too much time of the salesguys that did engage with it which should have been selling time, when they could have passed details onto in-house designers, and the other reason, is that did I say salesguys?  I should have said “salesguy”, singular – only 1 of the team managed to get to grips with it!