System Frustration

I know a group of sales trainers/consultants that have a system for key account management.  They’ve ‘automated’ this by creating a spreadsheet to track every opportunity and account in their suggested way.

They sought to create something a bit more professional than a mere spreadsheet, looking at software development.  Then they canned the idea.  It was too difficult to work out how to cater for every customer having a slightly different take on what they wanted.  In effect, it meant each client would want significant ‘bespoking’, and that adds zeros to the bill.

There’s a lot of column inches devoted to incorporating sales methodologies into crm systems.  Yet won’t they fall into the same trap?  And we’re talking about requirements beyond user-defined field fixes and presentation/report-writer options.

Countless (not always small) firms I come across never progress farther than spreadsheets.  Compliance may be low, standards get meddled with, and collation never happen, yet how are these issues helped by ‘crm’?