A CRM, short for customer relationship management system, is meant to be the one place your business keeps every customer, every conversation, and every deal. Set up well, it saves each person hours a week and tells you where the next month's revenue is coming from. Set up badly, it becomes one more thing to update, and people quietly stop using it.
The second kind is common, and it rarely needs replacing. Most of the time the software is fine and the setup is wrong. Here are five signs your CRM has drifted, and what to do about each.
1. There is a spreadsheet next to it
This is the clearest sign of all. Someone keeps a spreadsheet of "the real list", and the CRM holds an older, thinner copy.
A spreadsheet appears for one of two reasons. Either the CRM cannot hold something people need, such as a renewal date or a project budget, or the spreadsheet is simply quicker to update. Both are fixable.
What to do. Open the spreadsheet and list its columns. Each one is a field, a single piece of information such as a phone number or a deal value, that your CRM is missing or hiding. Add the fields that matter, import the spreadsheet once, and agree a date when the spreadsheet stops being updated.
2. Nobody trusts the numbers
The pipeline report says there is £400,000 of work coming. Nobody in the room believes it.
A pipeline is the list of deals you are working on, grouped into stages such as "proposal sent" or "negotiating". It goes wrong in predictable ways. Deals stay open long after they have gone cold. Closing dates are left blank or years out of date. The same company appears three times under slightly different names, each a duplicate record.
A pipeline like this is a weather forecast nobody updates: it describes a day that has already passed.
What to do. Hold a ten-minute pipeline review each week, and agree one rule: a deal with no next step and no date is marked as lost. Run the CRM's duplicate check, which most systems include, and merge what it finds. Within a month the report starts to mean something again.
3. Updating it takes longer than the work
If logging a phone call takes two minutes and a dozen clicks, people stop logging phone calls.
This usually comes from good intentions. Someone set up every field that might one day be useful and made half of them mandatory. Someone else added nine pipeline stages when four would do. Each choice made sense on its own. Together they make the CRM slow to use.
What to do. For every mandatory field, ask who reads it and what decision it informs. If nobody can answer, make it optional or remove it. Then let the CRM fill in what it can by itself. Most can log emails automatically, and website enquiries can arrive as new records without anyone typing them in. Ours do: an enquiry on this site becomes a contact and a deal in our CRM within seconds.
4. Customers have to repeat themselves
A customer emails one person, phones another, and explains the whole situation twice. The first conversation lives in someone's personal inbox, where nobody else can see it.
This is the problem a CRM exists to solve, so it is worth fixing first. When the history of every customer sits in one shared record, anyone can pick up where a colleague left off.
What to do. Connect each person's email account to the CRM, so conversations with customers are recorded against their record. Use the CRM's call logging, even if the notes are one line. If your team shares an inbox such as hello@, connect that too.
5. It does not talk to your other systems
Your website takes enquiries, your accounts software sends invoices, and your email tool sends newsletters. If someone copies information between them by hand, the CRM is an island.
Systems share information through an integration, a connection that passes data across automatically. Most connect through an API, short for application programming interface: the agreed way one system asks another for information or sends it some. You do not need to understand the API. You only need to know whether a connection exists, and who looks after it.
What to do. List the systems that hold customer information and the copying your team does between them. Many CRMs connect to common accounts and email tools with a built-in integration that takes minutes to switch on. The rest usually need a small piece of custom work, which pays for itself quickly in time no longer spent copying.
Before you think about switching
When a CRM is unpopular, the instinct is to replace it. A new system brings the same problems if the setup is the same. Fix the five above first. If the CRM still gets in the way after that, you will know exactly what the next one needs to do better.
We review and set up CRMs as part of our systems work. If yours has a spreadsheet sitting next to it, get in touch.
Glossary
- CRM (customer relationship management): one place for every customer, conversation, and deal.
- Field: a single piece of information on a record, such as a phone number or a deal value.
- Record: one entry in the CRM, such as a contact, a company, or a deal.
- Duplicate record: the same customer or company stored more than once.
- Pipeline: the list of deals you are working on, grouped into stages.
- Stage: a step in the pipeline, such as "proposal sent" or "won".
- Integration: a connection that passes information between two systems automatically.
- API (application programming interface): the agreed way one system asks another for information or sends it some.