It’s called Customer Relationship Management for a reason

Dave Heywood (00:00)
How much is your CRM a marketing automation platform costing you? And what are you actually getting for it? This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

If you’ve got a fifteen or so person team, you’ve got some marketing automation CRM capability between the base cost for your marketing, individual seat licenses for sales, any contact tier upgrades and onboarding fees.

you’re probably spending something between fifteen to twenty K every year. And sadly for 70% of you, that asset is completely wasted.

Analyst reports across Gartner, Forrester and Harvard Business Review have found that up to seventy percent of CRM projects completely fail to deliver the value that businesses expect. failure here doesn’t mean that the software doesn’t work.

It comes after the initial fanfare where teams stop updating records.

Sales pipelines end up being run off spreadsheets because no one can trust the data. And what you’re left with is a very, very expensive graveyard.

So what’s actually kiboshing your CRM investment and how can we start to turn that around?

We love to blame the platform.

Hubspot isn’t enterprise enough, let’s migrate to Salesforce. Or Salesforce is a little bit too clunky, let’s move to dynamics.

that might have been true ten or fifteen years ago, but by and large, they’re all broadly very, very similar in scope, capabilities and and even cost.

and actually a lot of the data out there shows that only a minuscule amount of CRM failures, close to six percent, are actually caused by technical software issues. The rest it really comes down to process and that awful catch-all term, culture. So you haven’t bought the wrong software.

it just hasn’t been fully embedded into the way you work and run your business.

And from my experience running and embedding CRM alongside marketing capability, there’s a few major culprits that I’ve seen time and time again. The first one is really over engineering the thing. I’ve sat through far too many workshop sessions where we start talking about what we need the CRM to do and deliver.

it turns into an absolute bureaucratic nightmare.

ops teams, senior leadership, finance, all layer on convoluted process over convoluted process with mandatory fields here, long drop-down menus there, and really heavy data requirements. And they just keep getting stacked on more and more over the time. And there’s usually a skew towards really, really tight

sales and pipeline management and really, really lax relationship management.

what we end up with is a bunch of dashboards that no one really looks at and which completely forgets the core function of a CRM and the clues in the name, customer relationship management.

Actually, Salesforce themselves have done some research into this and they found that sales reps spend 72% a week on non-selling activities.

That’s nearly four days not out doing the thing that they’re paid to do. Instead, they’re probably some of the most highly paid admin staff you’ve got on your payroll.

and if it takes someone ten minutes to log a five minute conversation, they’re not gonna do it.

And so when we design a system or approach to look backwards instead of empowering people to move forwards, then it has little use or value and adoption just slowly tapers off never to recover.

The second one is a real false economy here and it’s all around limiting access.

so someone looks at that fifteen K CRM bill.

and we start pulling out individuals. Well, what if only our top salespeople have access? What if actually we consolidate it to a single super user per team?

Licenses then end up becoming severely restricted. And actually what ends up happening is because that access is gated, either your senior leaders and sector leads or whoever does have access end up taking on all of that manual administrative data entry for others, or the most likely outcome is they just don’t bother

And what promised to give you that really clear view of your breadth and depth of relationships now has huge massive holes in it. So your marketing data isn’t able to plug into and augment that that sales picture. You’ve got no idea to what extent a major target account might actually be.

engaging with your content and ready and willing to have a conversation around particular topics because well half the people holding relationships are completely locked out of that machinery.

And the first other culprit I’ve seen is this pulled back towards spreadsheets.

If we take the other two factors, what ends up happening is that the business just stops running off of CRM. We revert back to Excel spreadsheets because everyone’s got access we know it, we trust it, and we end up with a very surface level view of what’s happening.

But it essentially comes down to the fact that CRM can’t be trusted. And the hardest part when we’re growing is getting everyone and keeping everyone on the same page. So if we’re looking at static offline spreadsheets, then we’re only going to get a very, very narrow picture.

So let’s stop being bleak for a moment.

Fortunately I’ve seen this work really, really well. And I quite fondly remember going into a business where the CRM was in that place. It was

Essentially a pipeline tracker that no one was really using that always seemed to be missing key opportunities and relationship management wasn’t really a thing at all.

So we ended up completely flipping the script. We didn’t switch platforms. We took a long hard look and stripped out a lot of pointless complexity. We sat down with Teams and turned CRM into a really lean, simple.

useful tool built purposefully for sector leaders and frontline teams. And we just focus on two things.

One, who holds relationships across our current accounts, target accounts and broader network? And what’s happening with them right now? Who’s speaking to them? Are they engaging with marketing content? Are they signing up to events? What pages are they visiting? What does this tell us about what they might need or want next?

That was it. We had minimal validation rules, no mandatory fifty fields just to get a contact in. Linked up to people’s inboxes, so logging and tracking stuff was an absolute breeze.

and really simple dashboard views which presented immediate opportunities for people to go and have tailored conversations with their network.

And this wasn’t a quick process. This took a year or two. But it became so important to the running of the business that when the firm was acquired and sold, the single most common feedback from teams across the entire integration programme was please don’t take our CRM away.

That would have been unheard of a couple of years ago.

That was the point for me when I realised that what we’d built was genuinely useful and a key pillar of that growth engine.

So how do you go about starting to fix this? Got a couple of things you can do.

First one is

Go and sit with the actual human beings, but we’re asking to use this platform. Your relationship owners, your sales reps, your sector or team leaders, whoever we’re asking to day in, day out use this. But ask them a few specific questions. What actual value do you get out of using this tool, if any?

What feels significantly harder to do than perhaps it should be? And what fields or steps or processes here do you just flat out not understand? But what’s really important, this isn’t a conversation where people get to vent at you and just ask for them to please make it all go away. This is about understanding where there’s friction, where there’s blockers, and how you can.

Get back to that sense of pure utility.

and the second one is to really enforce using this live to run your business.

So take away offline spreadsheets from your pipeline meetings or key account management process. Pull your CRM or any dashboards up live. and if the data’s messy, incomplete, or out of date, then people update it there and then.

And you might have to go through this a few times and it will be highly uncomfortable. it will feel incredibly long-winded, but the moment teams and individuals start to understand that the business is run off that data, then

come meeting four or five, suddenly everyone develops this quite keen interest in making sure that the latest state of play is reflected accurately because let’s face it, no one wants to look stupid.

But what this all boils down to really is just let’s stop making things harder than they need to be to satisfy a dashboard or report that no one looks at anyway. Create something that people actually value, or just turn it off and save yourself fifteen to twenty grand, but fly blind in the process. The choice is yours. I hope you found that useful.

I’m Dave Heywood and this is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’ll see you next time.