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• By Stephane LEE
• on Apr 02nd, 2007

Who cares about your CRM tool ?

A few weeks ago, we chose our CRM tool.

As a start-up, we didn’t have many needs, but a tight budget. So we didn’t spend a lot of time looking for the best CRM product around.

Eric and I, from our past jobs, had a pretty good experience on CRM tools, having used Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Commence software.
We also knew what differentiated SaaS subscription, Open Source and software licence.
So our choice was a no-brainer, and we went for a online CRM from a little French company.

In the end, the real question is : WHO CARES ?

There has been so much work, literature, ads and bright speeches on CRM apps, that you may think it is a crucial (Enterprise 1.0) tool. The one you can’t do without, the one that differentiate big organized companies from little chaos start-ups. The tool that would allow you, the sales director, to play golf - while customers rushed to your shop after receiving a phone call or newsletter from your well-thought ot marketing campaign driven by your well-ordered customer base, that your well-bred salesmen love to maintain. The tool that all other tools revolve around, the heartbeat of your business, the center of your universe, the tool to rule them all.

There has been many disappointments about CRM tool ROI, because it turned out that buying a tool didn’t suffice. You had to have marketing experts at hand that could orchestrate campaigns based on the customer data; and yes, your salesmen still had to convince customers

I don’t want to say that CRM apps are not useful : of course they are useful, we bought one.

But we had our eyes open : it’s first and foremost a customer database, and a database is only useful when you know what to do with the data ! 

Eric is a sales veteran, and he thinks an Excel spreadsheet would be enough to make for a customer database. Like he use to say, CRM apps are for sales director, because it allows them to have a consolidated view of the current deal flow. According to him, this is the main reason to buy one, and I fully agree.

Let’s get to my point.

We never told our customers which CRM tool we used. They will never know until we do. And even if they knew, they wouldn’t care.
Because CRM tools doesn’t do them any good. At best, they can do good for the company, if ever you know how to use them, but for your customers, what does it change ?

If ever CRM tools worked like recommendation engines (see Amazon’s), your customers could find something worth in them. But I don’t know of any CRM tool that does it.

The truth is : AS A CUSTOMER, I DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE CRM TOOL YOUR COMPANY IS USING.

I have no interest whatsoever about this tool, because this tool won’t do me any good.

My only interest when I want to buy a product/service is to get the best price and quality. Does the CRM tool that you - Mr Business - bought, help me achieve this goal ? Nope.

Does your CRM tool help me know you ? Know how you treat peer customers ? Know the commitment you make in our relationship ? Nope.
Does your CRM tool help me understand your product/service evolution ? The features ? The reasons why you make this or that ? Nope.
Does your CRM tool cares for what I think, who I am, what are my key interest ? Nope.

How can you ask a tool to increase sales if your customers don’t see any benefits out of it ?

Well, if you’re the market leader, maybe CRM tools can help you reduce inefficiencies. But if you’re “yet another business”, don’t expect too much from them, because your customers just don’t care !

Bottom-line : CRM apps may not be the right tool for customer-driven strategies.

1. On May 07th, 2008 at 20:54 by piyush bakshi

Of course, from a customer perspective the brand and quality of your CRM tool does not matter; I mean no-one has ever said that it does!!

Maybe in B2B scenarios, enterprise customers may get impressed with a SAP or Oracle deployment, but largely its the customer experience that matters and like you say, its not really the tools that make a business customer-centric.