BAASS Insights Technology Blog

Manufacturers are keenly attuned to productivity and profitability. Many have embraced enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), business intelligence software (BI), customer relationship management (CRM) and many other technological solutions to improve efficiency and revenues.

“We’d love to use a CRM, but I’m afraid my staff won’t use it.”

“We just bought a new CRM system but I can’t get the team to enter their data.”

“Our CRM system is great...for the people who know how to use it. The rest of us are confused.”

It is often the case that we find our customers making the same mistakes when it comes to their CRM system – especially during implementations.  Implementations are big projects, however many organizations go into the project with a “lets get this over with” frame of mind. In our experience, this doesn’t usually go over well. With this mind set.

Did you ever play the “telephone” game when you were a child? That’s the game where one person whispers a message to a player, then in turn whispers it to another player, and so on until the last person has to state the message out loud. Hilarity often ensues when the final person repeats the message because it’s so different from the original. It always proves

Have you ever been surprised by a sale scheduled to close that got bumped into next month? How about a sales forecast for $50,000 that came in at $15,000?

If you’ve ever taken a computer science course, you have probably heard the old computer programmer’s saying “Garbage in = garbage out.’’ Meaning that if your CRM is populated with outdated information, chances are this will affect the output efficiency.

How long has it been since you implemented your CRM project? If it’s been a while, or if you’re about to switch CRM vendors, it may be time to refine or even redefine your CRM objectives.