When talking about CRM systems, people – especially managers – mostly think about functions, features, and control. How can a process be supported and managed? How can I get good analytics out of the system? Does it fit into the existing IT landscape?

These and many similar questions take precedence when it comes to selecting software systems. Usability and UX are often only an afterthought or, even worse, lip service. The result of this is often an abysmal user adoption of systems, as they do not do what the users want, don’t help them or, on the contrary, cause even more work than the users had before.

The CRM Sales and Impact report 2021 study by Arlington Research shows that on average 52 per cent of sales leaders report that their CRM platform is costing them revenue opportunities. This average increases up to 65 percent in specific industries.

On the other hand, a study by UsabilityGeek finds that it is beneficial to fuse UX and CX. Similarly, according to research by Jacob Nielsen, when good UX design enhances the customer experience, companies see an average increase of 83 percent of the measured KPIs across marketing, sales, and service. Apart from the revenue boost, benefits include increased and accelerated adoption, higher productivity, improved customer satisfaction, reduced training time and lower support cost.

Therefore, the main question to ask is not whether, or rather in how far improving the UX does improve the acceptance, use, and helpfulness of a CRM system. Instead, one needs to ask what it takes to come to a better UX and what the inhibitors are.

This blog post is based on the CXChangersTalk that I had with Tim Holm. He currently works at SAP and his experience stretches both sides of the aisle. He worked – and works – in sales, also in non-software sales and at different software vendors. This helps him to analyze this problem from both sides, and vendor independent. It also made him a vocal advocate of having great CX in CRM systems.

This is, because UX becomes visible in nearly everything employees, in particular do. How long does it take to enter and track activities or opportunities in the system? Or how hard is it for sales reps to get all the information they need for their work out of the system? The stories of sales reps who literally spend nights to create a quote are galore.

For Tim, user experience encompasses “everything from how we use something, how intuitive it is”. This sounds simple, but has a lot of implications, not in the least that the CRM system should work for the user and not the other way round. And in the end, the benefits are not only more productivity and user satisfaction, but at the end also an increased customer experience and -satisfaction. Using the preparation of a quote as an example again, the time to create it could come down to an hour instead of days. The customer gets it that much faster and should have a better experience with it; at the same time, more quotes can be created, leading to more possible revenue and definitely increased productivity.

The 1-million-dollar question

Why then, isn’t UX looked at so late, if at all, in the life cycle of a CRM system? Why don’t companies make it a core theme?

One of the answers lies in inertia. It is quite difficult to replace, or only change, a historically grown system quickly. A lot of business is depending on it and then business might still thrive. Therefore, there is less feeling of urgency than in situations where a capability does not exist, or something breaks. And although studies as the ones quoted above give KPIs and strong evidence that good UX is beneficial, it still is difficult to build the corresponding business case.

In Tim’s words “the urgency is not seen as too big as somehow the overall business is running but the question is where you want to go”. And this question often is not asked the right way.

So, what are some good KPIs? In sales, one of them is very obvious: Additional revenue. Another one is productivity – how much time does it take to create a quote? In other business areas there will be different KPIs to look at.

However, another main KPI that Tim sees is employee attrition. He says “I also met colleagues who left a company because they were so yeah, frustrated by the processes. And because they do not see any worth in spending like more than 50% of their time with just administrating the software instead of doing the real business for us as sales, which is selling stuff”.

This statement rings true for other departments that are not customer facing, too, and includes finance, or HR, to name but two.

In the end, the main point is that every user “need an intuitive tool to do the task; you are working with it on a daily basis and have to do so in an efficient way. For example, when you're working in customer service, you need all your information of your customer, who's calling you, at your fingertips. When you're working in marketing, you need a tool to easily send out marketing campaigns”. 

Having systems with a good and consistent UX in place, companies are creating a virtuous circle. Having good UX gets good data; good data improves the usefulness of the system and the outcomes. This, in turn improves the data, as the users are actually using it. And, btw, an end-to-end solution helps here as it fosters a consistent UX across user groups.

If good UX is so helpful – how do we get there?

One main lever is an alignment of business department priorities and an alignment with IT. Departmental implementation decisions to reduce a pain point are not helpful and cause a fragmented IT landscape and data silos, which in turn lead to a degradation of the customer experience. The challenge that Tim often sees is that “IT teams are so overloaded with so many different projects, not only for the for the sales business, that actually the CRM topic is deprioritized because of some other project, for example, in the ERP space or supply chain”. To achieve this, it is critical to maintain cross departmental communication and prioritization. “Create a feedback loop. Speak to each other and see where can you have quick wins and how you bring different teams together to make actually in the end, all teams happy”.

The second part is to avoid trying to boil the ocean while not going for standalone solutions. Instead, companies need to start small and fix challenges on a strategically aligned solution. As an example, if there is an urgent problem with lead recognition, implement the lead management process first, maybe on a new system that is intended for all relevant departments to use. Or go for quick wins or capabilities that need to be built up. From there on, identify the processes that need change and collaboratively prioritize them. Deliver frequently, so that the user groups see that things are moving into the right direction. This is important as taking the first step might actually lead to an initial degradation of the user experience as the employees might need another system, but by moving more and more capabilities into the new system, the benefits will accumulate.

Third, apply change management. Most humans are reluctant to change. All of us see this for ourselves, e.g. if Spotify moves a button or iOS gets an updated and generally improved UI. Change management makes sure that “people have UX in mind from the first day. It helps changing the mindset of all users, getting them to use the new tool, because the worst thing that can happen, is that you implement a new tool and nobody's using it. Even more so, if has a good UI”.

Which leads to the fourth point. What is perceived as good UX changes over time. Therefore, it is important to move into the cloud. Given you work with the right vendor, this ensures that “you will get all the new functionalities, all the new user experience, the design. You will get it on a regular basis. So you do not have to take the struggle to make sure that your system is always up to date”.

Is it rocket science? No. Are UX and CRM a match? Yes!

The benefits are clear and the way to go there is, too. 

We just need to take the first step.

One of today's big business topics is robotic process automation. What is it? A boon or a thing? Where is the real value in applying RPA and how to do it right? So many questions that the #CRMKonvos team needed to ask Sebastian Eggert of SOGEDES.

It is no secret that RPA has its roots in UI based test automation to conduct load and stress tests and screen scraping. It is also no secret that it is always better to use APIs than that. That would put RPA firmly into the category of dying animals or, in more technical terms, make it a bridge technology.

But then, how about real life? Can one always do connect applications with APIs? How about empowering business units to get solutions faster than working with a continuously overburdened IT department? And: How about the risk of entrenching existing processes instead of entering the road to digital transformation, which is a business transformation? Is it reasonable to expect investments being made into RPA being turned over fast? After all, temporary solutions have the tendency to become quite permanent.

And if it is a bridge technology: What is the future? Hint: Look into process mining and machine learning...

Most important of all is the right approach for implementing RPA. Where to start, how to decide about good candidates for automation? Does it need a strategy?

He answered them all! Watch the episode that will remain known as the "hot shit" show. Because RPA is quite hot. 

Three times is the charm. Our first attempt was disrupted by Texas getting off the (power) grid due to a winter storm, the second one due to Streamyard going offline (courtesy of a Google problem), now we finally made it happen and talked with an enterprise software user about sales operations.

Based upon real life experience, how can sales ops be improved, how can it contribute to sales success? Does it need process, tools, or what? Well, the answer to that one is, of course, both. But what comes first and how to make sure that people love to use the resulting system?

Our guest Thomas Verly, VP of Sales and Marketing at EagleBurgmann has quite some interesting answers. Also to the question whether Revenue Operations is really a thing. Is it new wine in an old bottle or rather old wine in a new bottle. 

Thomas has some truely interesting stories to tell that help us identifying what is really important for a sales organization, even if it is in a quite specific industry. 

At EagleBurgmann they identified the secret of what makes their sales reps use the system - and they have a truly astonishing adoption. Hint: It is not force but they managed to make the people want to use the system because it delivers value to them.

How? No spoiler here besides:

• Don't digitalise chaos
• Simple is beautiful
• Harmonisation is a good thing
• Don't forget about change management

Watch the episode. It is worthwhile. More than worthwhile!

Many a company has a severe challenge with how their processes actually work. Documentation may or may not be there. Tribal knowledge exists. Lots of repositories, too, including file systems, collaboration tools, chat tools, email, etc. In brief, there is the need for a solution. 

Startup Sevantiz has taken on this challenge with its Flockwise platform, which is reason enough for the CRMKonvos team to invite Sri Sabesan, Mani Manivannan and David Pickrell into our studio to discuss their approach and how it relates to CRM (spoiler alert: it does) and CX (it does, too). 

But what is Flockwise?

Flockwise brings knowledge from  the documentation, tribal knowledge and the transaction systems to answer the questions that employees in businesses have every day.  Although we utilize a chat interface, It is much more than an Chatbot.    Flockwise is designed to  discover knowledge and serving it to the user in a way that the user get the right answer to the question. 

Flockwise creates the opportunity for the Enterprise Flock and their trusted advisors / consultants and outsourcers to capture knowledge and provide answers to the questions in a way that no other solution does.   Creating an efficient way for something that we have always talked about. And that is capturing expert knowledge in a way that is truly reusable for the benefit of productivity of the employees and customers and suppliers of an organization.

Sounds good? Then dive deeper into this CRMKonvos episode!

CRM, in various incarnations, has been around since the 90s. If one counts in contact managers like Goldmine, then we are actually talking about the 80s. Some consider it a strategy, but whether it is or not, is a discussion that has been closed long ago.

Still, there is a lot going on. And I mean a LOT.

So, it is time to talk to someone who accompanies the industry since it was immature, someone who also contributed to shaping the industry and some of the solutions around.

So, we reached out to Volker Hildebrandt.

Volker is a fountain of information about where it comes from and where it is heading to. So, if you are interested in the current state of affairs and in the trajectory that the industry is likely to take, then listen in.

You will not regret it!

Now this title is not a case of do a rhyme or get bitten but actually summarizes the topic pretty well. The CRMKonvos team had a long and good discussion with John Paterson, CEO of Really Simple Systems about the needs and wants of a CRM for SMBs.

Are the requirements that an SMB has really different from the ones that an enterprise has? At the end of the day the original challenges seem to be fairly similar. Especially on the sales side, people avoid the system, just like Denis Pombriant found in a study that we talked about earlier this year in our CRMKonvo about why salesreps hate their CRM. Here a short version that just answers this very question. The parallels in thinking and observations between Denis and John are striking!

But then, there are a few differences. Listen to John explaining them.

But then this isn't all. Talking about value of the systems we couldn't not also talk about the value of AI. Is there any? Where?

Spoiler alert: There is, but one needs to know what one is doing. What? The discussion reveals it in the last 15 or so minutes.

Enjoy the conversation. We learned a lot. You can, too.

Many CRM systems are still well in the past. They do not do what their users, especially sales people want them to do. They do not see them as helpful. Why not? What can be done to improve the situation? The CRMKonvos team discusses with Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research.

Why do salespersons rather clean the bathroom than use their CRM?

Do you know why a CRM system cannot be "sexy"?

You will not be surprised to learn that technology is only one aspect in this picture.

It’s not just the bathroom. A study that was conducted by Beagle Research found a long list of things salespeople would rather do than work with their CRM systems. For instance, waiting in line at the motor vehicles office, having a fight with your significant other, going to the dentist -- you get the idea--are all ahead of CRM. The question is why? And Denis simple answer is that all the other things are finite and have an endpoint but CRM seems to be forever or at least more long term. That says a lot. Still, people are reluctant to discuss this and it’s no one’s fault, certainly it’s not the fault of the software, the software vendor or incompetence about the purchase process. What this nets out to is that the majority of CRM in use today was designed for another time, for different business processes that have been superseded by the Covid era but that started even before Covid.

Digressing slightly, the same phenomenon could be seen about ten or more years ago. Back then businesses were trying to get CRM to the Web and they also wanted to give customers more control but many took shortcuts. Often they simply put browser front ends on systems that were previously used by customer engagement personnel with the result that regular customers didn’t understand the processes they were working in and many got frustrated and left the engagement and the vendor.

Being an analyst, Denis, of course has a view on trends and on what is right or wrong with pricing.

Enjoy the last CRMKonvo of 2020. It is well worth it.

Thanks to our loyal audience. I wish you a very happy and prosperous 2021. Stay safe!

Smaller enterprise software vendors today operate in a world where their fortunes may rise and fall on their ability to integrate with one or more cloud computing platforms. In many cases, having a connector or API for multiple platforms is a great means to survive and thrive. But it’s not the only way.

Versatility has always been one of the watch words of cloud computing. The ease of adding and updating functions, or of moving to a new platform entirely, created an incentive for vendors to embrace that versatility. The CEO or CFO who is looking out for their company’s future would thus rarely be faulted for trusting vendors whose products work on as many platforms as possible.

The CTO, on the other hand, might not share that view. While that role has to allow for future moves their company might make, they are also the person who is most responsible for choosing the best tools for the job and making sure they keep working. For the CTO, a vendor’s ability to serve across multiple platforms is far less relevant than the quality, usability, and robustness of their product for the platform being used right now.

Disclosure: The inspiration for this article comes from working with FastCall (www.fastcall.com), a business communications system vendor that works exclusively with Salesforce. FastCall is my client; the words and thoughts presented here are my own. 

Is This A Game?

Think of it this way: Let’s say you have a Playstation gaming console. Does it matter if your favorite game is also available for XBox, Nintendo Switch, and PC? You can only use one system at a time, and you might not even own any of the others. A game developer that has to patch and create new content on multiple platforms will probably have a longer release schedule, introduce relatively more bugs with each update, and might not focus on issues specific to the Playstation if the XBox is a squeakier wheel.

A multiplatform business software vendor, likewise, has to retain staff for support and updates for every version of the product. This, when added to development and marketing of new products for those platforms, means greater overhead, and probably higher prices passed to the customer. Specialist vendors like FastCall can run very lean and still deliver an excellent product for their chosen environment.

The video game analogy maps well to enterprise software, but here’s another one to consider: mobile apps. When you browse for apps to add to your phone (as opposed to looking for a specific one), you are presented with a list of possibilities that can be very hard to distinguish. The main differentiator is their rating, and those are known to be skewed toward the extreme ends of the scale. It can be hard to tell, and somewhat time consuming, to figure out which of them have been updated regularly—or ever. Is the app that hasn’t been touched since 2014 flawless, or did the developer stick it on the list because it was good enough and would earn some money without intervention? You might—might—be able to filter by most recently added, but newness is no guarantee of maintenance.

Users run into the same issue with third-party applications that run alongside their cloud business software. The app marketplaces are geared to show the best rated and the newest applications, not the ones that are most thoroughly maintained. Yet maintenance is an important sign of quality, because it means the developer is still listening, still actively updating their apps, doing more than the minimum required to stay listed. 

The Updates Must Flow

Large vendors will have the resources to keep the updates flowing, but if a small vendor is doing it, that’s a sign of commitment. Their app isn’t an ancillary revenue stream, it’s their livelihood. FastCall is its product. A company that exists to create high quality apps for a software platform will cease to exist if it stops making apps, but also if it stops delivering quality.
It makes perfect sense to engage a big software brand to provide your business computing platform—the bigger the platform, the more it can hold. What you put on that platform doesn’t have to come from big vendors. For major, mission-critical applications, sure, go with a top seller. But for all the things those products don’t do, and for anything new you want to try, bigger isn’t always better. For specific functions, your best bet is often a small vendor that only develops for this one platform. They will put in the work, and they will be there for their customers, because their existence literally depends on it.

Salesreps really love to feed data into their CRM system after a long day, or even during the week-end. They are truly looking forward to their weekly sales call with numbers that every single one of their colleague massaged themselves. They are obsessed with typing all sorts of entries into a quotation and know their product catalogue by heart, so that they can provide their customer with the best of all possible quotes to solve their business issue.

Salespeople really appreciate all the high quality leads that are funnelled to them by the system.

And, of course, they are truly altruistic and thrive on helping their customers for good.

Sounds like you?

No?

Well, then you are probably like most of us.

In brief: Salespeople hate their CRM!

This didn’t change almost 40 years after the first electronic CRM tools have been introduced. Users of CRM systems still often do not have the feeling that the systems are serving them, but that it is rather the opposite.

That is especially true for salespeople. But I repeat myself.

Salespeople face a two-pronged challenge. On one side, in an environment that is more and more data driven, they face an increasing reporting demand, which in turns requires an increasing amount of quality data being fed into the system.

They feel that all these administrative tasks keep them away what they are doing best and what they want to do most: Be with their customers, understand them, and offer – sell – them the right solutions for their challenges.

Thereby making them happy.

On the other hand, salespeople feel that they become more and more redundant.

A feeling that is backed by statistics and surveys showing that more than half of the buying journey is already done before a customer – b2c or b2b – contacts a salesperson.

One might get the idea that these two challenges are related to each other. So, how can this be overcome? How can salespeople become more relevant again?

The path to where we are now

In the beginning there were activity management tools, contact management tools, and account management tools, the latter as a kind of shared electronic rolodex. Goldmine, founded in 1989, successfully combined activity-, account- and contact management for teams, as a first of its kind. Amazingly, the software is still around.

Salespersons used some of these tools and hated the fact that they weren’t integrated. They had to use and live with many different tools, which improved some aspects of their lives – or not.

A consequence of this was the emergence of sales force automation (SFA) tools that targeted at two issues:

• Integrating and streamlining sales processes from lead to order and
• establishing a common repository of data that could get used by whole, distributed, teams.

This was the high time of boutique vendors like Kiefer und Veittinger (later acquired by SAP) or CAS, which originated in Germany, and later on of Rockstar Siebel. From here the thought of integrating marketing, sales, and service in one suite emerged and CRM, an integrated tool, that intended to cover all relevant customer side processes, was born.

Add some analytics (to create analytical CRM) and not only salespersons but also management were happy.

Only that especially salespersons weren’t.

They weren’t happy, because CRM software made them enter an increasing amount of data into the system, making ‘their’ personal assets and contacts corporate assets and contacts. On top of that, by entering ‘their’ data into the system, they feared to become transparent, without getting anything back. They felt like being controlled and like working for the system, instead of having a system that works for them.

Well, and then this whole data entry did and still does cost their time.

Salespeople are communicators. They live on the phone and in their email client. Sincerely, most CRM tools traditionally do not have a decent email editor. Also, email clients were needed then and continue to be needed now, anyways. So, the problem of switching apps was improved, but not yet really solved.

Social media emerged and quickly became mainstream. People started to publish lots of valuable information, information that is extremely helpful for building relationships. The ‘social animals’ that salespersons are, pounced on this chance to understand people, their interests, relationships, and affiliations.

Naturally, CRM software could not keep pace with the ever evolving social media, which quickly became one of the most important information sources and communications channels for salespersons.

Of course specialized vendors, that addressed this gap emerged quickly; from social media engagement platforms like Hubspot to more SFA-like tools: one of the latter being Nimble. The big vendors, being less agile, took a bit more time to jump on the wagon.

A new term was born: Social CRM.

But only few vendors truly realised – and acted upon this realisation – that CRM, especially sales, is and always was, social. And most of the solutions still distinguished between social media as channels and email as another channel. And, being point solutions, initially mostly with poor APIs, the solutions did not help in creating a consistent account and contact database, let alone achieving the holy grail of a 360 degree view of the customer. Even if the solutions had a decent API, IT departments often refused to invest the effort needed to integrate yet another point solution.

The obvious result was a decrease of data quality, making salespersons even more unhappy, as working off unreliable data is not effective, let alone efficient. XLS became important again.

This story continues with the still ongoing move into the CEM and CEX world.

What to do about it?

As said before, sales representatives are social animals who do not have time to spare.

For them a CRM system, to get value out of it, needs to exhibit three basic tenets:

• it needs to be there where the sales representative is, physically or digitally
• it needs to show the sales representative what is important in the current context and to make solid suggestions or even take actions.
• it needs to speak with him

Be where I am

Their CRM system is but one of many applications they are using across devices, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. By their very nature, CRM systems are tools that ingest, aggregate and enrich data, so it can be used for a purpose. The result is actionable information that needs to be provided to its users. This way, e.g. interactions with contacts are logged without any explicit intervention or are pulled from various sources.

Furthering this thought, the system must offer is services across channels, be available within social media tools, productivity tools and especially within the used email client. The latter part being fairly easy as probably 90 per cent of all business users use either Outlook or GMail. Still, what this means is that the system must embed itself in the tool of choice, either by means of a chatbot or by offering a user interface that becomes a part of the social media tool or mail client and that from there, intelligently using the users context, provides relevant information.

Speak with me

The mobile aspect is a given, too. No CRM system that is worth a grain of salt comes without mobile capabilities, as an app or at least via responsive User Interfaces. What they are lacking, though, is the ability of being used in a hands off fashion, e.g. using voice as the interaction channel. How about getting a call from your friendly CRM system after a customer visit, asking for a visit summary while you are driving to your next appointment? After all, the system recognizes that the time for the meeting has passed and that you are on the move again.

Voice as an interaction channel will become an increasingly important interface to CRM systems, be it initiated by the user “hey CRM” or by the system itself as in the example above.

Show me what is important and make solid suggestions

Last, but not least, the system needs to be able to show the salesperson what is important for him at any given time. This includes AI-supported lead- and opportunity scoring based upon interaction quality, frequency, change thereof, deal size, and sentiment, to name a few criteria. This It also includes the ability to suggest next actions that provide the best chance to further nurture the opportunity. On top of this, the system might unearth opportunities for the sales representative, which provides tremendous value.

Next steps for Sales Leaders

There are few to no system that fulfils all this. Some solutions are closer than others, some of these might even fit into the chosen platform strategy.

In case you do not yet have a CRM system, or even an SFA system, choose wisely. Identify not only what is important for the company but also how you can best enable your sales representatives to contribute to this.

The easiest way is to make life simpler and more joyful for them, so that they have more time to do what they do best and like to do most: Selling your solutions to your customers.

If you already have a system that you are happy with, then your situation is slightly more difficult: Together with your vendor and your implementation partner you need to thoroughly analyse the short and midterm roadmap of your software. Will it fulfil the needs stated above? When? How reliable have the vendor’s roadmaps been?

If this exercise does not lead to a satisfactory result but you are still happy with the system, then it is time to work on systems in the vendor ecosystem that augment your system, so that it fulfils your needs. You could even go best-of-breed here, but always start within the ecosystem as this promises best possible interfaces and lower pain integrating the two systems.

If you are unhappy? Well, then it is time to look for a new system.

A good number of my customers is pursuing this strategy.

Are you?

This is a repost of my February 2020 CustomerThink column article

The News

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The bigger Picture

My PoV and Analysis