ryan_howard

Director, Business Development

Acclaimed Answer

Does every CRM suck?

Howdy Savages,

Background: My company has hired some senior "sales excellence and strategy" leaders to come in and try to improve our sales process. part of that includes migrating CRMs.

We used Salesforce up until 4 years ago, switched to SugarCRM which in my view is basically a clunkier saleforce and now the new team is pushing to get us to switch back to saleforce or Microsoft.

My industry has very long sales cycle (9-15 months avg but large $M deals) and very relationship based so I am honeslty a big skeptic of all the "customer360" jargon about how the CRM helps the sales folks.

Years ago I had voted against changing from Salesforce to Sugar and the leadership then did anyways. Now it feels like we are going full circle. I worry the new "sales excellence" team just wants to change something to feel like they are making an impact that will yield little benefit to sales with significant disruption.

My question to you all is, are all the CRMs basically just tracking software to log accounts, deals, etc? do any of them truly have any benefit for sales people or is it all just metrics for sales Ops that typically adds no value to the sales team?

TLDR: Besides a faster UI is any CRM better for sales people than the others?

🙅‍♂ MarketingSucks

🗝 Sales Enablement

17

24 comments

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CuriousFox

WR Officer

10

🦊

Usually it's not the CRM that sucks, it's the admins at your company that run it.

GDO

Politicker

2

BDM

Preach! Some crms are extremely powerful. But they get set up by people who have no clue what sales people do

justatopproducer

Politicker

2

VP OF SALES -US

This. Amen sis

SaaSguy

Tycoon

5

Account Executive

Salesforce is good, just takes some investment and an actual team to keep it running properly. Most companies absolutely do not use Salesforce to its full potential, not even close.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

1

🦊

Preach.

ryan_howard

Politicker

0

Director, Business Development

We actually do have a pretty sizable admin team that previously ran Salesforce and now runs Sugar admin for us.

What are some features that you’ve seen useful for sales people that most orgs don’t have? It feels like it’s a lot of work to get any advanced features up and running and causes the system to be slow (hence why they often aren’t implemented)

The new team seems to think leaving sugar for another platform will take less resources to admin which makes me feel like they are drinking too much of the new supplier kool aid

saaskicker

Celebrated Contributor

2

Enterprise AE

You get the most out of any CRM if you put the relevant info in there from the jump. Rather than think about shiny new features, what do you HAVE to have is a better way to look at this so the Account/Prospect view isn't cluttered.

TennisandSales

Politicker

2

Head Of Sales

ughhh sounds like a TERRIBLE situation to be in.

IMO the CRM does 2 things:
1. track all my deals, accounts, and contacts.
2. allow me to run reports to pull data to help with prospecting.

i have yet to see a CRM that can do anything substantial besides that.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

2

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

This is my primary use of the CRM.

We also have some plugins that can help - 6Sense is good for tracking engagement IF your CRM has a good number of contacts in it so that you can see WHO is hitting your site and be able to get in front of them.

TennisandSales

Politicker

0

Head Of Sales

yes great add on! i have never used 6sense but i know a little about it and i think its a cool tool.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

2

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

yeah, the visibility into how much an account is hitting your site is great. It's better when you know who, but I guess you could also pick up the phone and start dialing.

antiASKHOLE

Tycoon

2

Bravado's Resident Asshole

I'm with @TennisandSalesCRM really only does those two things that are worth anything to me as a sales rep.

TennisandSales

Politicker

1

Head Of Sales

i have heard ppl (vendors really) say that their CRM will help you close deals and stuff but i just dont really see that happening.

Pachacuti

Politicker

2

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

Yes - every CRM sucks.

JMSwiggidy

Politicker

2

Enterprise Account Executive

I was an AE at Salesforce, I personally think they use Salesforce internally very well. Then I look at the other companies I’ve worked at that use it, and it’s typically a dumpster fire.

If you use it right, it works wonders and saves tons of time and energy and really does give you a deep dive into an account, contact, etc.

Boutdamtime

Politicker

0

Client Executive

This is great perspective I was hoping someone from SFDC would speak up. Every company I have been to typically treats sales as a necessary evil and doesn’t invest much into it. SFDC is an investment that’s supposed to have a good ROI but many CFOs see it as a expense and that’s it. I think salesforce is powerful but most organizations implement the bare minimum to store contacts, make quotes, and let a VP or two pull sales reports etc.

My ideal implementation of SFDC would have dashboards for customer spending, contact information regularly checked/updated via campaigns, and the ability to easily pull historic information. Haven’t seen it yet lol.

DevSomeBiz

Valued Contributor

1

Senior B2B Sales Guy.

A CRM is only as good as the admin running it. There is a third value that no one has mentioned - attribution. When I close a deal, I want to be able to point at a source of truth and say "now give me my money".

phonemonkey

1

President, Head of Sales

Does anyone like Pipedrive? Or Monday.com? I’m looking at these 2.

sora

Opinionated

0

RevOps Automation Consultant

Monday sales crm is good depending on your team size

nomdeguerre

Executive

0

Account executive

I think essentially all CRMs can do the same thing. It’s more in the implementation and how you use it, so changing it as part of a sales excellence effort seems unnecessary.

I’m pretty confident that SugarCRM can do evening that SFDC can do.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

0

Rolling 20's all day

My favorite that I've ever used was Onepage CRM. But for most companies it's too basic.
So yes, all complex CRMs are a bit tough to use.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

0

Sales Rep

A good crm when taking over a new territory is one of the best things in life

Justatitle

Big Shot

0

Account Executive

Most “startup” crms are bad because the ops person who set it up was inexperienced or wasn’t even an ops person setting it up. Usually when the company is larger it’s better set up but it’s not always the case

666ABC

Good Citizen

0

RM (Relationship Manager) Director of Sales

I recently was tasked with migrating our very small company from SalesForce to Hubspot CRM. We previously had both SF and Hubspot for Marketing. Unfortunately I came on at the company and inherited a SalesForce that was setup and managed by someone who no longer worked there, and it became my thing to manage. It was a nightmare, no way of knowing what had been done, or what was doing what, what pages were active, and the sync between Hubspot and SF was constantly in need of attention. Moved to Hubspot CRM, and was not only so much happier, much of what requires extensive customization and administration in SF was already there from the get-go. It made my life so much better. Plus the marketing capabilities of Hubspot so easily integrate with the CRM that there really is no better CRM for a smaller business that is Using Hubspot as a marketing tool. I’ve had experience with many CRMs, and Hubspot was so easy to get working well. Is it as Fancy and customizable as something like SF, No. But for a small or medium sized business, I liken Hubspot to the Apple Ecosystem, they just work and work well, no tinkering needed.

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