About a month ago, NASA revealed a cluster of images provided by the James Webb Telescope. Among the awe-inspiring photos was a supermassive black hole that is 24 million times the mass of the sun.
On seeing this, millions of sales folks whimpered and hid under their desks, suddenly reminded of their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.
All right, so that probably didn’t happen, but talk to any sales person about CRMs, and sooner or later the phrase “black hole of productivity” creeps into the conversation.
In the ideal world, CRM tools are meant to help sales folks do their jobs more efficiently.
From a sales person’s perspective however, CRMs can be seen as soul-crushing time sinks designed to prevent them from doing their jobs at all.
Hours and hours that sales folks could spend selling (that thing they were hired to do and are actually passionate about) are spent mindlessly keying in data points and wrestling with unintuitive, user-unfriendly interfaces.
In fact, 20% of sales leaders say they have actually lost opportunities because of user-unfriendly software.
That is the exact opposite of what’s supposed to happen!
Having data on hand, especially consistent, reliable data, should be a huge asset to any sales person.
The problem is that the system depends on the human mind to feed it all the data, and the mind, as wonderful as it usually is, can also be unreliable. Couple that with the fact that people just don’t feel like facing these complex interfaces at the end of a hard day’s work.
Human errors lead to data gaps, and the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
The solution then, is to have a tool that feeds data into the CRM directly. Automating the process as much as possible removes several pain points, including:
- Time wasted on manual data entry
- Potential errors due to a complicated interface
- Unhappy sales folks muttering under their breath about stupid this and dumb that.
Tools like Clari take customer data directly from comms, including call transcripts and emails, and use them to populate CRMs automatically. This means sales folks get to sell more, leaders have time to coach and hit their own targets, and everyone gets to log off early!
