A staggering amount of the projects we get are from companies who have had CRM projects go awry, be unused for years until finally a company is ready to reclaim all that untapped revenue again. Over the years, we’ve become well-versed in the circumstances which led to their failure and eventual coming to our consultants for help.

You know your CRM system is failing you if….

It is not creating better relationships between buyers and sellers.

“When CRM technology was first introduced, sellers believed that with this technology alone, they would have better relationships with their customers, which would lead to new and organic growth,”

“Yet the best sales reps understand that for a truly fruitful sales-customer relationship, a two-way conversation must exist.” The problem is a typical CRM system does not support this conversation, he said—sales reps need context to make CRM data actionable.

It is not helping sales reps close more deals.

Again, Miller said, for sales reps on the front lines, additional assistance is needed when speaking to customers. “As such, the sales execution market is now working to boost CRM’s capabilities by filling in the gap between what it can do and what is needed.”

It is not forecasting any better even though there is more data.

Justin Shriber, vice president of products at C9, also drills into CRM’s ultimate role as a data-gathering system with this observation.

“CRM systems are very efficient at centralizing customer data from internal sources,” he tells CMSWire. However, “external sources and data residing in other tools, such as email, don’t always translate find their way into the CRM. As a result, despite the proliferation of customer and industry data, there’s been a decline in sales forecast accuracy.”

The bottom line is that companies have ever more data in their systems, but their ability to forecast and drive sales is stagnant.

“CRM Consultant alone fail to meaningfully translate internal and external data into insights that directly impact sales teams’ abilities to identify deals and accelerate their close,” Shriber concludes.

“Social, cloud, mobile are being presented to organizations and their users as ‘tools’ without thought as to ‘why’ the tool is beneficial to the organization and, more importantly, to the end user,” she said. “As long as the primary focus is technology and tools, and the business and individual user drivers are secondary, CRM systems will continue to fail.”

Lack of vision within the organization is another culprit, she adds – namely that management often misunderstands the value that a flexible CRM solution brings to the enterprise. “CRM systems are often implemented to force compliance to various rules and processes, considering only the ‘how’ of the system, and not the ‘why’ behind it,” Emsley said.

If you’re ready to implement some Customer Relationship Management policies and technology that will actually work, come to the people who know how to do it properly. Book a free initial consultation with one of our Perth-based consultants today at http://crmperth.com.au/contact-us/ and do a mail enquiry@CRMperth.com.au you can call on the no.: (08) 9325 4505.