Just two decades ago, B2B sales people spent most of their time filling out computer forms to manually track hundreds of pieces of data on customers and accounts, mostly for the benefit of managers who watched their every move. Two decades later, virtually nothing has changed.
Over the last twenty years, consumer web and desktop software has evolved: the consumer world has become social, mobile, and location aware. Interfaces have become simple, intuitive, and pleasurable. Data collection has become automated and increasingly intelligent.
During the same period, enterprise software has made surprisingly little progress. In the case of sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) software, the lack of innovation in the user experience is particularly remarkable. While new software-as-a-service models have streamlined deployment, customization, and IT management of CRM tools, the tools themselves haven’t evolved at nearly the pace of other technologies.
CRM has a problem: it’s not working as advertised. A 2011 Accenture study of sales effectiveness and CRM usage found that only 16.9% of companies using CRM believed that their CRM tools improved win rates. Only 11.8% believe that their CRM tools shortened sales cycles. And only 15.4% and 3.7% believe the tools increase revenue and margin respectively. Where did CRM tools help? The survey showed that slightly more than half of companies believe that CRM helps to improve communication between sales people and their managers. Why? Likely because forcing sales people to document every activity improves managements ability to monitor activities and to discuss them with their teams.
Today, almost every business-to-business organization struggles with basic sales force management problems that have plagued the industry for decades:
- Sales activity tracking remains a largely manual effort: CRM systems are filled with information on customers, prospects, accounts, and activities. It’s not uncommon for companies to require more than a hundred fields of data on a typical opportunity and the corresponding accounts and contacts. What do all of these data points have in common: they are typically manually entered into a web browser or software application by the sales people themselves.
Science of Revenue 