During OracleWorld keynote, after Oracle bought Siebel, Larry said something like: "there are only 2 useful features in a CRM system - forecasting and analytics - and everything else exists simply to collect data for these features." See if you can find the original quote.
Larry is exactly right. I have never come across a company that believes their CRM is going to help them drive sales or has tried to trick their salesforce into using CRM by billing it as "sales software."
In my experience, a CRM is typically fed leads by a marketing automation system or bulk record loading from offline events. All the reps need to do is sort their list of leads by priority, call on them, and flip the status to "meeting" or "closed/won" when they're done. That's nowhere near data entry slavery, IMO.
With a CRM, we want to ask:
* How full is our funnel?
* Where are our leads coming from?
* What's my projected revenue this quarter?
* Is anything stuck?
* Who isn't working their leads fast enough?
All of these things are hugely valuable and none of them have to do with being a "communication" tool.
You are right. But just answer honestly one question - is this data that sales people provide for their reports really 100% honest??
If you had CRM on top of the communication tool - or even better - CRM reports like pipeline would be in real-time generated based on real life customer interactions - that would be much more valuable right?
That is exactly what we do with Discourse ( https://discoursehq.com ) - there are couple of usecases where this makes a lot of sense:
- real-estate brokers can track pipeline based on real life customer interactions
- car sales
- financial services sales
- telco services sales
We have integrated Discourse with Facebook fan pages so leads generated on fan pages can be immediately converted into prospects - right there on the spot.
We have a growing number of customers and we are looking for more :)
