One of the main demands from a CIO or VP Sales when talking about CRM is the option to sync with Outlook, Google Mail or any other mailing system. This is strange for me because I find it hard to believe that someone will use this information. Here I review the most common arguments regarding the demand of email synchronization.
First they say: “We want to better track the communication between the salesman and his customer”. Mmm, I am feeling sorry for the employee, let’s call him Bob, whose scope of work is going over hundreds of emails of an entire sale or marketing department searching for information. In addition, Bob cannot obtain any analysis by reading email context because he does not know the relationship between a specific salesman and his customer, what happened at the last meeting and frankly speaking, this is really not the way to control the sales team’s behavior in front of the customer.
Another argument of them is: “We want to archive all the mailing history to better know the customer”. Here the mistake it that CRM is not a repository for all ever-written emails. Let me doubt the fact that a sales director will ask his team to read every mail, one by one, to obtain a pattern of any customer and based on that, set the marketing strategy of the upcoming year. Sounds logic or not?
Third argument is: “This will help us analyze the work being done in the field”. In the point that we are standing today, as far as I know, there is no algorithm to automatically analyze text into strategy and I guess no CIO will want to add this task as a milestone to his CRM implementation project.
The salesman needs to add information to the CRM to support the management and not waste time on copying emails from one system to another.
CRM is a strategic tool and not and archive. Adding ten emails to ten different won opportunities will not contribute to the management. If a salesman answers a question such as “What was the main reason for your win?” to CRM, that input can be easily transferred to strategic information. Also, by manually feeding the CRM, you are asking the salesman to think and reflect his own sales process and not just copy text or attach emails to the opportunity.