Why Sales Reps Hate CRM Systems

I am coaching a number of sales reps who are being forced to partake in their company's CRM software. In case you don't know what that is, CRM stands for "Customer Relationship Management." This would be where you would store all of your contact information for each account and prospect. It's a simple enough concept but salespeople bristle at most every form of record-keeping. You'd think they were being tortured in some Iranian prison by the way they talk about how much they cannot stand recording every detail. In a former life I, too, was committed to similar indentured servitude and hated it every bit as much. I saw no purpose to it; no value whatsoever. How could such activities bolster my sales? I kept that opinion alive for years.

Until this happened....

Several years ago, one of my clients was a company in the Midwest named Wetzel Brothers. To me, they were just another customer. I trained two or three of their reps and they were pleased with the results, so pleased in fact that the president of the company, Mike Draver, called me to suggest that I call on their parent company, Consolidated Graphics, out of Houston.

Never heard of them.

So, given the contact name of Rachel Keonig, I began the pursuit of this bigger fish. It took a few calls to get through, but dropping the name of "Mike Draver" helped since he, apparently, had been singing my praises to Rachel as well. Eventually, we spoke.

I related the benefits of the coaching program—The Sales Challenge—that Mike had been raving to her about. Along the way she asked where I was from. Since no one knows where Duxbury, Massachusetts is, I told her I was in the Boston area. "Oh," she said, "I went to high school in Needham." Coincidentally, so did I. Apparently, we were two years apart and blah, blah, blah we talked about school and Red Sox and Rachel told me she'd keep me in mind.