Charles Tatum

The decision to add CRM and/or marketing automation software to your business is an important consideration, and one that should be carefully evaluated before either type of system is purchased.

Depending on which solutions are chosen, integrating CRM and a marketing automation platform can present a fresh set of challenges, and so it’s a good idea to clearly understand the purpose of each one individually, and the goal of having the two systems working together.

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It happens to the best of us. Though the CRM buying process is very different than buying consumer products, one of the common denominators is the tendency of both vendors and salespeople to pitch their products with buzzword-heavy lingo. When we, as buyers, get caught up in the pitch and start relying on fancy language and the occasional bit of sales hyperbole, it’s easy to get carried away and make a purchase that’s not entirely based on our needs.

The CRM industry, and the vendors in it, certainly have their fair share of product lingo and feature buzzwords. Those about to embark on, or currently in the middle of, the evaluation and purchasing path will undoubtedly encounter a fair share of product jargon and enthusiastic sales reps eager to explain their respective products using whatever flavors marketing has cooked up that week.

Top Ten Sales Buzzwords

For those wading into the waters of buying CRM, either for the first time or as a seasoned enterprise software purchasing veteran, LinkedIn has recently published a list of the top 10 sales buzzwords used in 2013.

It’s probably safe to bet on hearing some, if not all, of these words when your CRM buying process moves from the research phase into actual product evaluations and sales reps are brought into the mix.

Looking just at North America, the top ten buzzwords are:

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• Driven
• Strategic
• Effective
• Responsible
• Competitive

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• Positive
• Creative
• Organization
• Innovative
• Patient

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Though LinkedIn’s list is not specific to the CRM industry, it’s not hard to imagine how the terms above might be applied to a product like CRM.

For example, “(Insert CRM product name) allows your organization to effectively drive sales and be competitive in your vertical by establishing focused business processes that increase ROI.”

Another, “We’ve integrated an innovative marketing suite into (CRM product name)’s core feature set that allows your creative team to develop strategic messaging based on social media monitoring and push positive brand awareness.”

For the record, I have fabricated the above examples entirely. They are not copied from or based on any particular CRM vendor’s sales or marketing material, and are meant only to serve as an example of the kind of language those in the CRM buying process might reasonably expect to hear.

Using Your Own Language

The best way to avoid falling into the trap of buying CRM based on fancily-worded feature sets and overly enthusiastic marketing hyperbole is to come ready with your own buzzwords, so to speak.

By going through a careful planning and evaluation process, your business will develop a detailed list of core features and functionality that you can use to evaluate each CRM vendor on your terms.

Choosing a CRM system is all about your business, it’s processes, and it’s needs. No one knows those three things better than the people that run it.

By taking the time to develop a comprehensive CRM plan and strategy, before you charge into the vendor jungle, you’ll be far less susceptible to being influenced by well-meaning reps eager to tell you about the latest strategic innovation that will allow your business to “be an effective communicator of positive brand messaging to your prospects and strategically drive creative organizational responsibility”.

Not every business needs or will benefit from CRM. They are few and far between, but they do exist.

Other businesses don’t realize how much they would benefit from it or sometimes don’t know what it is at all, and continue to miss a great opportunity for improvement. Finally, there are those businesses out there that are fully aware of what CRM is, it’s usefulness, and would clearly benefit greatly from implementing it, but for one reason or another choose to go down a different path.

This last group, the “aware but unconvinced” category I’ll call it, often employ a variety of alternatives to CRM that vary greatly in their effectiveness as business, sales, and customer management tools. We speak regularly with employees frustrated with the solution their company is using, and it continues to amaze us how much energy some companies will expend in their efforts to avoid purchasing CRM altogether.

Often, the time, resources, and money a company will spend on alternatives to CRM far exceed the costs of implementing an actual CRM solution. Here are five alternatives to buying CRM:

1) Do Nothing

Having no solution of any kind, or more often a mishmash made up of several of the options below, is actually a fairly popular choice, judging by how often we hear about it.

When a business doesn’t commit to any one particular way to manage their sales and business processes, it’s frequently left up to individual employees to find “what works best for them”. What works best for each employee can vary drastically, and usually leads to a company’s valuable customer and sales data being stored in a hodgepodge of different software, email, handwritten notes, and other oddities.

2) Sticky Notes & Business Cards

For employees and businesses that find technology to be burdensome and onerous, this is the go-to solution. We’ve heard countless stories from sales and IT managers about how a member of, or the entire sales team prefers to jot things down by hand rather than log calls and customer information into a computer.

The drawbacks to this “solution” should be fairly apparent to any manager that has tried to produce an even remotely coherent picture of the company sales pipeline.

3) Excel

For the first week or so of my first inside sales job, I used Excel to try and track my calls, follow ups, and accounts. It worked fine for about three days, and then it just became a giant mess.

The allure of using spreadsheets can be hard to resist for some, but at the end of the day it almost always reaches a critical mass where managing it becomes so complex that it ends up taking more time just to keep each sheet updated than it takes to do the job you’re trying to keep track of.

Also, the moment an important row, column, or sheet is accidentally deleted or overwritten is the moment most people see the light in CRM.

4) Outlook

Probably the most popular choice for companies that don’t feel that CRM can deliver the kind of value it purports to. Outlook almost, almost feels like it’s a CRM system on it’s own. It’s got email, a calendar, contacts, notes, notifications, etc.

It’s easy for companies to get sucked into the illusion that Outlook provides everything they need to handle sales and customer management. But it doesn’t. The reasons why would easily fill another post or two. The biggest reason, like most other things on this list, is that Outlook is siloed, not centralized. It may work for an individual, but it doesn’t work for a company that needs to see all the data together to get a holistic picture of what’s going on.

5) Contact Managers

Products like ACT! and GoldMine blazed the trail that ultimately lead to modern CRM software. Thousands of businesses continue to use them on a daily basis. For small businesses, it may prove adequate until the company grows and it’s needs change.

But contact managers have some very real limitations that prevent them from being viable solutions in the enterprise. Flat field (as opposed to relational) databases, minimal or non-existent mobile access, outdated user interfaces, and a general lack of customization are just some of the problems we hear from companies that want to migrate to a modern CRM platform.

Rebel Without A Reason

As I mentioned in the introduction to this post, not every businesses absolutely needs CRM. But for those where it’s implementation would have a positive impact, perhaps dramatically so, purposefully ignoring that fact will only do more harm than good.

Just about any CRM solution is better than the five alternatives mentioned above, it doesn’t have to be the most expensive product on the market to be beneficial. If your organization is on the fence, or is struggling to manage with a poor alternative, it’s never too late to re-evaluate and put your business on the path to CRM success.