Traditional CRMs are Killing Your Sales Team’s Productivity

The traditional customer relationship management system (CRM) is facing an existential crisis. Sellers, once forced to spend countless hours tracking customer data in CRMs with poor UI, are opting to spend their time more efficiently. This shift has driven a need for insight-driven data solutions that can maintain the sheer volume of a company’s customer data and surface actionable, timely insights about buyers.

This technology shift is not just a response to the inadequacies of existing systems, but a strategic leap toward a future where real-time, relevant data reigns supreme in every customer interaction, and sellers can focus their time and energy on doing what they do best – actually selling.

The Decline of the Traditional CRM

At their inception, traditional CRMs revolutionized how sales and marketing departments collectively handled customer data.

But tools and tech stacks have gotten more sophisticated and first-party data has continued to grow. CRMs weren’t built to manage this. They have begun to struggle under the pressure of maintaining complex, diverse data sources. There are a few inherent flaws in the traditional CRM model:

1. User interface issues – CRMs were designed to be a repository of historical customer data. That’s why the user interface (UI) of these systems is often clunky and unintuitive. While CRMs are useful to sales leaders and data teams, busy sales reps – who really only need a single pane of glass to work with instead of the whole house – aren’t able to quickly grab the information they need, especially when having to decipher if the information is outdated.
2. Data silos – As customer data pours in, data from different systems is typically stored in separate databases managed by different departments, making it difficult to maintain a holistic customer view. And as customers become more complex – as they add locations, parent companies or subsidiaries – their information becomes less suited for a traditional CRM. Data warehouses have emerged as a solution to storing data from various applications and engagements, but it’s still difficult to merge and dedupe that data accurately.
3. Manual entry and updates – Traditional CRMs can’t maintain and update customer information in real time, instead relying on overloaded sales personnel to do it. This means insights come with a lag, limiting their relevance and usefulness. A recent Gartner report revealed that B2B contact data can decay at a rate of over 70% a year, so it’s likely that you’ll be dealing with bad data almost immediately, assuming you’re not dedicating resources to constant data cleansing.
4. Difficult integrations – Incorporating third-party data can exacerbate the problems of an unclean CRM. Even the smallest discrepancies in data structures can create huge headaches.
5. Tech sprawl – To combat the above issues, teams adopt new tools that promise to bridge data gaps and are quickly overwhelmed. These tools are often difficult to manage, frequently break, and do only a fraction of what’s needed to enable insight-driven outreach.
6. No activation layer – Even with a team that focuses on cleansing your CRM, activation remains an intensive task that falls on sellers. They have to manually look up accounts, review calls, emails, notes, etc., to gain a real view of the customer.

These issues not only lead to fragmented customer insights but inhibit cross-functional collaboration and hinder seamless customer experiences. With the rise of multi-channel marketing, the challenges only grow.

Insights in Action: Modern Sales Applications

Insight-driven sales applications provide a solution tailored to the modern challenges of sales and marketing. They centralize and manage data but also use generative AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to provide actionable insights for go-to-market (GTM) teams to act at the right moment.

Real-time Insights

By processing and analyzing vast volumes of data in real time, insight-driven sales applications supply GTM teams with a deeper understanding of customer behavior and preferences. This helps outreach go to the right person, at the right time, with the right message. They also shift the sales role towards building relationships, rather than documenting them.

Holistic Customer View

Modern data solutions integrate first- and third-party data, ensuring the resulting insights are as comprehensive as possible. This allows for personalized, targeted interactions that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Better Data Quality and Hygiene

Automated processes and advanced analytics ensure that data is accurate and up to date. This not only improves relevance but also helps companies comply with privacy regulations.

Additionally, modernized data solutions make all the difference for data teams. We spend so much time combing through data to cleanse it and analyze it, and the data integrity can easily be compromised. Modern solutions set guardrails so sellers can easily access the context and insights they need to do their jobs well without getting caught in the weeds.

Beyond the Data

The shift from traditional CRMs to real-time customer data platforms is more than a change in software preferences; it’s emblematic of the need for an interwoven, dynamic customer data management experience. Relying on static, siloed customer data to drive sales strategies inhibits your sellers, your marketing team, and your ROI. Conversely, a modern sales solution connects various data sources and provides real-time insights into customer behavior and preferences.

Go-to-market teams should reassess their CRM strategies and leverage the insight-driven, AI-backed tools that are redefining the customer relationship.

By adopting these innovations, companies can create an environment where every customer interaction is powered by informed decisions and personalized insights.

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