Let’s rundown a few of the issues with legacy CRM systems:
Empty Shell
CRMs are delivered empty, and kind of useless in the beginning. You have to do all the work to populate them before they start delivering any value.
In most cases you need to manually enter information on each contact and company as you engage with them, which is a pain.
If you happen to know what your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and Buyer Persona look like, you’re one step ahead, but, again, the CRM won’t help you here. You need to license extra data from someone like ZoomInfo, and import that data into your CRM, which is a lot of extra cost and effort.
Poor Data Quality
CRM data entry is the bane of every sales reps existence.
We call CRM the “System of Record,” but that’s only partially true. It’s really a record of just what a rep has time or is willing to manually enter, plus the data from other systems RevOps has connected.
Most reps spend hours per week tediously entering data. Time that should be spent selling. And most struggle to see how all this data entry directly contributes to their success, so they often enter the bare minimum (I don’t blame them).
All that means a lot of data is incorrect, missing, out-of-date, duplicated or inconsistent.
At my last company, Fliptop, we were doing predictive lead and account scoring, and found that the only data you could really rely on in the CRM was when a rep was about to get paid. In that case, you probably had a real company name, deal size, close date, at least one associated contact, and maybe a billing address. But the data quality dropped off a cliff quickly after that.
This doesn’t just affect sales productivity - bad data leads to inaccurate sales forecasts, irrelevant marketing messages, poor customer handovers, and lost revenue opportunities.
No Workflow
Let’s face it - your CRM doesn’t work for you. You work for it.
You do all the work to create companies and contacts, enter meeting notes, add tasks, set up opportunities, and craft customer emails.
You have to keep your pipeline current before your weekly review meeting with deal activities, close dates, contacts and roles, and next steps. And you have to figure out how to prioritize your day, making sure follow-ups don’t fall through the cracks, you’re prepared for your meetings each day, and you’ve noticed when a key contact changes job or gets a promotion or engages with your marketing channels.
All because your current CRM doesn’t have any smart workflow engines working behind the scenes, around the clock for you.
In the end you really have 2 bosses - your human boss, and the CRM.
CRM is all stick , no carrot 🥕
No Unified Customer View
If you’re like me, a few times a year you get a message from a new sales rep at one of your vendors, introducing themselves, and asking if they can jump on a call to understand a little more about you and your needs. Why? Shouldn’t the CRM already tell them what they need to know about me and my account?
You already know the answer - it doesn’t. Most information about what’s going on with a customer isn’t in the CRM fields, it’s buried deep within notes, if it’s even in the CRM at all.
And a big part of the customer picture - how they’re using your products, what marketing programs they’ve interacted with, what support issues they’ve had, what payment plan they’re on, is likely buried in different systems.
All this makes handoffs impossible, and wastes not only your rep's time, but your customer’s time (and patience).
Usability & Complexity
I often think about what it must be like to be a young sales rep who uses TikTok and Instagram on their phone, and apps like Notion and Airtable for work, and then has to log into Salesforce.
It must feel like driving your grandfather’s Oldsmobile.
For those of you who use CRMs like Salesforce, you know what I’m talking about. Not being able to inline edit fields. Having to understand the difference between a Lead and a Contact, or data that doesn’t copy over when an opportunity is created. Trying to establish parent/child company relationships. Pages that grow into Forms From Hell over time, as admins keep adding custom fields for everything.
And Salesforce can’t fix this anytime soon, if ever. It took over 4 years for 50% of Salesforce’s user base to upgrade from the Classic to Lightning user interface, and there’s still a significant portion of customers that are on Classic, even though Lightning was introduced over 10 years ago. There’s just too much tech debt to overcome without a complete reboot.
No Historical Memory
You may find this hard to believe, but CRMs have no memory. When you change a field, the old value is lost forever, unless you’ve attached some kind of data store like Snowflake to it.
That means they can’t answer simple questions like “how does my pipeline compare to last week?,” or let you revert back to the previous value of a field.
I’ve seen sales VPs download a CSV each week of the pipeline, just so they can compare last week to this week before their weekly pipeline review meeting.
In fact, Salesforce (the company) still does most of their pipeline reviews and forecasting in spreadsheets!
This problem is so bad that Andy Byrne and Venkat Rangan founded Clari a few years ago to address this shortcoming in Salesforce, and have built it to a wildly successful 9-figure business. No offense to Clari, but things like seeing what’s changed week-over-week in your pipeline should be part of the core CRM, not an expensive add-on.
Made for Management, Not Reps
CRM is a misnomer.
It isn’t about Customers. It isn’t about Relationships. It’s really about Management.
Most reps I know don’t feel comfortable putting all their data in the CRM. So they keep a “shadow CRM” in note-taking apps like Notion/Evernote/Google Docs/Microsoft Word and spreadsheets like Airtable/Google Sheets/Microsoft Excel. They copy information into the CRM when they’re ready to talk about it.
In the worst cases, reps don’t even put information into the CRM until after the deal closes, which leads to some really wonky reporting (e.g. negative average sales cycles).
Just shows you that the CRM is primarily for the benefit of management, not reps.
Complexity and Cost
Could you imagine if Gmail, Zoom, Notion, or Slack required an external consulting firm for you to get them to work? No.
Yet that’s what a lot of companies need to do with CRM.
There are close to 2,000 certified Salesforce experts today, and the Salesforce services market alone is measured in the billions of dollars.
The idea of a small or even medium-sized business having to hire outside consultants just to make their CRM work for them is crazy.
And let’s not forget about the high total cost of ownership. You’ve got the base CRM price, of course, but those costs can balloon quickly with all the add-ons, integrations and premium support services you need to create your basic go-to-market stack.
Now don’t get me wrong - Salesforce’s pricing is brilliant - for them. They force everyone to be on the same edition, and while it’s easy to upgrade to a higher tier, it’s not so easy if you want to downgrade (trust me, I’ve tried). So they’ve got this really nice exponential revenue curve.
And then they sell you another cloud.
In the end, it’s not unusual for a company to spend several hundred to a couple thousand dollars per rep per month for their productivity suite.
Cuckoo. 🤪
