5 Major Mistakes You’re about to Make with CRM — and How to Avoid Them
Advice from a former CRM seller turned tech founder on how to avoid expensive mistakes.
As a former CRM salesperson and current founder, I feel compelled to warn fellow founders about the risks of falling in love with CRM features over functions.
The wheel was not inherently useful because it was round or made of stone. The value of the wheel was in moving heavy objects with less effort and time than existing modes of manual labor for construction projects.
For several years early in my tech career, I sold Microsoft and salesforce.com licences and consulting services. I saw a lot of terrible, costly mistakes.
Today, there are dozens of popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems for startups and small businesses. Some have incredibly powerful reporting. Others have an extremely user-friendly, simple interface. Decision-makers can essentially buy as little or as much as they want in features.
Immediate priorities should yield something especially critical at the early stages of growth — visibility.
Although products are sexier and easier to use than ever, conflating awesome UX with utility is a trap. This thinking can result in significant lost time when you have to go back and redo the project. There is also a material cost as these mistakes can cost companies thousands of dollars in licensing fees — and sometimes consulting dollars, too.
The points below will help your SaaS CRM implementation be a success before you’ve even scheduled a demo or started a trial. They apply to all the company functions you might use CRM for — sales, marketing, service, and customer success.
These are the top 5 reasons your company could crash and burn with a CRM — and how to avoid them.
#1 — You haven’t mapped CRM goals to strategic KPIs
There’s a reason being data-driven is a buzzphrase used more and more.
The key to achieving successful outcomes, as Project Managment Institute points out, is defining success measurably. Skipping this step leads to the obvious bumble of never knowing if you reached a destination — or worse, successfully arriving at an irrelevant outcome.
The #1 reason customers abandoned their subsciption… because they pushed off important conversations and decisions about their business — goals, needs, competing demands, cashflow — and how CRM could help them achieve strategic priorities.
Immediate priorities should yield something especially critical in the early stages of growth — visibility.
Think about your last update email to investors, your board, or executive team. What did you highlight? What’s your focus for this quarter, or year? If it’s customer retention, customer success, customer service, and account management likely all need to be hands-on in this conversation. These leaders can also help with #2.
Things to think about
- What led us to think we need this?
→ ex: customer service struggling to prioritize/resolve tickets; sales pipeline is currently managed in a spreadsheet; marketing campaigns are in a silo separate from sales - What departments would use it?
→ ex: marketing, customer success, sales, customer service - How high of a priority is it?
→ ex: burning priority - What are the ideal functional outcomes?
→ ex: centralized paid ads management; collaborative sales forecasting; faster assignment/resolution of inbound customer success questions; centralized client information; clearer communication and collaboration on complex sales deals
Bonus points
Thinking ahead for long-term needs is smart. Don’t get too bogged down in road mapping at this stage at the expense of efficiency.
#2 — You’re treating end-users like second-class passengers instead of esteemed copilots
I recently worked on a consulting project for a large healthcare company implementing a new tech system. They sent consultants from a Big 4 consultancy to shadow the users, document the processes, and do some limited interviewing. But, the users were reluctant to talk — and with good reason. The consultants were outsiders — there one day, gone the next.
This step simply calls for the thoughtful inclusion of your own teams. It may be the simplest step on this list.
Defining success requires input from all the stakeholders. You want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly of an end user’s thinking. Consequently, you must seek end-user input to solve the pain points that triggered the search in the first place.
Things to think about
- What is working well in sales currently?
→ ex: sales reps put all their calls on the calendar, so they don't want to change how they do that - What’s hard about the customer service ticket assignment right now?
→ ex: managers need to assign tickets equally to team members, so they have a strong preference for round-robin assignments for their team - Can customer success see who is at the highest risk of churn?
→ ex: success team managers have a difficult time reporting on customer onboarding calls, platform logins, newsletters engagement - Are integrations important in daily workflows?
→ ex: being able to automatically publish company blog content and send automatic, corresponding daily digest emails would be ideal
Bonus points
Ask users about their biggest fears in an anonymous survey. It might reveal they like spending time on the phone, hate how slow other systems you use can be, or otherwise unearth complaints you may never have anticipated. Use this insight to think about user adoption — and potential push back.
#3 — Your business processes are nebulous or inconsistent
I know perfectly well that very early-stage startups are just trying to keep their heads above water. But, as companies and their teams scale, processes necessarily must be defined. Even if a team consists of one person — if something is done inconsistently, like sales forecasting — no CRM system can automagically normalize their work.
Perhaps working under the wishful thinking that would be the case, there is one critical mistake dozens of my customers have made when putting new tech in place. It’s the expectation that the software will define how they do business.
“How often should I send emails? I’ll just do what Mailchimp is set up for by default.”
This is backward.
Your business processes should drive how technology is used. This is true whether selecting an industry-specific CRM or one which serves a broad market. Even if using an email marketing automation system, for example, that’s nearly-perfect for your needs out-of-the-box, you still need to ask yourself how these impacts work upstream and downstream from you.
For example, is your new campaign series going to conflict with individual emails the sales team reps send out? Or, will adding an approval mechanism for your customer support ticket assignment act as an unintentional bottleneck if there’s not a clear process for handling assignments when the manager is out of the office?
Things to think about
- What standardized steps do you use?
→ ex: stages of your sales funnel - How do you circulate reports today? How often?
→ ex: daily customer support ticket totals (open, closed) reports are sent to a group through Slack - Does anyone have access to all data across the company?
→ ex: user roles/permissions will be relatively open in our small, transparent team - Are certain activities recorded for the purpose of compensation?
→ ex: customer success reps must touch every account once per quarter - Which documents might you need to continue using?
→ ex: sales collateral used on all deals
Bonus points
When you do begin evaluating specific platforms, ask about templates or how other customers in the same vertical as you have been successful. No single system comes completely tailored to your unique way of doing business, so templates are a great place to start.
#4 — You hope your CRM will monitor and maintain itself
Not all CRM systems are made equal. Some will require very little maintenance, to be sure. Others will require a lot. This is a function of complexity, in most cases.
But there’s a universal truth to CRM administration — every organization needs it. It is smart to pick one or two people on your team as administrators. They do not necessarily need to be a developer, a data genius, or even have a database administrator.
What is the process for training users in the future?
Many systems are so intuitive now that it really just isn’t imperative. The system you pick will ultimately determine the level of sophistication you need — but it’s all learnable. There are a few things your admin absolutely does need to know an do.
Things to think about
- What is the process for training users in the future?
→ ex: onboarding new hires to the CRM will be done by the system admin; or, the sales manager will onboard users - How will you keep track of challenges and wins with the system? Where will problems be escalated?
→ ex: use the system to log end-user issues/concerns or feature requests for future projects; track the number of logins by individuals to measure user adoption - Who will serve as the internal CRM champion?
→ ex: in addition to the system admin and management, each functional group will have a designated power user that can help with easy, everyday questions
Bonus
While building out your team, ask in interviews about database administration skills. Frequently, this is a role handled by non-technical employees. I argue this is an asset — and the perfect complement to a technical database admin. Together, this team will be prepared for both the functional and technical needs of users.
#5 — Your data would make data analysts weep under their desks
Bad data is problematic for a number of reasons.
The most pernicious is customer-facing — such as erroneous information about a resolved ticket that’s actually still open. Or, maybe deals in the pipeline aren’t being touched frequently enough because data input has historically been spotty because sales reps didn't log all their calls or emails.
Data import can be its own whole adventure. Many of my customers have decided to start fresh — an approach that has definitive pros and cons. This is an area where consultation can be especially helpful for beginning with the end in mind.
Things to think about
- Do we need to import all of our current accounts?
→ ex: some of our accounts haven’t bought in 2 years; unsubscribed and inactive email addresses don’t need to be imported - Is there data we need to merge before importing?
→ ex: we have duplicate contacts created by salespeople who couldn’t see each other’s spreadsheets previously - Will we continue using our API to create contacts in our new CRM?
→ ex: because we use a landing page system we love, we will continue using Zapier to automatically create leads in the new system - Do we need our Knowledge Base in the new system?
→ ex: our organization now hosts our knowledge base on Notion, so we can skip setting up a Knowledge Base in our new CRM
Bonus
Google Sheets has an Add-On to help with systematic data cleaning and deduplication. This is a project you may want or need technical help on, depending on the amount of account history, the volume of accounts, and contacts your organization has.
Takeaways
It bummed me out to see customers buy our product, only to jump to another platform a year later at renewal time. The #1 reason customers abandoned their subscription was not a problem with product features, nor support.
avoid “clean up CRM clusteriffic project” from creeping onto your to-do list
Rather, it was because they pushed off important conversations and decisions about their business — goals, needs, competing demands, cashflow — and how CRM could help them achieve strategic priorities.
To avoid “clean up CRM clusteriffic project” from creeping onto your to-do list:
- Go-live with consensus on clear goals.
Define success or risk wandering aimlessly. Taking a data-driven approach is key to making smart decisions after you’ve launched. Bonus points for thinking ahead to long-term, but don’t get overly bogged down in roadmapping at this stage at the expense of efficiency. - Be prepared to meet urgent user needs.
Talk to your users! Prepare a thoughtful survey. Find out what the day-in-the-life urgent needs are and focus on function over form for ROI. What is working well today, what users would absolutely detest and revolt against, how you can improve customer experience, and more are in the territory of questions you should explore and prioritize. - Use the system to mirror business processes.
Look at the standard steps, documents, people, and technologies involved in your everyday operations today. Think about your reporting intervals and audiences. Everything you do today — and the way you do it — is ideal to map out to give yourselves clarity as you prioritize the right problems to solve and pick the right solution to solve them. - Agree on system ownership internally.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Similarly, it’s best practice to build on small successes by expanding the use of the system over time. To be prepared for that, a final piece of the preparation puzzle is having a system administrator (“owner”) in place well ahead of go-live and prepared to take the lead after it. Consider asking in interviews if candidates have experience as a database admin, specifically with a CRM system. - Populate it with clean and clear data.
“Junk in, junk out,” applies here. There are usually templates available, if not support teams to help point you in the right direction or upload accounts, contacts, and deals on your behalf. Even Google Sheets now has a deduplication Add-On that can be used for systematic data cleaning.
Annette Miller is the Cofounder of Enriched Couples, the first financial therapy platform for family financial wellness. Focusing on trust and teamwork-building, the platform helps couples forge healthier relationships with money and one another. It blends cognitive-behavioral techniques with financial empowerment for richer relationships with unified financial goals.
