Eat Your Own Dog Food — And Other Challenges To Using CRM Tools

Over the past few decades, CRM has evolved extensively. The genesis of CRM was really database management. For the last 25 years, I have worked in sales and sales management for several organizations, and I don’t think there is a CRM tool that has existed in that time span that I haven’t used. Lotus spreadsheets, ACT, Siebel, SAP, Oracle; you get the picture.

The initial CRM drivers were used to enable sales management to view forecasts of the sales team. They could track the activity of individual sales representatives, their accounts and prospects. Managing the pipeline and predicting future outcomes were paramount for internal reporting up the corporate food chain. In addition to internal reporting, maintaining contact lists (protecting the company if a sales rep left the company) became the second most common use.

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