Salespeople Have a Love/Hate Relationship With CRMs   Almost everyone is using CRM in their businesses  for its efficiency in data collection. But truth be told, many salespeople have a love and hate relationship with CRM. CRMs are a great way to hold data but it doesn’t offer solutions on how to utilize this data in a way that reflects real time engagement with customers.    Kevin Knieriem is the Chief Revenue Officer at Clari, a revenue platform for companies in Toronto. He’s been with the company for 15 months and he’s had a background in enterprise software for over 25 years. He started his software sales career with Siebel System, the first enterprise CRM and from there, Kevin spent 11 years at SAP and due to an acquisition, also spent time with Oracle.    What is a CRM? CRMs are a place for account, contact, and opportunity information to be stored. These are major components  to track sales so it has been the primary  revenue solution for companies for the last 25 years. Keeping your CRM up to date is important so the organization understands the health of its revenue.   Starting with Siebel Systems, Kevin hasn’t seen much change in CRMs. It still has the same basic model for accounting opportunities. It’s a place where sales reps can post information but it doesn’t provide any feedback about how to utilize the data. It takes a lot of maintenance to update a CRM but we use it anyway. Unlike SaaS or subscription, CRM doesn’t allow you to track the continuous journey of the customers.    The limitations of CRM Adobe is a company that runs on subscription.Let’s say for example that an Adobe seller is selling a marketing automation solution, Marketo Acquisition. A client who buys the service and wishes to expand will have to get another subscription over time.  Even though the data is present, the activity that is involved over the time of a subscription doesn’t get tracked by the CRM. The challenge for reps and the sales leader using the CRM tool is that it doesn’t give you the real-time feedback that is needed to run the business as efficiently or effectively as they could.  It turns into a circular problem because the data give no feedback to the sales rep about how to move forward, but when the manager is approached for coaching, they are still looking at the same data with no additional insight.  Layers of managers get involved in analyzing the data and by the time a solution is created, the data is from the past and no longer applies.  It doesn’t take into account the customer’s journey and sales cycle. You can’t really make good decisions using data that may no longer be relevant.    Sales reps are Franchisees Kevin suggests that sellers  be looked at as individual franchisees. This positions each sales rep to utilize the resources of their company to best execute the business.    Nothing happens unless you make it happen. I think companies need to help arm their sales and revenue organizations with solutions that help them in this modern time of transparency. #SalesHelp   Using Clari  Clari is a revenue platform.  Sales reps need to spend the majority of their time selling and not just inputting data. This is how Clari can help. There are tools now that allow auto-capturing the context of CRM data and combining that context with the database.  This means activity around the data can be analyzed and as a result, better decisions and interactions can occur.    When an automation process is in place, more critical questions can be answered:       How engaged is the customer? Are they engaging with you or with your marketing machine?  Is your top-of-funnel nurturing the sales process? Do your ABM campaigns work?     The answer to these questions will give you the idea a better understanding of how healthy opportunities really are. The single most important skill for any company to have is its ability to forecast. The forecast directly impacts the operating plan of the company. The single most important function