Visibility versus value: what are you really trying to buy?

Every CRM promises to deliver a 360° view of the customer. It appears in almost every case study, white paper and piece of promotional material the vendors have ever published. But is such a view really providing value? Or is it just providing visibility?

Purchasing a new CRM isn’t a small project. When measuring the ROI on such an investment, what dollar figure do you assign to visibility? Is it even possible to do so?

This is where organisations need to really think about what they’re trying to achieve and bring things back to basics. Often, the reason for any CRM implementation is to serve customers better and to improve revenue.

When a customer service or sales representative is deluged with every single thing the organisation knows about a customer, service and sales aren’t improved. People are drowning in information: rather than knowing everything, these key personnel just need to know the right thing — that is the key to better service and sales.

Visibility isn’t value

It’d be remiss to think the 360° view hasn’t been beneficial; it has, but the key questions are what kind of benefits has it brought and to whom?

Transforming from a manual spreadsheet-driven process to a CRM can feel like the lights have been switched on for the first time. But it is crucial to understand that visibility is not value: visibility itself doesn’t improve the customer experience or add more line items to an invoice. The central promise of a CRM is help drive revenue, but many have simply delivered visibility and called it a day.

Getting from visibility to value requires someone to work their way through all the insights, figure out which signals to act on, and in what order.

Account managers today are already overwhelmed, having to track down shipments, chase invoices and manage reorders, while dealing with hundreds of customers and thousands of SKUs. Flooding them with more data than they would ever need doesn’t help them; it overwhelms them.

The problem with CRM today is that you might feel as though you’re getting value, but everyone is more overwhelmed than ever, and sales results aren’t improving.

Ask any salesperson what they need to drive more revenue and I’d be very surprised if a single one said they need another dashboard, report or summary. They don’t need all that information — they just need the right information at the right time.

Narrowing the aperture

If I’m in a new town and ask for directions to the bakery, but I am given the story of the town’s founding, the historical data of its agricultural yields and the family history of the local mayor, I might have full visibility — but I’m no closer to finding a meat pie.

What account managers need is not more information, but clearer guidance on what to do, where to focus, who to call and what to say.

It’s time for CRM to move beyond the 360° view. It might have once been helpful, but now it simply spins people in circles — it’s time to narrow the aperture.

The next generation of CRM pulls data from places like the ERP or unstructured data sources like email. It can identify where sales volume is slipping, where opportunities are being missed, and turns this data into actionable recommendations. This is much narrower than a 360° view. It is specific and practical guidance on what to do today, like “call this person at this account about this product”.

Guidance at this level enables the seller to deliver a level of service they could previously only deliver to a small handful of customers. Not only do service levels improve, but so does revenue — whether through more sales to existing customers or brand-new accounts.

With a narrower view that provides the right insights at the right time — rather than everything, everywhere all at once — people can operate at a new level. They can provide better service, protect current business, and drive new opportunities they might have missed otherwise.

That is the value that CRMs have been promising.

*Adam Frank is Senior Vice President and General Manager, APAC at SugarAI.

Image credit: iStock.com/AndreyPopov