If you’re a modern, digitally integrated business, you probably have some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. They’re necessary for juggling contacts and providing a centralized spot to manage them all. They also show your sales pipeline in 1s and 0s, which changes to reflect your business activities in real time.
They don’t fix everything, however, as many businesses find that their business has outgrown its CRM. When that happens, a new CRM or more bespoke, targeted software may be needed to wrangle your data. Here are three signs your current CRM is holding your business back.
Recording Customer Relationships Isn’t Enough Anymore
Being systems of record, CRMs work best for organizing your clients, then running them through a clean, standardized workflow. However, as customer relationships deepen and you refine your pipeline, adding extra channels, it can create an abundance of busywork. For instance, moving from platform to platform to get the job done means a lot of manual data entry, wasted time, and operational friction. It also introduces a lot of cracks that data can fall through, leading to lost opportunities and the need to repeat processes.
This happens because CRMs may record who your clients are, but the actual process of engaging with them demands more targeted, personalized action. Scaling up the CRM isn’t the play here; instead, you need something that acts on customer data in real time, or as close to it as possible. This is what a modern, AI-powered customer engagement platform (CEP) is ideal for. CEPs are capable of reacting to customer data and meeting them wherever they are, whether it’s through email, text, notification, or more. They cut platform hopping and prevent CRM data from sitting in your pipeline without being acted upon.
You’re Not Capturing Early-Stage Leads
When a customer shows up on your CRM, they’ve already made their way through your sales funnel. Then, when they’re a known quantity, your CRM is great for cataloging the relationship. However, when your business has outgrown its CRM, generating new leads becomes just as important as nurturing and closing sales with existing ones. CRMs can’t do that.
This can leave marketing left out in the cold, where they need to spend time and money reeling in new leads. In this case, the CRM is functioning just as it should. Instead, look into marketing automation platforms (MAPs) that gather prospects, quantify them, and nudge them further down the funnel. MAPs allow you to tag them with lead scores and tailor outreach to match their interests, based on web habits.
Your CRM Isn’t Reaching the Back Office
CRMs are often adopted as a standalone system that looks over all your business processes. As established, it can have blind spots, like the earlier stages of the sales funnel. Once your business grows and your pipeline becomes more complex, a similar blind spot can form between your front office and back office. This is especially true if your business relies heavily on accounting software or warehouse logistics.
CRMs focus on those front-office deliverables and mark them as in progress or fulfilled as appropriate. But, as your business grows, the gap between marking something as complete and actually completing it gets bigger and bigger. Many plug those gaps with middlemen and more expensive bloat. Instead, you should keep the CRM tracking customers and consider a sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that’s capable of integrating with it. That way, you have two tailor-made systems to manage two different parts of your business, instead of expecting a workhorse CRM to do both.
There’s a reason CRMs are so popular nowadays: they’re great at what they do. But when a standalone CRM doesn’t cut it, there are whole suites of business management software that can provide a more targeted approach.
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