Gartner had an recent article that alerted folks about limitations to Salesforce.com. In the article they wrote:

More than 60 percent of large sales organizations deploying the application service providerwould find their costs double within three years, due to customization
and integration costs to replicate prepackaged software designed for
complex organizations, Gartner Inc. said. A large sales organization
would be one with 500 salespeople or more.

Before we even get that far, however, I feel that a number of the new generation Sales CRM tools have missed some basic needs (for even small organizations) on incorporating practitioner experiences into the products. Having been involved with sales processes and IT of a number of organizations and on different platforms (e.g., Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, ACT!, Lotus Notes), I actually find many of the tools to be lacking in a number of areas relevant for a company to get faster up the sales learning curve (SLC). The sales learning curve (which is not my idea) involves getting an organization's arms around how to create sales in a manner that is 1) manageable from an executive viewpoint, 2) can be both replicated and repeated (e.g., by copying salespeople and processes), and 3) treated as an operations process where effectiveness of different sales process flows can be systematically or experimentally improved over time.

Off the top of my mind, here are some areas where either the new gen products are deficient (in the baseline product) or the support help in these areas leave something to be desired:

• Permission marketing was likely a bolt-on afterthought to the products - Perhaps modular design. Perhaps not. My contention would be that these tools started out on the sales process side and so these products simply made it easy for salespeople (who are hard to corner down to enter data as a general rule) to enter data. There tends to be few tools to reconcile a person's contact information in the contacts database, leads database, and opportunities database for marketing purposes - not to mention that using the data across the databases is not so easy. Shouldn't contact information be cleansed and fall out naturally from the process of immature lead to mature opportunity? This stuff should migrate nicely into the contact database of the corporation. Getting clean data is essential to a permission marketing program.


• Reporting and sales management tools needs to be much better out of the box - Sure the forms can be customized and exported to Excel. I have my MBA and became an Excel Jedi Knight. But why do I need to do it as it can just create other issues. Out-of-the-box reports generally miss critical (but very basic) things to foster reporting and work mangement. Sales managers and CEOs want to know (in a consolidated view):

• How many new leads are there?


• When was a lead entered?


• When was a lead last acted on? Is there an aging report for leads (just like there are aging reports for A/R in finance)?


• What is the priority (or warmth of the lead)?


• What are the next steps to move the lead or opportunity forward?


• What was the source of the lead (need subcategories as opposed to more choices, although I suspect the platforms try to steer one toward campaign management)?


• What is the estimated deal size and product or service in question (e.g., need an item list field out of the box from lead through deal closed phase).


• 1-2 sentence description of lead or opportunity.

• Email integration needs to be easier and better - A lot of sales dialogue is captured in email. If the product doesn't allow one to sync the discussions, the tool becomes that much more useless and hard to integrate with salesperson processes.


• Too many pipeline process phases with no guidelines as to use what when - I suppose this reflects configuration flexibility and knowledge of textbook definitions of sales pipeline phases such as suspect, prospect, qualify, etc. There really should be some configuration templates that tighten up the business rules (e.g., leads converted to opportunities automatically when pricing proposal delivered to customer prospect) somewhat analagous to the way Quickbooks has pre-set charts of accounts for service versus product businesses, etc. Alternatively, if the company's made it easier for sales managers to define and communicate the business rules manually (internal communication templates), I suppose this might work.

This is pretty basic stuff. And I highlight this not necessarily for the products themselves but because managers need to make up for these shortcomings manually. It's more the exception than the rule that I've seen the above functionality in new generation sales CRM systems out-of-the-box (note Sugar CRM 3.0 may have added some of this functionality recently - I have not yet seen it).

BTW - the picture above is one of a short putt. Dave Pelz (a well-known golf guy) advocates shooting 17 inches past the hole as the optimum for sinking putts. Maybe the same thing applies for Sales CRM.

Steve Shu