Your CRM And You: 4 Tests To Determine If It's Time To Break Up

By Geoff McQueen, CEO, AffinityLive

By Geoff McQueen, CEO of AffinityLive

Remember when you first got your CRM? Everything seemed so promising — a single oracle of truth you could turn to for updates on everything going on with your client accounts. For many, though, CRMs stopped being a helpful friend and instead became a burden requiring constant updates and double entry and giving precious little back in return.

Here are four quick tests to determine if you should break up with your CRM.

1. Your CRM Doesn't Sync With Your Address Books

When you get a new lead or prospect, you want to start working on turning them into a closed opportunity right away, right? As smartphones become the center of our professional lives, you should be able to enter a contact into your smartphone’s address book and have it automatically appear in your CRM. Same goes for emails. Simply forwarding an email from a new lead to your CRM should be enough to get you going, so you can focus on building the client relationship instead of data entry.

If your CRM doesn't talk to your address books, be they Outlook, Google Contacts or your smartphone, and sync new contacts automatically between your address books and the CRM,  then you should really think about breaking up with it. Not only is it a waste of time to have to double or triple enter things, but the busier you get, the more likely you are to forget. Essentially, your CRM will stop being useful just when you need it the most.

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