There is a CRM; if nobody uses it, there isn’t

A CRM is the system where customer and conversation records live — whatever its name: a piece of software, a spreadsheet, a notebook. In most companies the answer to “do you have a CRM” is yes. The licence was bought, the setup done, a training session held. Then the sales team carried on working from their phones, because the phone is fast, the CRM is slow, and nobody checks the records. Six months later there are a hundred records in the CRM and nine hundred in the salespeople’s phones. The company owns a CRM; it doesn’t own its customers.

Where the leak is. An unused CRM loses three things. Visibility: marketing can’t see which leads were called, sales can’t see who came from which campaign; each says the other side isn’t working. Follow-up: a lead that was called and not reached, if it lives in a phone, isn’t called a second time; nobody remembers. Ownership: when a salesperson leaves, the customer list leaves with them. The sum of the three is a meaningful share of the annual ad budget, and it appears in no report.

Three levels. At level one there is no CRM; records are in a spreadsheet or a notebook, usually personal. At level three a CRM exists, part of the sales team uses it, the source is entered by hand, and recording discipline depends on the person. At level five marketing and sales use the same CRM; forms drop in automatically, calls are logged automatically, stages are defined, and the data is trusted — the management meeting opens the CRM screen, not a spreadsheet.

A field example. One company had paid for a CRM licence for two years and had four hundred and ten records in it. Leads over the same two years exceeded three thousand. We didn’t ask for the salespeople’s phones; we asked for one week’s call log: a hundred and eighty calls made, fourteen entered in the CRM. CRM usage was eight percent, and management understood it as “the team loves the CRM”. Nobody had lied; nobody had done the division. Two rules and automatic form capture took the rate to fifty-five percent in the first month and eighty-eight by the third. The biggest change was the weekly meeting opening with the CRM screen instead of a spreadsheet.

The two-number check. Take last month’s lead count (the table from the previous piece). Then look at how many records were created in the CRM last month. The ratio of the two is your CRM usage rate. Above ninety percent, no problem. Below fifty, you don’t have a CRM; you have a licence. In most companies this ratio sits between thirty and sixty percent on first inspection, and nobody has calculated it before.

First action. The rule comes before the software. Two one-sentence rules: “A lead that isn’t in the CRM doesn’t get called,” and “A call that isn’t logged didn’t happen.” The second sounds harsh; that’s the point. Say the rules at the sales meeting, run the weekly meeting from the CRM screen rather than the spreadsheet. Have the agency or the web person make forms drop into the CRM automatically; that removes half of the “no time to log it” sentence. Recalculate the ratio a month later. A company that passes seventy percent reaches ninety within three months.

In Growth 360, CRM usage is the first point of the Close column. One of the Full Assessment’s evidence questions asks for this ratio directly; it is also one of the questions that most often gets “I don’t know” in the Evidence Index.