For years Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has been about tracking interactions with clients, prospects and leads.  Sales people have (sometimes begrudgingly) created sales forecasts through opportunity management. Customer support creates tickets for problem resolution and marketing might use the tool to track campaigns.  All tasks are extremely useful to an organization.  As time has progressed, I’ve seen CRM go from simple contact management to fully automated work-flow systems. The results and information generated can either be amazing or frustrating.

Some companies have struggled to get users to adopt CRM applications (specifically sales people).   Sales people tend to be independent and just can’t be bothered with systems that don’t have a clear personal benefit thus the resistance to use CRM software.  And clearly good sales people have different personalty types than someone in accounting or finance.  I’ve often said that when you get an accounting degree, it’s a Bachelor of Science degree for a reason.  And sales, well- it’s more of an art.

One of the key reasons sales people resist CRM software is that the carrot approach is lacking.  There’s been nothing to date that drives sales people to use the software. 

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