But It Doesn’t Have to Be

Sound familiar? Almost all consumers have stopped doing business with a company because of a bad experience. That’s according to a RightNow Customer Experience Report, which indicates that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. In the world of B2B, if your company relies solely or largely on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you could be driving your customers into the arms of the competition. Here’s how.

CRM: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

When CRM systems were first developed over 30 years ago, they were designed to make sales teams more efficient at organizing customer information. As the technology has evolved over time, CRM has promised (over-promised?) a never-ending stream of functionality aimed at growing sales. Companies are enticed by theoretical capability only to find that the reality is often quite different.

Salespeople, the group that CRM was intended to help, are among the most disillusioned. You might hear mutterings of ‘waste of time,’ ‘too much data entry,’ and ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ And with such halfhearted participation, the management insights that CRM is supposed to deliver are wholly unreliable. Arguably worse is that the more you ‘push’ on an ill-fitting CRM solution, the more rapidly you’ll annoy your customers.

You’ve probably heard CRM described as a necessary evil (not exactly a ringing endorsement), but it’s just a small part of the complex sales information landscape. Properly executed CRM is helpful at showing who your prospects are, capturing previous interactions, and tracking opportunities but it doesn’t do much to help your reps when they’re actually in front of customers. To optimize its potential, you should supplement your CRM software with an effective sales enablement tool.

Augment Your CRM with Sales Enablement

In order to commit to a brand, 79% of consumers want helpful, friendly reps, while 55% first and foremost want information quickly and easily. Where CRM systems fail to deliver on these experiences, sales enablement platforms, like StorySlab, can help.

Elevating the sales rep to the role of consultant, these tools enhance sales efficiency by aligning B2B sales reps to resources throughout the customer conversation and making it easy for them to access additional resources while in the trenches. These tools are intuitive and interactive, too, so your sales team will actually enjoy using the platform day in and day out – which can’t usually be said for CRM systems.

With the StorySlab platform in particular, sales representatives can access their most essential materials offline at anytime, anywhere and on any tablet, phone or desktop. So even if your team is without an Internet connection, they can present to prospects, showing respect for the customer’s time. Plus, with a beautiful, customized design specifically crafted for your brand and sales process, you can boost your image as a leader, and at the same time, give your B2B reps an easy-to-navigate platform that helps them better tell your story.