We Got Rid of Salesforce, Thank God

Hey, everybody. It’s Mark Christie with The Salesforce Trainers.

Here’s something that’s been bugging me today.

I was speaking to a friend of mine who’s a sales rep at a company, and naturally, the topic of CRM came up. He said, “Yeah, we used to use Salesforce, and we got rid of it. Thank God.”

I asked, “Why? Thank God?”

He said, “Oh my God. It was so complicated. We hated it. There were fields all over the place. It was just an administrative chore. They wanted us to fill in things that had no relevance and certainly didn’t help us sell.”

My first instinct was, “Well, that’s not Salesforce’s fault. That has nothing to do with whether Salesforce is good or bad.”

Salesforce is amazing technology. It’s a great tool.

What my friend described speaks much more to the implementation of Salesforce—and this is pretty common.

Salesforce unfortunately gets a bad reputation among salespeople who find it cumbersome and clunky, as well as sales managers who have to enforce its use but don’t want to. We see this all over the place.

But again, that’s not Salesforce’s fault. It’s much more likely to be symptomatic of one of two things—or possibly both.

The first possibility is that the sales team has an established process, but whoever implemented Salesforce didn’t take the time to understand what salespeople and sales managers actually needed to do to make a sale happen.

Instead, they built Salesforce based on what they thought the team should do, what they had seen before, or even one person’s opinion—without involving the entire sales team.

The other possibility is that there wasn’t really much of a sales process at all. Salesforce was built without sufficient consideration for how salespeople in that organization actually sold.

Regardless of what happened, one fundamental consideration was missed when implementing Salesforce:

Process first. Platform second. People throughout.

It’s quite common to see organizations implement Salesforce without considering their sales process first. They’re essentially building a house without a foundation. It’s just not going to be very strong.

So remember, when your Salesforce adoption is poor:

Don’t blame your users. Fix the system.