“A fool with a tool is still a fool.” I use this phrase all the time with organizations who are going through software package evaluations. With the “tool” in this expression being the software being evaluated, sometimes the companies we work with must evaluate the process they are trying to automate before jumping into an expensive new tool. If they haven’t taken a look at the business process the software is supposed to assist with, then they money could be spent much better elsewhere.
Interestingly enough, we are evaluating our CRM / Marketing Automation tools at Solvaria. It’s easy to get distracted by the vendors who shower us with statistics about how companies who use their software are experiencing x% growth after implementation. But none of them have asked us about our process. If a company does not have a good sales and marketing process in place, what makes them think that automating a bad process is going to yield better results?
This reminds me of ISO9000/9001 certifications that many companies in the 2000s were looking to achieve. The basics of any of these programs is “document what you do and demonstrate that you do it.” What this could mean for any organization, is “document a bad process and demonstrate that you follow that bad process.” Is this really helping an organization, or is this just a certification stamp that you can put on marketing material to make your customers feel good?
In the spirit of “practice what you preach,” we are taking a step back to look at our sales pipeline process and making it more systematic and efficient before making a decision on our software evaluation. Once this exercise is completed and demonstrated to work for our organization, we can then feel good about selecting the best software for our organization.
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