Among the various technologies available to aid sales and marketing efforts, CRM is one standout, used by a majority of both small and enterprise business. So, what are the advantages of using a CRM platform? Pipedrive surveyed [pdf] more than 1,600 sales professionals to find out just that.
With salespeople racing to meet quota, productivity and organization help – and these figure prominently into the choice to use a CRM platform. Two-fifths (41%) of respondents report that one of the key reasons for using a CRM platform is because it helps improve productivity, while more than one-third (37%) say that they choose to use CRM as a way to get organized.
Some 35% of respondents say a primary reason for using CRM is that it’s a way to gather customer information. While having a central place to store customer information is beneficial, a challenge that many marketers and salespeople face is the quality of the data they have on their customers. In fact, earlier research found that only about half of B2B marketers trust the accuracy and completeness of their data. Unfortunately, maintaining accurate customer data is expected to continue to be a challenge in the future.
The convenience of the whole sales team having the ability to share information (35%) is another reason respondents use a CRM platform. Additionally, sales professionals also cite the ability to manage their sales team (34%), have an overview on sales (32%) and track performance (27%) as key reasons for its use. To a lesser extent, sales professionals use CRM to avoid forgetting or missing out (25%) and to avoid losing information (21%).
So with all these reasons, what is stopping some sales professionals from using CRM?
Without considering cost as a factor, one-quarter (26%) of respondents who do not use CRM say they prefer using spreadsheets such as Excel, while 22% say there is no need for it and 18% say CRM is not relevant to their business. Data security (17%) and not being comfortable with technology (11%) are other barriers to using CRM, while only 4% of respondents say that they don’t use CRM because they have used it in the past and did not like it.
Even so, sales professionals and marketers agree that their teams could become less siloed. As such, it might very well be worth the trouble for these reluctant sales pros to make use of CRM so they can better collaborate with their colleagues.
Further data can be found in the release here.
About the Data: Results are based on a survey of 1.636 sales professional conducted in October and November 2018.
