Forty-eight percent of sales professionals believe their CRM systems are unfit for purpose, as customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of $5.5 million per year, according to a new CRM and Sales Impact Report from SugarCRM, a customer experience platform.
The research revealed that many businesses lack the necessary tools to provide the kind of customer experience that will keep them competitive. Inundated with status quo CRM systems, sales leaders are struggling to ensure their sales teams are spending enough time with customers and can access the data required to build and maintain these relationships. The report surveyed 1,000 sales decision-makers in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Australia, and found that 52% believe their CRM systems are costing them revenue.
Key findings include:
- 53% of sales leaders are fatigued and frustrated with the CRM admin burden placed on their sales teams;
- Sales reps are only spending 54% of their time selling;
- More than half (56%) reported their customer churn increased in the last 12 months, with less than half (48%) reporting they don’t know why; and
- 50% of sales leaders admitted that they cannot access customer data across marketing, sales and service systems.
However, 88% of respondents said they expect to increase their use of artificial intelligence (AI) over the next two years to augment their existing CRM processes. This will help enrich incomplete CRM data with additional attributes to improve AI learning models’ efficacy. Data enrichment also enables AI to consider factors not present in CRM data, surfacing additional competitive insights previously unknown to organizations.
“Customer behavior has fundamentally changed and businesses around the world are facing a customer relationship crisis,” said Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM, in a statement. “Sales teams are bogged down with administration and stuck with an inaccurate picture of the customer with little advance notice or insight into customer churn. These findings are a wake-up call for companies relying on the market-leading incumbents in CRM with software that is tuned to steady-state and known customer behaviors.”
