Why CRMs are not a Good Fit for Consulting Sales

CRMs are Customer Relationship Management tools [1]. Unless you have a business where you have hundreds or thousands of sales a month, you don't need to manage hundreds or thousands of contacts each month.

For people who have done Sales for some time, they will recognise that it's easy to amass hundreds / thousands of business cards or contacts. How many connections do you have on LinkedIn which mean absolutely nothing? Collecting contacts doesn't lead to new business.

We find that most CRMs are not a great fit as they prove to be a distraction. You end up spending time adding details to contacts, cleaning them up, adding notes etc. Feels like you are doing Sales, but you are not. You sell by communicating (that's predominantly listening, nature gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason), not by housekeeping contacts.

Generating business is all about being in touch with someone who could be a good fit for what you are offering. That's what you should be focusing on: Opportunities. Any time you spend on supposedly "Sales" related activities is actually time you are not communicating.

Footnotes:
[1] They used to be called Rolodex which is a "rotating file device used to store business contact information". Its name is a portmanteau of the words rolling and index and essentially it's a collection of business cards.