From a salesperson’s perspective, the old adage, “Nothing is certain save death and taxes,” needs to be modified. It should read, “For salespeople, nothing is certain save death, taxes, and hatred of entering data in my $%^&* CRM!”

It doesn’t matter if you are a one-person agency struggling with how to manage volumes of customer interaction data without spending hours each night in front of your computer, or the president of a large rep firm trying to get your outside salespeople to submit their opportunity reports. Both of these individuals have the same problem — their CRM is not creating value, it is creating a headache.

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, is akin to exercise — we all see the benefit, but hate going to the gym. So, grab a cookie and have a seat. It’s time to talk about why CRM is necessary and why it is absolutely not about software — it is about you and your process.

First I will explore the origins of CRM and why we struggle with integrating it into our daily routine as salespeople. Then, I will share with you my own Salesperson Technology Stack — a collection of free, or nearly free, software that ended my CRM struggle.

CRM is for Managers, Not Salespeople

CRM was not designed for salespeople or small organizations. CRM’s roots were planted in the fertile soil of the Silicon Valley enterprise software landscape. In 1993, two enterprising folks founded a company, Siebel CRM Systems, Inc., focused on salesforce automation products. That niche morphed into what became known as CRM, and by 2000, they had surpassed $1 billion in sales. In 2006, they were acquired by Oracle for $5.8 billion.

The founders of Siebel never intended to cater towards companies with fewer than 50 salespeople — in 1995, the per-seat (per-person) cost of a Siebel system was $1,750. The software sold at this price included enterprise-grade contact management, opportunity management, and an executive dashboard for viewing sales activity data and what would later be referred to as “pipeline” data used for forecasting.

For management, this was a game-changer. For the first time ever, they had visibility into the sales process in near real-time. Over their morning coffee, they could double-click an icon and see instantly how they were tracking against their forecast, and reinforce decisions with data on salesperson activity metrics. If you have ever managed a salesforce before, you know how powerful these data points can be.

Certainly, the market has changed since then. The new enterprise juggernaut — Salesforce.com — charges a comparatively paltry $250/seat, and there are others on the market that charge far less for smaller, less-capable systems geared towards small business. With so many reasonable options, we should all be using and, more important, loving our CRM, right?

Like Your Gym Membership, Price Means Little

I am sure that, in your travels, you have seen a proliferation of a new type of gym — the 24-hour, $5/month facilities located in previously unoccupied commercial spaces. At first glance, these gyms are great: the equipment is clean and brand-new, the price is cheap, and the access is even better.

Surprisingly, even with the low price and easy access, the retention for these types of gyms is not great — according to the International Health, Racquet and Sports Club Association, roughly 50 percent of their members do not renew.

As professional salespeople, we all know that price is rarely the motivating factor — even the most frugal buyers still purchase on value, to varying degrees.

The problem with gym member retention and CRM adoption has never been price — the problem is human nature. We simply don’t like to do things that require us to do things outside of our normal routine, unless there is a clear and compelling value proposition.

CRM was made to provide managers data, not make the lives of salespeople easier. We all see the potential benefits of the data that CRM can offer, but for many of us, adoption of a CRM comes at the cost of our free time — a non-negotiable.

How then, do we reap the benefits of CRM without having to completely upend our routine?

The Salesperson as the CRM

Your sales process is, by nature, customer relationship management. You don’t need software to force you into a process that is not your own to do a job at which you are already successful. You need software that supports and documents your current efforts without getting in the way.

CRM doesn’t work for salespeople because it was never designed to be an integrated part of our natural workflow. What we need is software that instead of defining our process and demanding our time, fits seamlessly into our existing process and multiplies our time.

Which is why I ditched my CRM and created what I call my Salesperson Technology Stack.

My Salesperson Technology Stack

In the pursuit of maximizing my daily working hours, I took a hard look at the areas in which I spend most of my time. Based on that research, I determined that I spend the majority of my time in relatively equal parts on the following activities:

• Lead Generation
• Trip Planning
• Data Management

For each activity, I have a small group of technologies that help me to be more productive and more profitable. Borrowing from the software world, I call this my Salesperson Technology Stack — no technology in the stack stands alone, they all provide support for each other and, combined, make my life significantly easier.

Certainly, my particular stack of tech may not make sense for you. But I hope that in explaining my rationale you can, at the very least, use the concept to find tools that work for you.

Data Management — You Need to be Your Own Google

We, as modern salespeople, are assaulted by a barrage of data that is unprecedented in the history of selling. What we handle as individuals would have been handled, in the old days, by a team of professional secretaries and trained underlings.

To try and make sense of it all, I have storage strategies for the three primary types of data I deal with as a salesperson:

• E-mail.
• Documents.
• Everything else.

E-mail

Our ancestors had journals, we have e-mail. Our e-mail archives chronicle nearly every aspect of our lives — from quotes to RMAs — it is probably in your e-mail. In today’s age of cheap storage and fast searching, the causes for deleting e-mail have been all but nullified. Don’t delete e-mail — you never know when you may need it.

My killer app is cloud-hosted e-mail. Considering availability, search know-how, and sheer storage space, two contenders rise to the top — Microsoft, with their Office365 offering, and Google Apps for Business.

Both allow you to bring your own domain name and provide massive amounts of reliable storage (50GB for Office365, 30GB for Google) and lightning-fast search capabilities. To give you an idea of just how much storage that is, I haven’t deleted a single e-mail since 2009, and I am using just 60 percent of my 30GB allowance from Google.

Both allow you to access e-mail using Outlook, Apple Mail, and your smartphone or tablet’s native e‑mail client.

As an added perk, Office365 provides five licenses for their popular Microsoft Office productivity suite as part of the $99/user/year fee.

Comparatively, Google Apps for Business costs $50/user/year for the standard plan, and $120/user/year for unlimited storage.

Documents

For PDFs, presentations, application images, and other digital stuff, I rely on Dropbox (www.dropbox.com). Certainly there are other options available, but for what I get — seamless desktop and mobile integration, absolutely bulletproof file synchronization and backup, simple sharing of large files — the price simply can’t be beat. If you keep your storage at 2GB and under, your account is free. If you need more, you can upgrade to Dropbox Pro for $99/year.

Everything Else

Receipts. Business cards. Little tidbits of information about competitors, product training, and design improvements. Quick notes on prospective principals, meeting reports, business planning ideas — the list goes on. Salespeople generate a lot of information every day that, by itself, may not seem all that important but, collected over time, could be a gold mine.

For all of this, I use Evernote (www.evernote.com). Evernote runs on both mobile and desktop systems, and allows users to store any type of digital information in a way that makes recall simple and fast. The cost, as with most of these tools, is free for the basic version. Evernote Premium, which adds a bevy of features, is $60/user/year.

Combined, unlimited e-mail storage and Evernote are truly my second brain. The rest of my stack, in one way or another, depends on one of the two for long-term storage and recall of my most important data.

Lead Generation — Cold Calling Is Dead

As far as I am concerned, cold calling died along with the fax machine. Assuming that you are actually able to get through the voicemail gatekeeper which is designed specifically to route salesperson calls directly to purchasing, people these days are simply too busy to talk to salespeople who aren’t already experts on their business and potential pain points.

In the age of quick access to volumes of business intelligence thanks to Google and social media, cold contacting a prospect without knowing their title, past career experience, current needs/pain points, and having a back pocket full of relevant chit-chat topics (hobbies, interests, political affiliations, and more) at the ready is akin the showing-up to a meeting in the pre-Internet era without literature and asking, “so what do you want to buy today?”

All of my prospecting nowadays starts with LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). Using my Business Premium Plan ($19.95/month), I am able to view the full names of all LinkedIn members who are first, second or third degree connections. So, for example, if I am looking for Electrical Engineers at Procter & Gamble, I will construct my search to use those criteria, and then drill down to my geographical territory.

Once I have some names, I use a service called SellHack (www.sellhack.com) to find their e-mail addresses. SellHack uses a proprietary intelligence engine to find e-mails using social media and a variety of other public databases. Provide SellHack a first name, last name, and company name, and the algorithm has a better than 60 percent chance of returning a valid e-mail address. SellHack is free for up to 10 inquiries per month, and $9/month thereafter for the basic plan.

Once I land a meeting using my newly found e-mail addresses, I use the fantastic, and free, Refresh app (www.refresh.io) to learn more about what makes my prospect tick. Refresh constructs a digital dossier that tells me what connections we have in common on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+, a summary of their professional information on LinkedIn, a record of all our interactions, and other ancillary information like whether or not their favorite sports team won last night.

Trip Planning — Cancellations Happen

Last time I checked, my iPhone contained nearly 2,400 contacts. Based on an informal survey of my rep colleagues, they are in the same boat, if not cruise ship. To make sense of this all, I created an app called CustomerMapr (www.customermapr.com) that I use daily.

First and foremost, CustomerMapr effortlessly maps the contacts and companies that are stored in my iPhone’s Address Book. I can either find contacts near my current location, or those that are in a particular city.

Once the contacts are mapped, I can use CustomerMapr to help with trip planning. Using the Meeting Requests functionality, I can organize contacts into a group based on geographic location, and the system will automatically e-mail the contacts to see if they are interested in meeting.

If one of these appointments falls through, I know that I can always use CustomerMapr to see who is nearby.

When I am done with a particular meeting, I can use the Call Report functionality to save content-rich meeting reports — complete with pictures — that are automatically e-mailed to me and saved to my Evernote account.

CustomerMapr is free to download from the iOS AppStore. The free version allows mapping of 10 contacts at time. A one-time charge of $20 unlocks the Pro version, which allows for unlimited contact mapping.

Now What?

For me, ditching my CRM and creating my own Salesperson Technology Stack was a game changer. If you have gone down a similar road, I would love to hear about what you use and how you use it. Drop me a line at [email protected]. I promise that I won’t delete it.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].