A few years back we’re of the belief that why the heck should someone start another CRM or sales tool. CRM is a crowded, 30-year-old competitive market where 100s of players including bigwigs like Salesforce, Microsoft, and SAPs are playing.
Why another sales tool? You might also be in the same line of thinking. The same thing was asked to us over and over by different people during the customer interviews we’ve been doing for the last 1.5 years.
So we were of no doubt, what should be the purpose of our first blog post. It is to explain to you why we jumped into this and what is in it for you and the future of sales.
Our Tussle/history with CRMs
We were going through struggle while running our first venture. We were profitable and revenue was from new sales each month. We were literally on the ground and It was important for us to keep the energy of the sales team up every day. As spreadsheets and notes started to become less helpful in managing our sales process, we ended up with purchasing a CRM. But the memory of the first CRM I learned, the free Open SugarCRM in 2011 was a ghost of the past. All those new jargons, Leads to Account conversion to Potential and also questions like when to convert a lead. It was a really struggling thing then. Felt how easy our sales process is and what is this all about. It took almost a year to learn all those. The first CRM we bought was Zoho, after a year we switched to Insightly with great hope. All we wanted was to see how things are going and how the sales team is doing their job every day. Insightly too was just a wasted hookup in hope of a relationship. Our sales team never used it. When we force with determination, we had great resistance from our instinct itself that we are forcing them something that is not their pie. I strongly felt accurate data always push better productivity and used to be strong advocate of this kind of administrative tasks.Problem is I get tired of pushing the team.We switched to PipeDrive. Simple and Pipeline was easy. We were not using that for anything else. Just the pipeline. I had no answer to the question of why can’t you use a spreadsheet than paying 12USD. In spite of all these, we were thriving. Making profits, bootstrapped and our own money, yet finding it difficult to scale the business due to external market challenges. Our exposure to medium and large enterprises with our product helped us taking a walk through of their sales organizations and challenges. Many of them were using Salesforce and custom made CRMs and we found none of them are happy. Having not satisfied with current tools are common. But the dissatisfaction index on CRMs were something exceptional.