The market for CRM software has grown considerably in the past decade from a $13 billion industry in 2010, it has nearly tripled in size to clock more than $45 billion in revenues in 2018. Businesses now have many options ranging from free CRM solutions to industry-ready and vertical-specific solutions to choose from. In the midst of this, the legacy CRM systems— engineered during the dot-com boom — continues to rule the CRM space.
So, what is a legacy CRM system?
Legacy CRM solutions are built for the sales leader in an organization, and not for the salespeople. They are hard to set up, does not easily integrate with your existing ecosystem and require extensive training. Even after all this hard work, your salespeople are burdened with manual data entry.
Legacy systems can also refer to an early generation, browser-based system. Compared to the previous category of legacy systems, these are easier to use and maintain. They may not always be optimized to run on newer versions of browsers, relying on outdated versions to run smoothly.
But, the question remains — are these legacy CRM solutions, which have become large and clunky over the years, the right solution for your business?
According to CSO Insights, business metrics that matter most to sales leaders such as win rates, quota attainment, and the sales team performance have shown insignificant improvement in the last five years.
The BIG question now is: when there are better options out there, do you really need to carry on with these legacy CRM solutions?
Here are nine reasons why you should dump your large and clunky CRM solution.
1. It’s loaded with unnecessary features your team won’t use
A feature-rich CRM is not a bad thing, but it doesn’t put your sales team at an advantage either. Unfortunately, legacy CRM solutions overload the product with features that for one, will test its tensile strength, and two, make things more complicated for your salespeople.
Current CRM solutions are filled with features that bloat the product and confuse the user-experience with too much unnecessary data — Forrester Study
Your salespeople require a simple and easy-to-use CRM solution that has just the right set of features to empower them to sell better and simplify the process.
2. Legacy CRM solutions have a steep learning curve
The problem with a complex and hard-to-use CRM solution is that your salespeople will have to spend a lot of time getting to know the product. This shouldn’t worry you too much as CRM solutions generally do take some learning.
So, whenever your high-velocity sales organization hires a salesperson, it takes a while to bring them on to the sales floor. But the longer they spend learning the product means more prospects slipping through the cracks and in turn lower user adoption. And every time there’s a new feature on the CRM, your salespeople require additional training and this results in a further lag in your sales process.
What your salespeople need is a solution that is easy to use right from the start and here, self-learning makes a lot of difference for your sales team to start selling quickly and efficiently.
3. Scalability comes with an expensive price-tag
As your business expands and brings in more prospects, you may want to automate some rudimentary tasks such as assigning prospects to your salespeople, sending welcome emails, tracking user behavior and more.
Legacy CRM solutions cap the number of records you can store, the workflows you can set up, and APIs are available only in their most expensive plans. It forces you to upgrade to a higher plan. Sure, you can save some money by opting for a yearly plan, but this means you are stuck on a long-term contract with the CRM and cannot switch even if you want to.
What your business and salespeople need is a solution that allows you to seamlessly switch between plans depending on your business needs.
4. Legacy CRM solutions require heavy customizations
Legacy CRM solutions require a technical team to get into the backend of the system and build the functionalities your business needs from scratch, resulting in loss of time and money for your business.
Your salespeople want to sell as soon as leads start coming into your CRM. But, when CRM specialists customize them to suit your business and this ends up taking a chunk of time, it delays their drive to sell and you’ll probably end up losing a few customers.
What your sales organization needs is a CRM solution that can be easily customized, without depending on a dedicated team to do it for them.
5. Your business applications don’t integrate easily with the CRM
Integrations increase the likelihood of your salespeople using the CRM solution, thereby improving adoption levels. This is because there is no learning curve for them involved in using the software they are already familiar with.
Legacy CRM solutions are not business-friendly right off the bat. This means that after you make the purchase, you’ll have to spend time integrating it with each business application you use in pursuit of an end-to-end system.
Your salespeople want to quickly get organized, conduct sales activities on platforms they are already familiar with, and save time on importing and exporting contact information.
6. Legacy CRM solutions have poor user-adoption
Did you know that 17% of CRM buyers face poor user adoption as a challenge with their current CRM solution? Most of the times it has to do with poorly designed user interfaces (UI).
Poor UI does not motivate your salespeople to work with the CRM solution. And before you know, they’ll stop using it. As a sales leader, you’ll need to track the sales metrics of your team and if your salespeople stop using the CRM, you will not be able to track it.
Your salespeople can adapt to the CRM solution better if it had a better user-interface — but legacy CRM solutions seldom do justice to the user interface. Your salespeople need a CRM solution with a simple UI that they feel good about using.
7. Your sales team cannot have conversations with context
The more your salespeople know prospects and customers, the better they can sell.
But, even today, around 18% of CRM users face difficulty creating a 360-degree view of customers from the CRM data.
You’d know that a 360-degree view of a prospect or customer is essential to have contextual conversations as they help convert prospects into customers.
However, large, clunky CRM solutions do not provide a complete picture of all customer data on a single screen.
As a result, companies that use legacy CRM solutions use over 35 different data capturing systems. While a few companies have an end-to-end system, the lack of this 360-degree view in a large number of cases hurts their business for the want of insights.
Your salespeople need a context-enabling CRM solution that provides a prospect’s conversation history, associated deals, their touchpoints with your company, related tasks, and appointments and how they engage in your website.
8. Clunky CRM solutions don’t capture leads easily
What your salespeople want is a CRM solution that simplifies the capturing process through smart web forms. This means that all your salespeople need to do is copy and paste a code snippet on your website and the CRM will take care of the rest.
A lot of CRM solutions capture leads easily and the process is straightforward: a prospect visits your website, engages with your salespeople via web-forms, email, phone or chat, and their information gets recorded in the CRM solution.
This is a very useful feature for your salespeople to understand customer needs when they get in touch, making them aware of crucial information like the size of their business and their industry.
Unfortunately, legacy CRM solutions require your salespeople to learn to code or have some knowledge of it to perform the same function that other easy-to-use CRM solutions have simplified.
But, why do your salespeople have to code instead of spending their time on selling?
9. Lack of support hinders your sales team’s productivity
As a sales leader, having accurate and real-time data about your customers and prospects is crucial in the decision-making process. Legacy CRM solutions are riddled with complex workflows which can often lead to downtimes and errors within the CRM resulting in loss of productivity for your sales team.
Lack of good customer support is one of the challenges why 20% of users want to replace their current CRM solution.
Thus, your salespeople will have to continuously reach out to the support team to resolve queries and issues at the earliest. Legacy CRM solutions, however, take advantage of this and charge extra for ‘priority support’ so that your salespeople can jump the queue and receive clarifications.
But, you as a customer shouldn’t be taxed and wait for unagreeable amounts of time to resolve issues with the CRM solution because your salespeople bank on real-time information — the lack of which can seriously hinder their sales productivity.
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While legacy CRM solutions have rightfully earned their status as the crown jewel, they are not ideal for your business anymore. They might have innovated what we see as a CRM. But they are by no means the best. Several other CRM solutions have been built over the last few years.
They have revolutionary, easy-to-use and straightforward interfaces that allow your salespeople to start selling right out of the box — unlike clunky CRM solutions, which require extensive training sessions before your team can confidently use it.
