Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis? – Interview with David Campbell of SugarCRM

May 14, 2021

Today’s interview is with David Campbell, the vice president of product marketing at SugarCRM, the #1 rated Customer Experience platform. David joins me today to talk about CRM, what grade he would give CRM after being around for 25 years, SugarCRM’s recent CRM and Sales Impact Report, what the findings mean, what we need to do differently and whether or not we are on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Improving the customer experience of a FMCG category through a pandemic – Interview with Jan Kodadek — and is number 388 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at SugarCRM for sponsoring my podcast this month.

SugarCRM, the provider of the #1 rated Customer Experience platform, is trusted by thousands of companies in over 120 countries to help them achieve high-definition CX. Recently they released their new CRM and Sales Impact Report which surveyed 1,000 sales professionals from around the globe on what’s driving (or stalling) revenue and customer engagement. The report also asks a provocative question: Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis. To find out the answer check out and download the report here.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with David:

Companies desperately need CRM products. But, as an industry, we are desperately under serving our customers.
The CRM industry’s performance over the last 25 years would have to be a C- with a note saying ‘ambitious but well off the mark’.
SugarCRM’s recent CRM and Sales Impact Report: Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis found that:
- “half (50%) of all professionals surveyed reported that they cannot access the same view of customer data across marketing, sales, and service”.
- “CRMs are failing sales teams, customers, and prospects, with over half (52%) of sales leaders reporting that their CRM platform is costing potential revenue opportunities. Within certain industries, lost revenue opportunities increase, rising to 65% in finance and insurance and 62% in healthcare and pharmaceuticals.”
- ”53%of respondents report that the administrative burdens of their CRM causes friction for their sales team and the average sales rep spends only 54% of his or her time actually selling.”
- ”50% of all respondents to our survey report their organization’s sales team cannot access aggregated customer data across marketing, sales, and service systems
One of the biggest obstacles facing companies is to be able to organize itself in a way that makes sense.
When you divide your company up into marketing, sales and service, for example, you’ve now created three separate containers for all the people who deal with customers.
But, customers don’t see three departments. They only see one company.
Are sales people considered when CRM systems are being designed?
The system needs to take the burden away from sales people and take it on itself, automate the collection and processing of that data and then give back something to those reps like insights etc to help them do their job better.
That would flip the value equation so sales people would then be getting more from the system than they’re putting in.
Many CRM systems haven’t kept up with user/customer behaviour and the explosion in channels.
We’re not on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis. We’re already in it.
The first step to solving this is recognizing that somebody needs to be responsible for looking at your entire interactions history with customers from a holistic perspective, not just from the perspective of sales, marketing or support.
Then you need to have technology that supports an holistic and integrated view of CX and process that spans multiple departments.
Then you need to have people who are really well trained and have the vision of the experience you want to deliver and the know how of how to deliver it when they’re dealing with customers.
Start with the end in mind.
Backcountry, a specialist online outdoor retailer, competes with the likes of Amazon that offers choice and scale using their CRM system to ramp up the human connection aspect and deliver a really personalized experience. They provide a white glove service if you like, where their reps are called gearheads and are a combination of a concierge mixed with an expert advisor.
A major global electronics brand has mapped out their customer experience in great detail, all the way down to what’s the experience going to be like to unbox one of their products. They run this from their own in-house application/platform and use SugarCRM in a headless architecture fashion to provide embedded CRM services to that application. This has been integrated with other back office processes (order management, inventory, fulfilment etc) so they can connect online as well as brick and mortar sales. Moreover, they use SugarCRM’s analytics and AI capabilities to allow them to make better decisions around optimisation and performance.
We need to shield both users and, most importantly, customers from complexity.
One of the biggest barriers to achieving this is siloed thinking.
Take a step back and thinking about what a customer’s experience is like today, how that works and consider what are the steps and things that a customer goes through in their lifetime with you.
Then take a step back even further and ask yourself what should that experience be? What what do we want that experience to be? And, then how does that align with our value proposition as a company?
The most effective companies are the ones who have a very simple value proposition and then basically move heaven and earth in order to ensure that they meet it for their customers very simply.
David’s Punk CX word: Simplicity.
David’s Punk CX brand: Carved.

About David

David is vice president of product marketing at SugarCRM where he leads the team that plans and executes go-to-market strategy for all of Sugar’s products and services. A 30-year veteran in software and technology, David has successfully conceived, developed, launched, and grown multiple, industry-defining products at a variety of companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Avalara, and AvidXchange.