Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a recent chat I had with David Roberts, President and CEO of SugarCRM, the sales CRM platform focused on B2B growth. We talk about why sellers/salespeople don’t get any value from CRM systems, whether the advent of AI makes things better, whether organisations are taking a tool-first, problem-second approach, what they should be doing instead, and the role of contextual intelligence, amongst other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Closing the experience gap – Interview with Qualtrics executives from X4 – and is number 580 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with David:

• Current CRM Systems are Management Tools, Not Seller Tools: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have largely failed to fulfil their promise of helping sellers, instead acting primarily as management tools for control, pipeline, and forecast review, which leads to sellers viewing them as a burden.
• AI Will Revolutionize CRM by Ingesting Unstructured Data: AI is expected to completely change the game in CRM by ingesting unstructured data—the “language of relationships” (e.g., emails, conversations, text messages)—and making sense of it, eliminating the need for sellers to manually input information into many fields.
• AI Enables Real-Time Contextual Guidance for CX: AI will change the output of CRM by recognizing patterns and making recommendations to sellers on where to focus their time and energy. This includes providing prompts on what to discuss with a specific customer, like pointing out they are not reordering at the historical rate.
• The Future Interface is Conversational and In-the-Moment: Instead of manual data entry, the future of CRM is here, allowing sellers to simply record a five-minute audio or video after a meeting, which the system ingests and makes sense of. This conversational interface will also proactively prompt sellers with discovery questions, such as asking what they learned about the decision-makers or the compelling event for a customer’s decision.
• Contextual Intelligence is the New Focus for Enterprise Applications: The shift is moving beyond dashboards (Business Intelligence) to “contextual intelligence,” which provides the deep context necessary to narrow the aperture and guide people toward a specific idea, recommendation, or action.
• AI Enhances, Not Replaces, the Human Element of Selling: AI will give sellers an “Iron Man suit,” making them faster and more powerful, but it will not replace them. The human parts of the selling experience, such as conveying belief, engaging in discovery, and listening, will become even more important and valuable.
• Organizations Must Shift from a Tool-First to a Problem-First Approach: A major problem in the software industry is getting trapped in conversations about functionality and features (tool-first). Instead, the aspiration is for a “thin CRM layer” that ingests data but collects everything known about a customer from across the enterprise (ERP, quality management, back office) to provide context and drive action.
• Future AI Solutions Require Extensive Content Upload for Precision: To be precise, a precision selling platform built on conversational AI must be trained on a vast amount of content about the business, products, customers, and sales methodology. Future CRM implementations will require customers to upload content like sales methodology, objection handling, and competitive battle cards, going beyond just processing data.
• AI is the “Iron Man Suit” for Sales Managers, Improving Performance and Process: AI will assist sales managers by helping them monitor if salespeople are following the sales methodology and doing good discovery and solutioning. This will allow managers to better coach reps and can provide insight into whether the hard-and-fast processes are working, going beyond anecdotal evidence.
• AI Can Combat Customer Indecision, the Biggest Deal Blocker: More deals are lost to customer indecision (defaulting to the status quo) than any other reason. Best sellers counter this by creating a compelling event tied to the customer’s business objectives, and AI can help measure the effectiveness of approaches that de-risk the process and overcome this indecision.
• David’s best advice: Listen. Have great discovery. Really be curious about your customer’s business. Understand what motivates the person you’re talking to, how they’re successful in their own role, and figure out how what you do can help them achieve that.
• David’s Punk CX brand: Sonos

About David

David Roberts has spent a career empowering customer-facing organizations to excel at knowing their customers and in driving exceptional marketing, sales and service engagement. He is currently President and CEO of SugarCRM and is responsible for leading the vision, culture, strategy, and operations of the company. David has led exceptional companies and teams for 30 years with publicly listed and private equity-backed companies, with a focus on profitable growth and successful M&A.

He joined SugarCRM from Alchemer, a global SaaS company focused on helping 12,000 global customers improve their customers’ experiences (CX) and their customer and employee feedback programs. He served as CEO and Director during a period of incredible growth and scale; rebranding and repositioning the company and selling the business to KKR. In prior leadership roles, David was a Senior Partner in Accenture’s CRM practice, the CEO of ReedGroup (now part of Alight), and a cabinet member in Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration.

Check out SugarCRM, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) and Instagram at @SugarCRM and @sugarcrm respectively and feel free to connect with David on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash