Help me through this logic, please.

Ann All (with ITBusinessEdge.com) posted an entry in her blog today about the optimistic outlook for CRM sales.  She wrote, “Datamonitor, KensingtonHouse, CSO Insights and Gartner are among the companies with an optimistic outlook on CRM.”  She then added AMR Research to the list.

I won’t dispute the prediction. 

What I will say is that progress is painfully slow with respect to CRM meeting the requirements of salespeople.  Help me through this logic, please: 

• CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, right? 
• Sales, Customer Care, Marketing and Finance managers all need their reports from the CRM system to do their jobs managing customers, right?
• Who inputs a fair amount, if not most of the data?  Salespeople, right? 
• They have to be prodded, threatened, incentivized and shamed into keeping their information up to date, right?
• Follow me on this, please.  If the salespeople don’t sell anything, there aren’t going to be customers and customer relationships for a CRM system to manage, right?
• So, why isn’t there anything in it for the salespeople?  In fact, don’t most of your salespeople use your company’s CRM system for little more than basic contact management? 
• So why does the task of keeping the CRM system up to date at the expense of their selling time make any sense at all? 
• Why don’t the CRM companies design systems help salespeople sell more?  Because salespeople aren’t their customers.  Management is.

What we need is more companies like White Springs and The TAS Group that understand the size and the impact of the CRM problem and are providing solutions.  And we also need CRM companies to start adding capabilities that will contribute to, rather than hinder, a sales person’s ability to sell.  When that happens I guess we should call it CRM 2.0.