Yesterday when speaking with prospects I received a very common objection: “We currently use Salesforce as our primary CRM. I can’t see the value in adding another tool.” As an SDR, having an understanding of Entytle’s capabilities and how it compares/interacts with all of the other common tools in the industry is critical. This helps me talk through a customers’ situation, needs and potential opportunity .
This objection comes from a combination of two things:
- Perception that CRMs (like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc) can solve an all-encompassing set of problems and
- Lack of awareness of industry-specific tools that exist to solve specific challenges, often in combination with more generic tools like a CRM.
In working with dozens of OEMs, most of whom have a robust CRM, they have all struggled to build a holistic single source of truth within their CRM. This limits their understanding of their existing customers and reduces their ability to proactively target their installed base.
There are two paths they can take to solve this –
- Make a significant investment in customizing the CRM (which is generic, not OEM-specific) and adding massive amounts of data, or
- Look for a purpose-built solution that is focused on solving the data challenges, and then complimenting the CRM’s capabilities.
Of course, our customers have decided on path B, leverage a purpose-built solution, although many of them wasted years and significant cost pursuing path A first (unsuccessfully).
A very common issue companies run into is standardized functionality. Salesforce solutions can either be not enough or, vice versa, too much, or too complex, etc. In one instance you need to pay for additional customization, in the other you will be paying for a full set of features, which honestly, most of which will never be used.
Many customization projects require hiring a whole team of (expensive) salesforce experts – just to get you up and going. Of course, it is not a ‘once-and-done’ exercise – you will need a team to continue to manage and evolve it. Now, let’s say you have the best experts on your team and they are spending significant time and money on this customization only to still fall short of your expectations because the data and reports are incomplete, not unified, duplicated and overall a mess.
This is a need Entytle fills by becoming the trusted installed base data platform specifically designed for OEMs. Entytle is often a fraction of the price (of customization, additional data ingestion, maintenance, etc for the CRM) and we partner with you each step of the way saving your company from needing to hire experts for the task.
I’ll be the first to admit it’s easy to slip up and enter bad data into your CRM (or ERP or other systems). Sales teams are focused on selling and not data quality. In our experience, data is often incomplete, inconsistent, duplicate, unstructured, etc – all further muddying the waters. Salesforce, with all of its great capabilities, comes with a very steep learning curve.
As functionality becomes more customized, and data becomes more comprehensive, so will the training and expertise needs increase . Unless you have hired dedicated salesforce experts and analysts (and often even if you do), it gets tough to get the real value out of your customer data that you should be able to. Over time, as the loss of Tribal knowledge occurs, this data becomes even more unusable.
Entytle understands the value of these silo databases and has built a Data Quality Engine that unifies, cleans, and augments all your customer data without the costly need of a team to keep it up to date. Pairing a great tool like salesforce with a powerful solution like Entytle has allowed dozens of OEMs to allow their sales teams to focus on what they do best!
Learn more about how Entytle can help your Industrial Organization.