What if I told you that I have my own private driver who takes me everywhere I need to go? You might think I’m very lucky or very well off. But what if I also said that I wasn’t particularly lucky or well off or special, because these days, almost everyone has a driver? You would probably find that puzzling and ask what I was talking about.

“The GPS that most new cars now have,” I answer. “It’s like having your own personal driver.”

Surely you would find this statement disingenuous. After all, while a GPS is a great tool for helping you navigate where you need to go, you still have to do the driving yourself, which involves determining your destination, fueling the car, and handling any problems that come along the way -- flat tire, collision, emergency back home, etc. The GPS doesn’t do any of that for you.

Yet there are many people in C-level offices who proclaim that their companies “do” CRM because they have subscribed to Salesforce. That is every bit as ludicrous as saying that you have a personal driver because you have a GPS system in your car.

What is CRM? It’s the methodology that each company uses to turn its suspects into prospects, prospects into new customers, and new customers into long-term, highly profitable customers. To do that, companies need to properly understand who their most profitable clients are, so they can target and properly manage communications with similar businesses. Doing that requires data analytics and segmentation tools that most CRM software like Salesforce can do.

But while Salesforce can facilitate CRM, Salesforce itself is not CRM. You know who else agrees with me? Salesforce. This is what they have posted on their home page.

"Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal: getting and keeping customers. It's an overall strategy to help you learn more about their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both of you. Successful CRM involves many different areas of your company, starting with sales and extending to other customer-facing areas like marketing and customer service. Salesforce.com offers a technology solution for all those areas."

(Disclaimer: I am actually a fan of Salesforce and its contribution to proper CRM. I have used it while assisting many of my clients through their subscriptions. I could write a whole other post about its outdated -- potentially never "indated"-- user interface that every client I've worked with hates. But that's for another day.)

So CRM is a methodology which requires a proactive process and a reactive dialog, all within the guidelines of specific corporate messaging. A typical sales process looks a bit like a conveyor belt. At the front end are suspects leading to prospects leading to qualified leads leading to proposals leading to clients leading to growing the lifetime value of each client. That is what CRM in its totality must accomplish. Since conveyor belts are mechanical, the idea that CRM can also be mechanical seems to make sense. The problem is that conveyor belts move things while CRM must move people.

And here lies the greatest rub. Long ago, Katherine Briggs and Isabelle Myers completed a still never disproven study which proves that there are 16 different personality types among humans. Consider the sales implications of that when you are trying to sell a product or service to a company or organization. In most cases, there likely is more than one decision maker to affect. That creates as many as 256 potential personality combinations. Oh and don't forget about your sales person/team and their personality traits. Add even a single salesperson and there are over 4,000 personality combinations. Maybe most important, each prospective company has its own unique opportunities and obstacles which must be addressed. These different combinations create the need for different messaging and approaches and that’s where “systems" fall apart and human interaction must manage the transformation. You just can’t perform CRM by opening Salesforce, sending a blanket email to 1,000 different individuals who seem as if they have similar company needs, and count on a singular set of words working equally on all.

So if email blasting isn’t the best use of Salesforce, how can it be used best? My dad used to have what salespeople used to call a "tickler file.” That tickler file was a recipe box with index cards inside on which each contained notes from each conversation. He would write on the card the date for the next interaction, and then file the cards in sequence such that each morning he would open the box and see if any of the cards showed that date for the next step. That is the best use of Salesforce. If you are using Salesforce as a way to communicate to everyone who sits at the same location on your conveyor belt with the same message, then you don't know how to sell and no software will ever help you. Salesforce needs to facilitate a highly effective action that a salesperson must do uniquely and on a case-by-case basis. And not enough c-level folks realize that the subscription wasn’t the sales solution. It certainly can make sales people more effective when used properly, but it is not the methodology for increasing sales.

And that is the point. Salesforce is a very good tool for increasing sales, but it is not a method. It’s not a strategy or a process or a salesperson. It is something you use within your CRM, not something that does CRM. That heavy lifting must be done by each person on your sales team(s). And you'll know that first hand when sales don’t hit goals and you are called in to explain that to the board. Because they won't be calling in Salesforce.