CRM Kibble

Eating one’s own dog food, or “dogfooding” is pretty common. It is so common that I had to Wikipedia it this morning to make sure I knew what it meant.

Turns out, I am one heck of a dogfooder. In every possible way. Before this job, I worked in a warehouse stacking Hill’s Science Diet dog food on pallets. But I digress.

The factories I work with do some solid dogfooding. They use their own stuff all the time. I am in the audiovisual (AV) business, so it just kind of makes sense. We all make video calls. We all use AV. Might as well be the AV we manufacture.   

Those same folks dogfooding all over the place, never eat their own CRM dog food. They never sit face down in a bowl of Sales Friskies. It only takes one hot second, when someone is promoted from doing actual stuff to being in ‘management’ before it’s all left behind. Immediately, keystrokes and mouse clicks become abstract. The frustration of RED MANDATORY FIELDS evaporates into decisions about what brown booze they will have stashed in their fancy private office suite.

Anything custom is yours. You own it. This is your product. If your company is customizing the CRM to fit, the execs should do a few minutes of dogfooding each month. Simple stuff. Look up a customer’s phone number. Try to record a meaningful data point into the CRM. Or craziest of all, create a quote.

I can tell you with complete certainty that in our industry, the execs are pretty certain the contacts got into ‘their outlook’ from the systems they set up 15 years ago. It is unlikely they know how much money they are spending on wasted clicks and keystrokes.   

Let’s go dogfooding. Who’s a good CEO? WHO’S A GOOD CEO?!