Is Your CRM Built for Technology Experts or Sales Experts?

When choosing a CRM, companies often focus on what the CRM can do, how much it will cost, and whether it will integrate with their environment.

Rarely do we think about WHO the CRM was originally built for or HOW it was developed. But these factors have a huge impact on the effectiveness of the product and how it will actually work in your environment - much more of an impact than whether the CRMs company’s marketing is slick or their salespeople convincing.

Most legacy CRMs were built as digital Rolodexes, and then updated over time with new features and add-ons to make them do more things. Other CRMs were built to compete with the legacy CRMs, adding new features or competing on cost.

Our CRM was built for sales experts, in partnership with sales experts, to meet the needs of sales experts. Here’s why that matters.

Most CRMs Make Money on Technical Complexity

If you’re using one of the 800-pound-gorilla CRM platforms, like Salesforce or Microsoft, then you already know just how technically complex your CRM can be and how complicated it is to update or customize it.

Most enterprise Salesforce instances require multiple add-ons, plug-ins, integrations, and custom coding to get the software to work the way the sales leadership envisioned. Users complain that it’s difficult to learn to use out of the box, and leaders complain that it takes too long to onboard new salespeople to use it.

One former Salesforce user told our sales team that buying Salesforce was like buying a mansion and then learning you had to pay extra to use the bathroom.

Salesforce and others like it have no incentive to become less complex or easier to use. The more complex it is, the more money they, and their technology partners, make on implementing, training, and customizing your instance.

We Built Membrain for Sales Experts

At Membrain, our reason for being was never to build a better piece of technology or to make money on training and customization.

Our purpose has always been to elevate the sales profession.

Early on, we partnered with sales training and development experts as channel partners, and they helped us build a product that is easy to implement, easy to use, easy to customize, and easy to improve. Our product helps them help their customers improve HOW they sell - so that everyone makes more money, and no one is bogged down in technical misery.

Check out this side-by-side comparison page of Membrain vs other CRMs »

How our Sales Development Experts Help Us Build a Better Product

Our channel partners are not systems integrators or technical professionals. They are sales development experts, business consultants, and strategists. In general, they’re not the most technically savvy people in the world. It’s just not their job.

They partner with us to access a no-code approach to their clients and to enable them to reinforce their strategy, process, methodology, and training through that technology. They need it to be flexible and customizable without a large amount of technical experience and with zero coding knowledge.

These partnerships help us build a better product for sales in several ways:

• Our partners are incentivized to make their strategy, process, methodology, and training stick - and we’re incentivized to help them do that
• We listen closely to their feature requests and act on them. Because they’re sales development experts and not technical experts, their feature requests are centered around how to get the KPIs they need to prove their value to their clients
• Sales development experts need workflows within the CRM to help them reinforce their training, and they help us understand what they really need
• Our partners need to upskill their clients’ salespeople effectively, and they show us how to help them to that
• Because they’re not technical experts, our partners need to be able to customize the CRM for each client without coding or hiring expensive technical developers

In short, our product is better because our channel partners help us make it better for their clients' best interests.

Our Partners Make the Product Better for End Users Too

Where other CRM vendors and their channel partners make money on complexity, we turned it on its head and made the complexity as low as possible so our sales development partners can make money on strategy and training - not on technical development.

In the end, this benefits everyone, including end users. Where other CRMs require major investments in technical development, ours frees up your budget to spend the money on sales strategy and getting HOW you sell embodied into your product.

And because our product is designed to be easily customizable by our channel partners, without coding, it’s also easily customizable by internal sales experts and company leaders to meet their needs.

We didn’t set out to build just another CRM. We set out to build a platform that makes life easier and better for sales professionals and better for the companies they work for, too. We’re always seeking new channel partners to work with, and we’d love to show you how we can help you sell more, do more, and do it better.