Learn how you can achieve better results out of your CRM.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology is one of the most basic and foundation tools that digital marketers use to manage customer relationships and interactions with potential customers. At some point in time, all marketers will have had some kind of interaction with a CRM. In fact, running a business without one is costly.
However, just having a CRM does not necessarily guarantee success. How you use it matters. Various studies have put the CRM failure rate around 18% to 69%. So, why do we have this high failure rate? What are marketers doing wrong? Why does CRM fail, and how do we fix it?
In this episode, Jeroen Corthout, Co-Founder of Salesflare.com, shares his insights on why CRMs fail and how you can fix them in your business.

Jeroen is the Co-Founder of Salesflare, the simply powerful CRM for small businesses. Jeroen loves building great experiences, tinkering with products, reading on diverse topics, optimizing health, and a good cup of coffee. Jeroen wants to improve the way people collaborate through sales.
Podcast Timestamps/Outline
01:11 – Introduction
02:08 – About Jeroen Corthout
05:27 – How pharmaceutical sales differ in Europe compared to the U.S.
08:27 – Issues on why CRM fail and how to choose the best CRM
13:29 – Trying a free CRM
16:23 – Why not try a freemium CRM and move to paid once you need the features?
18:14 – If you’re not getting the success you’re looking for, is it really a tool problem or a process problem?
20:14 – How to know and differentiate the CRM that people want to use
24:08 – Why do we need all of these tools?
26:56 – Revenue operations
28:17 – Sales enablement
30:01 – Timeline in implementing a CRM
33:19 – What should a B2B Digital Marketer do first in order to improve their CRM?
34:49 – Connect with Jeroen Corthout
Memorable Quotes
“The goal is to have salespeople use the CRM properly, then you can start thinking how you can organize it.”
“What is the very practical goal you are trying to achieve with your CRM?”
“Involve your sales team in the selection of a CRM.”
“When you make a choice, price is secondary. First, look at whether it’s actually going to be used and whether it’s going to bring you return.”
“Whether it starts with free, it can be nice, but does it actually going to be the CRM that your people want to use is much more important than whether it’s free or not.”
“Even though it starts with free, in the end, you will be paying a lot of money for the functionality you actually want.”
“There’s a ton of revenue lost in a bad follow-up.”
“CRM is not a database. It’s a thing through which you sell.”
“If you approach things in a pragmatic way and you don’t overcomplicate things, if you keep it simple, then it’s going to save you so much effort in the long run. It’s going to make you so much more successful.”
Episode Links and Resources
Jeroen’s website: https://salesflare.com/
Jeroen’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeroencorthout
Digital activity ROI assessment: https://b2bdm.com/digital-activity-roi/
More episodes related to sales to CRMs: https://b2bdm.com/customer-relationships