CRM Dashboards are misleading

I recently watched a great keynote speech given by Malcom Gladwell at the New Yorker annual conference where he talked about “mismatches” in hiring people.

The core concept is that organizations determine specific skills that are important for a role, isolate those skills, and then evaluate candidates based on their ability for each skill.  It all sounds so logical and obvious.

The problem, according to Gladwell, is that it doesn’t work.

He uses several examples spanning professional sports, lawyers, and teachers, and in every instance demonstrates that the candidates’ ability in isolated skills - vertical jump in basketball, mental acuity in football, college entrance scores for lawyers, level of scholastic achievement in teaching - are all poor predictors for determining if people will perform well in their job!

There is a fundamental problem with converting “people” into stats and using these stats to make decisions.  It is logical but not always worthwhile.

Now think about how most companies use CRM analytics to determine “customer profiles” and predict future sales.  Current CRM dashboards have detailed pie charts and graphs that isolate key information.  But is it a reliable source for decision-making?  Is it RIGHT?

I don’t think so (gasp!).

I think that CRM dashboards are misleading and setup sales people for failure, or worse, encourage them to “cheat the system”, making most CRM analytics nearly worthless.

There’s a need for CRM dashboards to provide real value to salespeople by helping them process a lot of data that helps them to manage the human side of business.

I think we have the solution.

Thanks to Jay Godse for sending me this video clip.
Graph from Graph Jam.