General Consultant Discussion

I wrote a new article about automation.

Specifically around the desire of most small business management to put alerts and notifications on ... pretty much everything.

CRM and automation go together like hand in glove so I've been front line, seeing different methods of automating tasks and what not.

9 times out of 10 the first instinct for SMB leadership is alerts! Ping someone when something needs their attention! Notify them! Text message! Ping! Ping! 

And I know a lot of us have experience with Knowledgesynch and similar products that help make that easy to do.

But ...

My experience shows that alerts are not useful and are counter-productive. Heck, productivity experts suggesting turning off alerts - even for something simple like that notification and chime that plays when Outlook emails come in.

If you don't want to click through, my basic premise is that automation should be used to prepare and organize information and people should learn to build new habits of reviewing that information on a regular basis. 

The combination of those two things creates a healthier, more productive work style that achieves superior results. 

And selfishly speaking, this approach helps drive CRM adoption instead of alienating salespeople and making them hate CRM (well... they might still hate it for other reasons but I will address those at a later date. :D)

More details in the article.

I would love to hear feedback / comments on the approach I take. If you have different experiences and feel that alerts work for you or your customers, I would like to hear more. 

A New Way to Think about CRM Automation