Having evaluated dozens of CRMs to replace my company's internally built system, here's my five cents:
- Salesforce is slow, expensive after adding add-ons, costly to customize, and visually unappealing. The older and less tech-friendly workers I've surveyed found it painful to use. The same might be said of many Salesforce competitors, including MSFT Dynamics and Netsuite. SugarCRM also has many of the same failings, but its UI/UX is better IMHO.
- Close.io, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Nethunt, Nutshell, Nimble and few others have a simpler and more engaging take on CRM that seems to be easier for a wider variety of users to adopt.
- A big chunk of CRM's perceived value is better found through sales training that focuses on qualifying customers and good work habits.
- CRM cannot turn most under or non-performing salespeople into performers.
- Many performing workers will resist adding contacts and data to a CRM for several reasons, self-preservation instinct being most prominent.
- Nurture marketing, once a CRM innovation, has become an annoyance for client/customer prospects... particularly over email.
- Predictive CRM requires either a lot of data to train, or hard to obtain signals. The concept underachieves.
The next great thing may very well be inversion of CRM, whereby your customers/clients automate the acquisition, evaluation, negotiation and purchase of products or services. At the enterprise level this exists for commodity products & services, but it's largely non-existent at the SMB/SOHO level. The normalization and quantification problem is significant, but I'm confident ML will address some of these challenges in due time.
Tl;dr ... there's still no substitute for hiring the right people. Charisma, emotional intelligence & motivation always surpasses sales automation.