Why are we misunderstanding CRM softwares

Background: Being in a formal CRM career with a product startup, it's been a 7th year for me to work with a lot of clients and even got to understand the competitive products like Salesforce, Zoho, SuiteCRM in great details. I had to wear multiple hats ranging from BA to guy installing CRM to customer advocate for large FinTech company to demoing advanced martech for indian PSUs and BFSI sector.

I have been lurking in this sub and all I can see is the bulk of guys using advanced CRM softwares like a data entry software, without leveraging any "CRM as a Tech". Since there isn't seem to be much awareness on such advanced capabilities, I want to provide a clarification on CRM as a technology through few points and use cases.

1. Mainly CRM as a process started with Technology. So it's not something that can be used like excel, rather it's been a progression of at least 20 years tech development. Think like CRMs as your mate who can track your customers on it's own, who can prioritise them or even serve them dynamic content as per their needs. It can tell you exactly who visited you as anonymous first timer and how it got converted to a very minute detail. If you are not using this, then it's not a CRM but simply an excel with better UI and more clicks.

2. CRMs offers configurablility, so that you can define a use case and then execute it in automation or with manual intervention. I presented 150+ demonstrations on sales, support, marketing. All I had to do was asking the client his business process of sales/marketing and configuring it in the software using workflows, usually within few hours. If you are using a CRM that lacks configurablility or that's not configured correctly, then it's not gonna help you at all to grow.

3. CRM offers a technical way to manage your customers interactions. But over the years, it grew well into designing it's own, effective business process. E.g. It offers leads and opportunities as separate modules, with separate criteria to clearly define your prospect. Lead modules focusing on how contact is entered in your digital universe vs opportunity is about how you treated it to be your customer. Such model is configured by default using components and even within their own purview, each components has 100 features to utilise for better customer understanding.

4. CRM is no way gonna replace your existing sales folks, so rather use it to be helpful for them. A lot of asks on the sub didn't show this element. You can well try to ask a sales time optimiser that would help your sales person to prioritise his appointments or may be a workflow to help him creates tasks for him automatically. Otherwise all requirements are usually from the CEOs who have no idea about workplace struggles of sales people, and thus sales team tends to ignore the CRMs or using only to fill junk data coz their boss asked them for entries.

Whole intent of this post is to suggest that there is actually a methodology & technology offered by CRM. It's open to offer unlimited growth only in exchange of our better understanding of what CRM means.