A typical company in this category is making limited use of their CRM and many fail to achieve their objectives, or just fail outright. Often these deployments have been rushed with very little planning or a lack of understanding of what the solution can do for your business. 

Most Zombie businesses undertake activities in isolation and focus on customer-facing activities performed by staff, e.g. how many sales calls were there today? How many cases were resolved by the service team? There is very little focus on the future, with most of the analysis being retrospective. 

You may be producing pipeline and forecast reports, but these are often padded with dead wood so therefore are unreliable. Sales may go up after spending money on a campaign, but you don’t know which elements were the impactful ones and it’s very difficult to show direct revenue contribution. 

Adoption of the CRM system is patchy and best practice is not commonplace. People find their own work arounds, reverting to using spreadsheets, diaries and contact books – this just compounds the issue. 

Zombie businesses want to see what’s happened, and you know that things ought to be better, but you don’t know how.