Everything is hard

I’m not sure what I’m writing about yet, as I’m still trying to tease out the idea. It came to me when I was swimming maybe, or during my morning coffee - but at it’s core, I’m struck by the following:

I’m currently in the last half of a client engagement where we were asked to review and recommend a “type” of CRM for the client. That’s about as much detail as I’m comfortable sharing on a public facing blog post, but you get the idea. What struck me is that, in total, we probably examined 30 products in the same space…..all tackling the same problem slightly differently (some more so than others), but I’m beginning to think that the big issue around lack of CRM adoption is less to do with software features and more to do with the fact that building a habit, any habit, is really hard.

I’m loving some of Unsplash’s more artistic stock photos.

Which, if you take that thought to its logical progression, means that you should really try to address the problem from a “habit creation” perspective a la James Clear, instead of searching for the perfect CRM. Maybe the tool becomes truly irrelevant. Yes, I’m aware of the irony of coming to the above conclusion in the middle of a software evaluation engagement that I’m being well-compensated to conduct. Don’t shoot the messenger.

Or maybe, if we abstract up a level, it’s more a statement that, the attitude with which we do something matters a lot more than the how. This brings to mind Kanban philosophy in the manufacturing world, which has just as much applicability 50 years ago as it does today. The tools have changed, but the deliberate intent is the same. So yeah, maybe this is a tool indifference post, as opposed to a “hating on CRMs” post.

So even though it’s really hard and annoying to measure everything that’s happening at a startup, because things are messy and chaotic in the early stages - if you approach it with the mindset of it is critical to the success of anything that I do, that I measure my activity so that I can get better at it, then it becomes easier to tabulate things manually at the beginning, and then to insist on transitioning to dashboards and KPIs when appropriate.

I’m still on the fence on whether this is a realization that someone can be taught or shown, versus needing to “get there” themselves. I guess you have to figure out how that person gets convinced, i.e. data or visuals, or testimonials etc and then present information in that format - but does that do it? I dunno…