At times I find myself sort of defiantly using this plainspoken phrase to describe our approach to technology:

“What we’re here to do is make life better for your staff.”

Because it’s easy to overthink technology sometimes, or get overly high minded about it. Doing technology right requires serious investment, so leadership teams and boards get involved. Slide decks and spreadsheets get created, return on investment gets scrutinized, success metrics get raised. What is this CRM going to do for us? How does this further our goals and priorities?

All fair and appropriate questions. But by itself, the CRM will not raise you a single extra dollar, or engage you a single extra person. By itself, your technology will not chase your goals or priorities.

Your staff will.

Of course, you already know what your goals are and your priorities are, because you hired staff to care about those things. Chances are you hired brilliant leaders for each of your key priorities, and surrounded them with highly capable staff.

These people spend every day thinking and strategizing and acting on behalf of your organization’s goals, its ambitions, and its priorities. They have depth of expertise and no shortage of strategic ideas for how to get there.

They just don’t have the tools and systems they need to make those ideas happen. 

They don’t have well customized systems that support and power their work. They don’t have clean data that lets them communicate with the right people at the right time. They don’t have the ability to come up with innovative new ideas or experiments and quickly get them into the world. And they’re nowhere close to getting back accurate, real-time data to help evaluate how well those experiments are working and make appropriate adjustments.

It’s as if you’ve hired an entire kitchen worth of brilliant chefs and line cooks, but given them only wooden spoons and mediocre ingredients to cook with.

Of course, if they’re like most of the dedicated and resourceful staff we’ve encountered at most organizations, chances are they’re still producing impressive meals. But they’re working a whole lot harder, and getting a lot less far, than they could if they really had everything working for them. If they really had the tools that not only support their work but superpower it, they would be blowing your goals and priorities away.

That’s what an excellent CRM system or website should be doing for them. It doesn’t come out of the box that way. It can’t, that’s now how technology platforms work. You need people who can do the never-ending highly skilled work of understanding your needs and constantly helping the tools fit those needs beautifully. Those are the platform teams we help put in place.

But when it comes down to it, in many ways yes, it’s as simple as this: We’re here to make life better for your staff.

Because your staff know what they need. If we can listen carefully and deliver on those needs, everything starts getting better. Everyone starts being able to do better and do more. We see this happen regularly, reliably.

You’ve got the talent and expertise already. You’ve got the ideas. Connect that talent to the technology to support and superpower it, then sit back and watch your chefs create some amazing meals.