The Future of CRMs: Understanding the Needs and Wants of Sales Professionals

Sales

Jun 30

Request

A Chicago-based market research firm came to Zintro with a request for deep qualitative insights from those closest to CRMs: sales professionals. Their goal was to run 24 one-on-one interviews with professionals ranging from SDRs to CROs across hyper-growth companies, especially in tech, healthcare, and social media. These 45-minute sessions would shadow participants through their daily flow, from sourcing leads to closing deals, while probing usage habits, feature gaps, and pain points. The segments were to be broken out by positions (SDR/BDR, Account Executives, Account Managers, Middle Managers, and Executives) and company sizes.

Solution

Zintro’s recruitment team first focused on identifying hyper-growth companies. Using TechCrunch, fundraising news, press releases, and other online sources, the team identified ~300 target companies with 30%+ YoY growth. On the participant side, the recruitment and project management teams carefully vetted candidates using a multi-criteria profile. Participants had to be:

In-role for 1–5 years
Demonstrating upward mobility (1 promotion per 2 years in role)
No more than 3 lateral job switches without progression

Zintro sourced and screened a broad base of potential candidates, eventually narrowing down a hand-picked pool of high performers that fit the exacting criteria. As one might expect, more high performers are focused more on selling than on taking part in research which made things more challenging. It turns out no one knows more high performers than other high performers, so referral bonuses worked well.

Results

The client selected and interviewed all 24 participants and conducted every interview within a two-week window, averaging 2–3 interviews per day. Despite the advancement of automation and AI features in most CRMs, participants revealed a surprising amount of manual effort still involved. From SDRs to CROs, recurring themes emerged around the frustrations with inefficiency, desire for streamlined UX, and a tension between AI opportunity and job security fears. SDR’s in particular felt that AI was likely to disrupt their position in the near future. Despite the concerns, the possibility of an AI-driven search within one’s CRM made many of the participants excited! Overall, the project was a great success and the client concluded by saying “Great work Zintro team! Always a pleasure and we’ll see you on the next one :)”.