It’s time we have a talk about the 360° view.  

You know the one. Every CRM promises it. Almost every case study video or customer quote from a CRM company mentions it. 

It’s like everyone's in a race to try and get as much information as possible. Know as much as possible.  

As though the answer to serving customers better (and driving more revenue from those customers) is being able to know as much about them as possible. It’s both too much and not enough. 

This desire for more and more information is the reason every company out there is falling all over themselves to offer ‘insights’. All promising to ‘separate the signal from the noise’ while burying users in information.  

‘You want to know how to drive more revenue from your current book of business? Great. Here’s every piece of information you could ever hope to know about them.’ 

People are drowning in information. It’s time we did something about that. 

Who is this valuable for?  

Now, I’m not saying that a 360° view hasn’t added some value. It obviously has, otherwise all those customers wouldn’t be mentioning it in all those videos. But the question is: what kind of value is it driving? And to whom?  

If you’re moving from a manual process with spreadsheets and handwritten notes, you find yourself suddenly getting visibility and it feels like someone has turned the lights on for the first time.  

But visibility is not value. You can’t measure the ROI on visibility. Visibility doesn’t deliver value to the customer or add more line items to an invoice.  

CRMs have been promising to help drive revenue for decades, but have delivered visibility and called it a day. It’s not enough. 

In order to get from visibility to value, someone needs to work their way through all the insights, and figure out which ones to act on, and in what order.  

Take an account manager in manufacturing who is already spending their day juggling customer escalations, installations, tracking down orders and shipments, following up on invoicing, managing reorders, and selling; never mind requests from their managers and management. 

Often with hundreds of customers, or thousands of SKUs. Or both.  

They’re already spread far too thin, and realistically spending much of their focus and energy on too few of their customers. Now imagine giving them all the information they could ever hope to know about all their customers.  

Will it help them to deliver a better customer experience? Drive more revenue? Free them up to spend more time with customers? 

No.  

Will it contribute to the overwhelm? 

Yes. 

And this is the problem with CRM today. You feel like you’re getting value, but everyone is more overwhelmed than ever, and sales results aren’t improving. 

Salespeople never asked for more information 

Ask any account executive how they start their day. They aren't asking for another dashboard. 

They aren't looking for another AI-generated summary. They aren't hoping for another report. 

They're asking much simpler questions: 

• Which customers need my attention today? 

• What changed since yesterday? 

• Which opportunity is at risk? 

• Where should I spend the next hour? 

• What should I do next? 

These aren't information problems. They're decision problems. And increasingly, they're action problems. 

360°, 36°, 3.6° 

Imagine you need to get to a restaurant a few hours’ drive from your house. You ask how to get there, and are given a map of the country, the weather forecast, the car’s oil pressure and tire wear, the local news, the stock price for the car manufacturer, and reviews of the restaurant.  

It’s better than nothing, but you’d rather just have the directions, wouldn’t you? 

What account managers need is not more information, but clearer guidance on what to do. Where to focus their attention. Who to call and what to say. 

It’s time for CRM to move beyond the insufficient 360° view. CRM should be able to give multiple views to serve different audiences based on what they need in that moment.  

The 360° view simply spins people in circles. Let’s narrow the aperture. 

We need a 36° view that shows which accounts need focus. It helps account managers to drive business from a wider segment of their customers by pointing them at the issues and opportunities.  

The next generation of CRM pulls data from places like the ERP or email, identifies where sales volume is slipping, or identifies whitespace by comparing similar customers – turning that data into recommendations.  

And we need a 3.6° view that gives direct, practical guidance to sellers on what to do today. ‘Call this person at this account about this product.’  

With that guidance, the seller can be effective across a much wider segment of their book of business, with a level of service they could previously only deliver to a small handful of customers.  

The benefit of precision 

When you shift from a 360° view to a 3.6° view, the conversation moves beyond visibility to execution and impact. With a 360° view, account managers are overwhelmed by data and information.  

With a 3.6° view they can operate at a new level – providing better service, protecting current business and drive new and expanded opportunities.  

Sceptical about what this would look like in practice? It looks like Tetley Harris moving from having 100 active accounts to 1,200+. Want to know more? Read the Tetley Harris case study for yourself.