I don’t know of a sales organization anywhere that isn’t scrambling to find an edge to help them drive more business and close more deals in today’s highly uncertain economy. Everyone I know is pulling out all the stops and working harder. That certainly goes with the territory these days, but I’m sure you have also heard that working smarter is just as important as working harder. If you are looking for ways to work smarter, one of the smartest things you can do is to start using your CRM as a sales revenue tool instead of a sales accounting tool.
CRMs have been around for years now; every sales organization has some version, ranging from something as simple as Outlook to highly sophisticated programs like salesforce.com, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Siebel and more. However, in the vast majority of cases I have seen, sales organizations too often use these systems mostly for sales accounting and to store customer contact info. There are two huge problems with this. One problem is that sales reps, uncomfortable with the fact that the CRM may be used against them, often don’t use it. However, the bigger problem is that many executives and managers don’t realize the true power that a CRM can deliver.
In my article last month, I highlighted eleven challenges sales organizations must overcome in order to maximize CRM adoption within their sales teams. Right at the top of the list were these three issues:
? Failure to gain executive leadership and sponsorship
? Failure to focus on sales management
? Failure to focus on generating revenue
These three issues are actually very closely related. Let’s work from the bottom up.
Let’s be very clear about one thing right from the beginning: sales organization exist to generate revenue! Sales organizations offer products and services, yes, but not for the pure pleasure of producing a wonderful widget. Sales is about revenue, and no matter how great your product is or how proud of it you are, if you aren’t driving revenue you are going out of business and you are going to be stuck with a warehouse of widgets. For this reason, every single thing – every operation, every process, every policy, every program, every principle - a sales organization implements needs to be measured against this one master metric: Is this helping us drive revenue, and if so, how much and how fast? Don’t waste your time or anyone else’s time on things that can’t somehow be quickly traced back to driving revenue for the sales rep and the entire organization. To the degree that CRMs are perceived as accounting and measurement tools, they aren’t about driving revenue, they are not creating value for sales reps, which means they are not creating value for the sales organization and no one will take them seriously. At least, not seriously enough.
Which brings us to Sales Management. Sales management is one of the black and white areas when it comes to driving revenue: the sales manager is measured on how well everyone on the team is growing pipeline, closing deals, and meeting or exceeding quota. End of story. If the team isn’t at least meeting quota, the sales manager should be very unhappy and at least a little bit concerned. The sales manager is not leading a Cub Scout troop or a therapy group, the sales manager is charged with making sure the team is driving revenue. Unfortunately, the sales manager spends too much time using the CRM to create reports for upper management - reports that, in many cases, the CRM can’t easily produce - vs. using it as a coaching mechanism to improve sales rep performance.
In my last article, I also alluded to the fact that most CRMs can be configured and leveraged so that they become revenue driving engines. Once the sales manager and the sales rep learn how to tap into the full potential of their CRM, they can collect and manage huge chunks of data faster and more efficiently, more accurately forecast pipeline, better target solutions customers need, shorten the sales cycle, and provide sales managers with better snapshots of what is going on across the organization at any given time, in order to nimbly shift priorities and develop new strategies that respond effectively to changing market conditions. All of this serves to drive revenue in a powerful and even exponential way. At this point, the CRM becomes a sales manager’s friend instead of just another task to manage.
And, that brings is to executive leadership. The sales rep is measured on how well they meet their quota. The sales manager is measured on how well the entire team meets its quota. How is executive leadership measured? That’s right; they are measured on how successful the entire organization is at driving revenue. In order to measure this performance, executives are accustomed to acting upon information as it flows up through the organization in the form of static reports that are typically generated about once a week. Executives then push the appropriate buttons to trigger better performance across the board. The difficulty with this process is that, in order to generate these reports for executives, sales managers are often required to go into the CRM and perform what amounts to accounting gymnastics to harvest the information and put it into the form the executives are accustomed to receiving. Unfortunately, this creates a lot of extra work for the sales manager without providing the sales manager any real benefit or time savings, so the sales manager may be slow to adopt the CRM, or even become resistant to using it altogether.
So, as the CRM is rolled out, executives will need to adapt to a new way of receiving information. In reality, there is no longer a need for static reports produced once per week, because the CRM is designed to deliver rich, detailed reports – usually much better than the static reports the executive has been receiving – and instead of being available only once a week, the data is now available in real time, all the time. These reports may vary in format from what the executive was accustomed to receiving pre-CMR, but it only takes a modest adjustment on the executive’s part to learn how to work in and leverage the new format. Soon, the executive can have better information, delivered in a faster and more actionable style, that is much more effective than the old weekly static reports, without requiring any extra work from the sales manager at all. With this more timely and richer information at their finger tips, executives can make the kind of just-in-time decisions that the organization needs to more effectively improve performance and drive more revenue.
To sum up, once the executive leadership team gets the vision for using the CRM to drive revenue, they will own it, sponsor it, and push it across the entire organization. That will change the culture of sales management, which will change the culture of sales reps, and that will drive revenue for everyone.
So here is perhaps the best and most powerful way to boost CRM adoption across your entire sales organization: help executives get the vision for how much new revenue can be created as a result of strategically repurposing and leveraging your CRM as a revenue tool instead of an accounting tool. There are numerous studies available right now that will connect the dots for them. At Baker, where we have just been named one of the top ten CRM adoption training companies in the world, we have several studies we can share. This month the Aberdeen Report has released a fantastic report documenting the way the intelligent use of the CRM can be combined with other strategies to send revenue through the roof. You can get a free copy of that report by clicking the link on this page.
As always, the bottom line is the bottom line.
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June Sales Quick Tip of the Month - Know Who You Are Talking To
One of the fastest ways a sales rep can waste an hour or more is to deliver a brilliant, effective, customized, persuasive sales presentation to the wrong person. After you have gone to all that trouble, the last thing you want to hear from your customer is, “This all sounds very good to me, but I am going to have to run this by Mr. Calabash. He is the one who has final authority over these decisions.” Auuggghh!. Now you may very well have to start over from scratch, because Mr. Calabash probably has a completely different set of needs and issues motivating his decision to buy. It is true that you don’t always get to start out a sales contact by speaking directly with Mr. Calabash, but make sure to ask early in the conversation if such a person as Mr. Calabash exists, and if he does, make it your goal to bring Mr. Calabash into the conversation as soon as possible. It will not only save a lot of time, it may very well save the sale.
