By Walter Rogers
Chairman
Baker Communication
September 2009
For the last couple of years now, all the buzz in business has been about the Sales 2.0 revolution. By Sales 2.0, I am referring to the way technology ? especially Web-based strategies and applications ? has transformed the way sales and marketing organizations can and must interact with customers, track information, implement solutions and manage sales teams.
For the most part, this revolution is driven by the simple reality that customers are empowered and inspired by the advantages they gain through using the Web and its sophisticated interactive features to control the buying process and customize solutions to fit their needs. In response to this demand from customers, countless developers of business applications have jumped into the market with products to help sales organizations leverage the Sales 2.0 revolution to more successfully interact with customers and drive revenue. At any rate, that is the stated goal, which brings us to the CRM Challenge.
CRM - an acronym for Customer Relationship Management ? broadly refers to a vast array of software applications (including many Web-based strategies) purportedly offering sales organizations the ?silver bullets? they need to more effectively manage all the processes it takes to connect with customers and grow revenue in the intensely competitive, rapidly shifting market conditions we all deal with these days. The theory is that CRM systems, and other processes related to Sales Force Automation (SFA), can help sales teams collect and manage huge chunks of data faster and more efficiently, more accurately forecast pipeline, better target solutions customers need, shorten the sales cycle, drive more revenue, and provide sales managers with better snapshots of what is going on across the organization at any given time.
The potential upside that CRMs promise to provide to sales organizations is fantastic. Billions of dollars have been invested by very smart people to create very complex and highly customizable systems that can scale to any type of process or organization. At this point, you won’t find a credible, successful sales organization on the planet that hasn’t invested a lot of money in some sort of CRM program. The problem is, you will also find most of them scratching their heads, mystified over the fact that the systems aren’t delivering nearly the bang for the buck they had hoped for, mostly because the level of adoption and functionality on the part of their sales teams is distressingly low. Why, in spite of all of the hype and hope, are CRMs missing the mark for most organizations?
Over the years we have built a deep repository of expertise in helping companies significantly boost their level of CRM adoption, and we can trace the difficulty to a handful of issues:
Failure to gain executive leadership and sponsorship.
Extracting the true value from a CRM starts at the very top of any organization. CRMs are intended to streamline workflow and increase sales throughput. As such the executive leadership team is responsible for helping the organization transition to a new way of business, one that eliminates as many friction points as possible in the customer pre-sales and support cycle. If executive leadership continues to require old reports, support non-optimized workflows, and resist new technology, then CRM efforts will sure fail.
Failure to focus on Sales Management.
Just as important as executive leadership, Sales Managers are the key change agents or change resistors. Sales reps will only follow what the managers will ask them to do. If Sales Managers don’t? utilize the CRM as the communication platform for coaching, best practices, and team communicationsÂ
September 2009
Too often, CRM systems are thrust upon sales teams, with lots of fancy menus and buttons that look cool but which have no immediate perceived relevance to what they do every day. If the users are the last to know about a change like this, they will not be enthusiastic about using it.
Failure to align CRM processes with sales team processes.
Deploying a CRM represents a massive change in workflow. Sales teams already have a process they are comfortable with. The CRM may interrupt or hinder that process, if it is not aligned with what the team is already doing. Either the CRM must track with the present process, or the sales team must be retasked to follow a different process, in order for any benefits to be realized. Sadly, they are often allowed to exist in conflict with each other.
Failure to build trust with the sales team.
A high percentage of the sales team may perceive a CRM to be another tool of “Big Sales Manager” watching over them, using the data entered by the reps against them during performance reviews or force reductions.
Failure to get buy-in from the users.
This is really a by-product of all the above. If users feel the system has been thrust upon them without taking their needs into consideration, or that it is only creating more work for them in the form of entering copious amounts of useless data, and especially if the data is going to be used against them, users will only do the minimum, if that much. Usually they will claim they are just too busy with real work to spend time with the CRM.
Failure to deliver effective training.
CRMs can be highly complex and intricate. The training and tutorials provided by most organizations during the deployment of the system focus on what the buttons do, but provide very little reinforcement regarding why reps should really care, or what is in it for them if they start using those buttons. It is all very overwhelming; for those reason reps often end up using CRMs as nothing more than hugely expensive address books to manage their customer contacts and record their sales. This leads to the ultimate reason sales teams CRM adoption rates are so low:
Failure to help reps see how the CRM will drive revenue and benefit them.
If the CRM doesn’t drive more revenue for the rep, the team and the company, it is truly a colossal waste of time and money. Because communication from upper management is often poor and training is generally insufficient or irrelevant, sales team members never get the vision or the skills to leverage the CRM for its ultimate purpose: driving more sales and improving productivity! Truly, with the right strategic alignment that includes process, skill and tools for the entire sales team (including sales managers and senior executives), CRMs really do drive revenue. Once sales reps discover the power at their fingertips and learn how to use it, sales numbers will begin to climb, enthusiasm for the process builds, adoption increases, and the CRM finally becomes the valuable tool it was always intended to be.
How do I know this? For many years, we have been supporting some of the world’s largest sales organizations in proven, best-practice CRM adoption techniques that have revolutionized their sales teams and driven net new revenue. As a matter of fact, Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world (see related story). We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization, and in next month’s article, we will begin to share some of the secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visithttp://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/ .
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