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Cover All Bases and Turn Your CRM into a Revenue Engine

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Cover All Bases and Turn Your CRM into a Revenue Engine

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication

Here is the bad news most sales organizations deal with every day:

  • Less than 55% of reps are making quota
  • Customers say "no" 6 times before they say "yes"
  • 65% of sales professionals stop at the second "no"
  • 75% of new leads never receive a sales call
     

Using these statistics, 75K of every 100K in marketing and training is currently being wasted.

Because sales reps already face this daunting struggle on a daily basis, they won’t invest precious time and energy learning a new CRM system unless they know it is going to help them win this battle, close quota, and drive revenue. This series on CRM adoption has focused on all the bases you need to cover within your organization so accomplish just that.

The bases you need to cover include:

Gain Executive Sponsorship: Demonstrate to decision makers that the CRM will give them faster, better, more actionable information and they will push adoption from the top down.

Focus on Sales Managers: Once sales managers discover how your CRM can make it much easier to do account planning and reviews, and conduct coaching sessions, they will find ways to encourage their sales makers to use it.

Involve Users Early in Development: If you consult CRM users early in the development and roll out phase of the CRM, they will have a chance to help you customize it to meet their needs and they will own the program from the very beginning.

Align with Sales Team Processes: Sales makers already have a system for working with customers. Unless you design the CRM functions to be aligned with that process, sales makers will drag their feet on adoption.

Build Trust with Sales Teams: Sales makers tend to assume the CRM is a sophisticated way to spy on them. If you emphasize the benefits to them and solicit their feedback so you can make the CRM more useful to them, they will push back less and accelerate their adoption.

Get Buy-in From Users: The key users of this system are the sales makers, so you want to do whatever it takes to help them feel comfortable. Solicit their feedback, try to understand their issues and needs, and customize the system according to the responses you get from them.

Include Non-Sales Facing Functions: The CRM should be the bridge that brings the whole organization together. Be sure to customize it so that all units can talk to each other, share information with each other, and collaborate with each other through the CRM.

Integrate Sales and Marketing Work Streams: The CRM is the perfect tool to change the conversation between sales and marketing. Using the CRM, these two units can collaborate instead of compete, and drive more real-time, coordinated sales plays that will generate revenue instead of only dead leads.

Solidify with Effective Training: Training on buttons and functions will not get the job done. Sales makers need training that will empower them to use the CRM strategically to streamline and speed up all sales activities to more effectively connect with and serve their customers. This is where the CRM pay-off is really created.

Reinforce Benefits and Revenue Generation at Every Step: This is the magic bullet of CRM adoption. It is not really a step or a base; it is more of an attitude or a conviction. People must grab the vision of CRM being the revenue engine for the organization.

We have experienced success after success as we have worked with top Fortune 500 clients to help them deploy their CRM in a way that significantly drives revenue. All the accounting features are important, but we are not in business to become better accountants; we are in business to drive revenue for everyone in the organization, from shareholders to the mail room. Sales organizations who implement the strategies we have been discussing in this series on CRM adoption report an average of 25% connect ratio, 65% conversion ratio, and 25 to 1 return on investment. All of this results in an immediate, measurable increase in the growth rate of revenue.

This is the kind of good news sales team members need to hear over and over again while you are going through the training and roll out process. Keep reminding them that the goal is to drive revenue and the engine for achieving that goal involves becoming experts on using the CRM for revenue generation. Make it your mantra or your slogan if necessary. Once the new CRM strategy is deployed, sales reps will begin to experience this success for themselves, and they will be the ones telling everyone else what an amazing tool the CRM has become for them.

Coming Next Week: Beginning a new series on the 12 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Managers

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.

Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.

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