Confronting the CRM Challenge

Kevin Price of the “Price of Business” asks Walter Rogers about pressing business challenges

[Kevin Price]: Welcome back to the "Price of Business." I am your host Kevin Price, talking to you about you and your business. I tell ya, we have a lot to talk about as always on today’s program. We continue, we want to talk about the fact that I do say it’s the show that never ends. And people say "What do you mean by that?" What I mean is that it continues 24/7 over at PriceofBusiness.com where you get the best of audio and video and articles and so much more, and also our sister website, HoustonBusinessDaily.com. We just like to keep you well versed in some of the things that you can find. When you look over at HoustonBusinessDaily.com in particular, we’ve got our weekly newsletter that goes out and that’s w-e-e-k-l-y. There’s nothing weak about my newsletter let me tell ya. It’s got great information, great content. Keeps you up to date, keeps you posted of what’s going on every single day. So, what we have is a brand new article by Walter Rogers. Walter Rogers is president and CEO of Baker Communications, confronting the CRM challenge, which in fact is what I was thinking, and in fact working on getting one for on the program. He may be calling in right now as we speak. In fact that’s exactly who we have lined up and that’s one of the things we wanted to talk about, was this confronting the CRM challenge, plus learn more about Baker Communications. Let me see if we have Walter. Walter have we got you lined up?

[Walter Rogers]: I’m right here.

[KP]: Good to talk to you. How are you, sir?

[WR]: Outstanding. How about yourself?

[KP]: Good, good. Tell us a little about yourself. Tell us a little about Baker Communications.

[WR]: Well, we are one of the fastest growing performance improvement companies in the United States. We’ve been around for about 30 years, headquartered here in Houston, TX that entire time, but our operations are global in nature at this point. We run somewhere around 900 performance improvement engagements a month, all over the world, for about 50% of the Fortune 500.

[KP]: Got it. So, that’s a good elevator speech. I like that. That was a good summation of what you guys are all about. Kind of tell us you know, kind of prioritize, because you guys do cover a lot of different areas, but you’re still very specific. You’re not some kind of jack of all trades. Give us an inventory of what are the major areas that you cover.

[WR]: You know the area where we’re spending the most amount of time these days is in anything to do with sales and marketing effectiveness. It’s top in mind for just about every single executive that we work with. Most organizations have gone through a pretty substantial cost cutting exercise over the last 18 months or so. At some point you stop getting gains from cost cutting and you have to start [WR]: focusing on growing your top line. That’s where we’re investing the bulk of our R&D, the bulk of our efforts, the bulk of our time.

[KP]: There’s been a real paradigm shift in the way people use their time and use their energy. Really we got more leverage now than any other time before, but I think we’re still kind of limping along with old paradigms. What are your thoughts on that?

[WR]: Yeah, we really are. I mean, there are so many systems and tools in the market place today that can really help companies streamline the way in which they go to market, get better alignment inside of their organization between what sales is doing and what marketing doing, making sure that those arrows are pointing in the same direction. It really boils down to 3 things. It’s systems, process, and people. Those three things have to be aligned in order to reach maximum results. What we find surprising is still today there are a lot of companies out there that don’t really have those three things nailed down. And there’s a lot of organizations that aren’t operating with any kind of a unified view of their customer, which makes it very difficult to predict new purchasing patterns, dig into what they’ve purchased in the past to make them understand what their options are in terms how you can add value to their lives. So, there’s a lot of paradigm shifts that still need to occur.

[KP]: Yeah. "Confronting the CRM Challenge". That was your very first article that you brought to us here at HoustonBusinessDaily.com and PriceofBusiness.com. Excellent. Very, very thorough article. And CRM, the acronym for Customer Relationship Management, that is an issue where, I mean there are still people out there using rolodexes my friend.

[WR]: Yeah, rolodexes, big chief tablets. It’s phenomenal and there’re so many tools that are really affordable and really easy to implement in terms of actually being able to turn them on. The real challenge doesn’t have to do so much with picking or implementing the tool, it’s getting the people in your company to actually use that tool. The paradigm shift that needs to occur is that, you know tools like Salesforce.com and others are sales enablement products. They’re not sales accounting products. Sales accounting certainly is important, but sales professionals, historically, don’t particularly like accounting unless it has to do with their paycheck…

[KP]: (Laughing) That’s the understatement of the year. They just want to make sure their check had enough numbers in it. That’s all they want to know about.

[WR]: That’s right, as many zeros as possible. But what they do like are things that help them make sales faster, quicker, easier, etcetera. That’s exactly what CRMs are intended to do. They’re absolutely intended to streamline the communication between sale professionals, their sales manager, their customer, other departments in an organization. At the end of the day the customer experience is better which means the customer buys more product or service from you.

[KP]: Okay, let’s talk a little bit about some of the things that you’ve discovered when it comes to the failure of CRM systems that are out there. And I’m going to kind of refer to your article and let you elaborate on some of these points.

Yeah.

[KP]: But the reality is that you covered a lot points. We’re not going to cover them all. That’s why people need to go to HoustonBusinessDaily.com and read all these points. What’s very important is that when you’re talking about accountability versus the actual implementation…You know, accounting is great and there’s tons of software out the there that does that type of thing but I tell you right now that people are looking for ways to leverage the way they get things done when it comes to their sales and where they increase their sales, to do it more effectively and to focus on the most profitable aspects of sales. That’s what your points deal with correct?

[WR]: Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly what people are looking for and they’re looking for it in all parts of an organization, from the higher level management down to the front line sales professional.

[KP]: So, with just a couple of minutes left, a few minutes left…Failure to gain executive leadership as sponsorship. Comment on that.

[WR]: You know, a lot of CRM projects get off the ground because departmentally somebody has decided that they wanted to help a batch of sales professionals, or a division, or what have you. But at the end of the day, what makes organizations really tick is the metrics that are reported, because executives look at metrics. They’re going to react from those metrics to point the arrows in different directions depending on what they feel needs to happen next. If the executives are using old systems to derive their metrics, which means that the sales professionals and sales managers are having to basically go through accounting gymnastics between using the information that’s in the CRM versus what information their executives want, you know, bridging that gap. If there’s a lot of accounting gymnastics then you’re going to have a real failure in the sale reps adoption of the product because it’s actually become harder for them to do business using two tools than it is just one.

[KP]: Walter, I want to cover a couple more of these points so let me…I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’ve got to make sure we cover some more.

[WR]: Sure.

[KP]: You could run right on that whole topic there. Again we are talking to Walter Rogers who is president and CEO of Baker Communications. Number two, failure to focus on sales management.

[WR]: Sales reps are only going to do what their sales managers ask them to do and what they’re inspecting, what they are expecting their sales reps to do. A lot of CRM efforts really focus on getting sales professionals and front line sales reps to adopt the tool and there’s not as much focus on sales management driving the behavior with the toolset. So, again the biggest role is the same thing. It’s a similar concept to getting executive sponsorship.

[KP]: If you really want the team to do it, you have to have everyone doing it, not just the team.

[WR]: Especially the leader of the team.

[KP]: Yup. Failure to focus on generating revenue. I like this one.

[WR]: Yeah, so all of this is about generating revenue. The only reason the companies purchase CRMs is to figure out a better way to generate revenue. If you approach sales professionals and sales managers with anything other than how you’re going to help them increase revenue, they’re just not going to listen. They’re going to tune out.

[KP]: Let’s talk about the failure to include users in the design or deployment of the system. I like that one too.

[WR]: Well, doesn’t it seem like a good idea to ask the people who are going to use a system how they’d like to do it before you actually push it on them? That’s really what that point is all about.

[KP]: Yeah, and you know what? Even with the company I’m involved in, we need to practice that a little more ourselves. That makes perfect sense. And let me tell the listener out there, we covered maybe four out of around a dozen points in a very thorough, very thoughtful article. Phenomenal job. Thanks for sharing it with us Walter.

[WR]: You’re so welcome. I enjoyed being on.

[KP]: Going forward, what are some of the other topics that we’ll be covering when you join us each time you’re on the program?

[WR]: Well, like you mentioned, there’re twelve of these topics and what we’re going to be doing is a deep dive into each one of these and we’ll be bringing on some guest speakers from some of corporate America’s largest organizations to discuss their experience with these challenges and they’ve overcome these challenges. So, today is really all about giving a brief overview of what this problem is all about and we’ll be doing some deep dives into some of the other issues which include things like aligning with the sales team process, how you build trust with the sales team, getting buy in from users, you know, the importance of including non-sales facing functions, how to integrate sales and marketing work streams, how to solidify with really strong, effective, lasting training, and finally how to reinforce the benefits of all this with revenue generation at every step.

[KP]: Walter Rogers, president and CEO. BakerCommunications.com, that is Baker Communications.com. I suggest you check him out there. Thanks so much for being with us.

[WR]: Thank you so much Kevin.

[KP]: More "Price of Business" right after this on CNN650.