Let’s be very clear about one thing: 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.Which brings us back to the topic of CRMs. 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, and that means they are not creating value for the sales organization and no one will take them seriously. A CRM is not simply a measurement tool or a data storage tool; above all it is a sales process management tool that has the potential to make every member of a sales organization’s job easier and faster and more profitable. Time is money; information is money; flexibility is money; efficiency is money. Any sales organization that is interested in closing and even exceeding quota must learn to view the CRM for what it truly is: the next best thing to a printing press when it comes to making more money and making it faster.
If you want to drive CRM adoption through the roof, make it an indispensable part of driving revenue for your sales teams. Customize it so that it provides information to sales reps that they can easily access and use to better manage their accounts. Build the cadence of your sales process around the use of the CRM. Show your reps how they can leverage the features and functions of the CRM to do account planning, develop and track proposals, store and update critical contact information, schedule meetings, do account analysis, and a dozen other things that will target high value opportunities and shorten the sales cycle.
Once you help everyone in your organization connect the dots so they see that the CRM is a fantastic tool for driving more revenue, they will be standing in line to learn how to use it, and your CRM adoption worries will be over. You will also notice a boost in your bottom line, and wasn’t that the reason for deploying the CRM in the first place?
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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