Gain Executive Sponsorship

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication

Walter Roger joins Kevin Price on “Price of Business” to discuss CRM adoption

[Kevin Price]: Let’s go back to the “Price of Business.” I’m your host Kevin Price, talking to you about you and your business. One of the more interesting, well all of them I guess are interesting, but I tell ya we had a great conversation, a very thorough conversation last week with Walter Rogers with Baker Communications. He is back again. He’s going to be on every Wednesday and he is one of the nation’s leaders when it comes to sales training and developing effective leaders in the arena of sales. Welcome to the program.

[Walter Rogers]: Nice to speak with you again Kevin.

[KP]: Good to have you on. How are you today?

[WR]: I’m outstanding. Just another glorious day in Austin, Tx. Today.

[KP]: There you go. Oh, really. You’re out there today. How’s the weather?

[WR]: It’s very cold actually. Not going to get above 40 degrees.

[KP]: Well, I’ll be. I tell ya, it’s interesting weather here in Texas. So much for global warming these days. But lets’ talk a little bit about this little CRM issue that you brought up in last week’s program. I want to continue, first of all, for the person out there not familiar with CRM, tell us exactly what CRM is all about.

[WR]: Yeah, so CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. But really what it is, is a system that companies use to get a 360 degree view of their customer and how to better interact with their customer.

[KP]: Yeah, very primitively, back in the day we used things called “tickler boxes” and things like that. And still, some people almost reach their software in a similar way. The reality is that there is just a huge amount of resources available.

[WR]: Absolutely. I mean they can completely change the way in which a company operates, goes to market, leverages their resources, improves the flow of the pipeline. It can really be a complete game changer when a CRM is used appropriately.

[KP]: One of the things you’ve got there at a HoustonBusinessdaily.com, you have your new column out there and it talks about: Wanna boost CRM adoption? You need to start at the top. What do you mean by that?

[WR]: Well, what I mean is that that we find in a lot of cases you have departments that will have a need for a CRM. They want to give their sales people better tools to interact with their customers, better visibility in the pipeline, to track activities, those kinds of things. And they’ll go off and they’ll buy a CRM. They’ll get it up and running. They’ll get their sales teams working on it. But then you get the disconnect between what the VP of sales wants or the president of the company wants in terms of information flow versus what the CRM is providing. So what’s actually happening in that outcome is that you’ve created double the amount of work for the sales professional instead of taking work away. So, it’s absolutely critical that you get buy in from the top leadership in terms of what metrics are going to be used and how they’re going to be reported upon daily and weekly so that you’re actually taking work off of the sales reps shoulders instead of adding more work on to their day.

[KP]: Got it. So, if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it entirely.

[WR]: From top to bottom, because this is really about alignment of the organization and creating what we call unified sales communication inside of a company. Where the executive has the same expectations of his director and the director has the same expectations of his sales manager and the sales manager has the same expectations of the sales rep. And that flow of communication going up and down that food chain is what separates winners from losers in a lot of cases.

[KP]: I think it’s a really bad habit that I see in a lot of corporations out there, and you might want to comment on this Walter, where the leaders will say “Yeah, this is good for you guys but it’s not good for us. We’ve always done things this way and you guys have to adapt to this.” Not only is it making it incongruent, it really makes it difficult for the whole team to do it.

[WR]: Yes, and I’ll tell you it really boils down to a lot of cases to reporting and numbers, and how numbers are looked at. So, a lot of the systems that are available today, Salesforce.com and others, provide real time visibility into the state of the pipeline. Without having anybody produce their reports, an executive can go in and literally click a couple of buttons and see what’s happening in that pipeline—what’s closing, what’s not, where things are getting stuck. So, it actually eliminates a lot of the requirements for creating complicated spreadsheets that report up information to management who then will have additional questions and you get this information flow spreadsheets going back and forth, back and forth. It’s a horrible cycle. You can kill all of that using CRM. But what’s happening in a lot of cases is that you’ve got the sales team that are using CRM appropriately—they’re loading their pipeline information, but senior management still wants the spreadsheets. So now you’re having to literally create another reports for senior management to look at and they can’t go into a spreadsheet and look at the detail where they could if they were using an online system.

[KP]: Do you like to implement everyone all at the same time or do you like to implement it on the management and work your way down?

[WR]: It’s really typically a staggered approach. It’s never necessarily a good idea to do a big bang, because there’s always lessons learned and every company is a little bit different as to how they implement CRMs and how they find that they’ll have been effective in sales process and sales skill. So piloting is always better than big bang so that you can understand what working and what’s not. Make you adjustments before you do the big bang. But you definitely need to start at the top in terms of getting alignment right out of the gate, in terms of what the metrics are that are going to be used, and how it’s going to change the behavior of senior management and the way in which they interact with information. Because if you can make that change happen at the senior management layer, then you can cascade down this new set of behaviors very easily. If you start at the bottom and try to push it up, you get a lot more resistance.

[KP]: Right, so you want everyone in the management, all the way and throughout management, particularly that management closest to the sales team already really familiar with it before you implement it down to the sales team.

[WR]: Yeah, because they will certainly have input into what kind of information they want to see and how they structure their quotas, and how they structure their plan, and how they structure their territories and all of those are things that can be streamlined with the appropriate use of a CRM versus a traditional, manual spreadsheet or tickler file system as you mentioned.

[KP]: Yeah, absolutely. So you start from the top. Tell me what a typical regiment will include. I assume it’s based on how far reaching the program is in terms of how much preparation has to go into it.

[WR]: A typical deployment…I’m sorry, ask me that question in another way?

[KP]: Yeah, what would a typical deployment entail? How many weeks in advance? How much education involved? I guess a lot of that has to do with how extensive the program is.

[WR]: Yeah, and really how large the company is. You can have small companies that have say 20-30 sales people. In that case it’s better to do it all at the same time, but if you’ve got an organization that has 500-1000, 10,000 sales people as some of our customer do then y’know the planning process can be pretty lengthy. We’ve been involved in situations where we had to help deploy a system to as many as 5000 sales professionals and we were able to get that done in 90 days. But again it all boils back down to resources and commitment from the sponsoring organization about how fast they want to get it done. I will say that today that today, if a company is not using a CRM they need to seriously consider it, because it just puts you at a competitive disadvantage that your competitors actually have a better understanding, and a better view, and a better handle of your customer’s purchasing patterns which a CRM can give you.

[KP]: We’re talking to Walter Rogers. Of course he is president and CEO of Baker Communications. We’re talking about one of the most important areas for a business in terms, y’know Burt Martinez he’s been frequently on this program. Talks a lot about systems. I’ve seen him apply that to different companies and it’s staggering the difference that systems mean. Or make on a company. So I think that CRM is just part of those systems.

[WR]: Yes, it really is. With a CRM in place, you can have a much more predictable selling pattern. You can actually deploy programs a lot faster. You can mobilize your sales force in a much more organized way so that everybody is going after a specific type of customer with a specific type of message in a specific sequence. It just enables the entire go to market process. It also makes it a lot easier to see a customer’s history. If a call comes in and all of a sudden you’ve had some kind of a rep transfer, and that rep that used to manage that account is no longer on that account that information hasn’t gone out the door with the rep, in his head. All that information is captured in the CRM so that the new rep that is now responsible for this account can take a look at the history and respond appropriately, and know about any problems that have occurred in the past or any wins as well.

[KP]: Yeah, absolutely. Very, very important. Walter Rogers, he is our guest and by the way you can learn more about him and his company at www.BakerCommunications.com. The number over there is 713-627-7700. I’ve got to tell you, your articles are excellent. Very, very thorough briefings on each of your topics. What I like about it is that you don’t just merely whet people’s appetite, but you really give some people some substance that they can work with.

[WR]: Well, you know, we do this as a mission. Some people have jobs and some people have missions. We absolutely view sales transformation as a mission of our company. There are so many best practices that we get exposed to from our customer base that we just feel it’s our responsibility to pass those down, not only to just our customer, but anybody who is really interested in helping to improve the efficiency of their sales organization. And these articles are one of the contributions that we make towards this topic.

[KP]: In addition to resistance to Salesforce, with a minute or so left, what are some other big factors that undermine the implementation of a new CRM?

[WR]: We’ll be talking about some of these in the later programs but failure to focus in on sales management to really implement the change. They’re as important as sales executives. In fact, maybe more so because they’re on the front lines. We’re going to then be talking about failure to focus on generating revenue, failure to include users in the design or employment of the system. Really failure of how to align the CRM process with sales teams’ processes. Building trust with the sales team. Getting buy in from users, including non-sales facing functions, because CRM includes a lot more than selling. It’s got finance, HR, a lot of other things that can get wrapped in and really how to integrate sales and marketing workstream training, and then finally focusing the entire effort on generating revenue, because that’s what this is all about.

[KP]: All about. Walter Rogers, great guest. Look forward to having you on again next week. He is with Baker Communications. Make sure you go and learn more about it at www.BakerCommunications.com. Thank you, sir.

[WR]: Thank you Kevin. Looking forward to next week.

[KP]: You bet. He is one of the many great contributors we have over at PriceofBusiness.com. Make sure you check out all of our contributors at and see some of the great articles we have lined up for you. I tell you it makes a big difference when you’re getting these briefings every week in your email. While you’re there make sure you sign up for the newsletter so can keep up to date on the best of business news and information.