Get Buy-in From Users

Walter Rogers sits down with Kevin Price to discuss crucial CRM adoption factors on “Price of Business”

[Kevin Price]: Welcome back to the “Price of Business.” I am your host Kevin Price. Talking to you about you and your business. Enjoy. Enjoy our meetings here every day, Monday through Friday. Talking to you about what’s going on the business scene out here in this great city of ours and really around the country. That’s exactly what the folks there at Baker Communications are all about. Walter Rogers, good to talk to you. How are you sir?

[Walter Rogers]: I’m doing wonderful. It’s so nice to be in Houston today and have us being thawed out. Nice to not be 20 degrees below normal, isn’t it Kevin?

[KP]: Amen to that. I’m looking forward to playing golf on Friday. That should be exciting. I’ve been missing those opportunities. So tell us real quickly, I notice you have a brand new article posted there on the website. Tell us about it.

[WR]: Yeah, so what we’re going to talk about today is really how to get buy in from what could be the most important audience that a company has right? The front line sales professional. How to get their buy in, how to properly use a Customer Relationship Management system.

[KP]: Very good. When you say “buy-in,” that means you’ve got to give the customer, who’s been involved in a system that’s different before, as excited about it as you are.

[WR]: That’s exactly right…with a customer is a great way to position sales people, because really, certainly a company has customers, the people that they sell products and services to. But you know, the VP of sales has its own set of customers and so does the IT department. Part of those customer are the front line sales professionals. Certainly we all want to help them become more effective at doing their job, but you know, when we roll out new systems to them, they need to buy in to what the system is about. Otherwise you’re not going to get any adoption and of course that will defeat the purpose of giving them performance improvement tools.

[KP]: Yeah, no question about it. Talking to Walter Rogers. So what do you want to bring to the forefront to our audience today about this?

[WR]: Yeah, so you know, it’s just like anything else. There’s a lot of tools in the market today. We all use probably Word, or PowerPoint, or Excel and these tools have a variety of features and functions that each of us use. But the truth is that most of us probably only use 5 or 10 things in those tools right? There’re hundreds of things you can do but we just get [Inaudible 2:20]. That’s really no different when you’re rolling out a Customer Relationship Management system. There’s a handful of features and functions that really make a difference to the end user, to the sales professional. If you focus on those and you start small then all of a sudden it’s going to be much easier to get adoption because you’re not firehosing people with information that may not be relevant to them.

[KP]: Yeah. Very, very good. And that’s very important. We really don’t want our clients to work too much. The idea is to actually reduce work, not increase it.

[WR]: Exactly right, exactly right. If you take a look at a, you know, a process that sales people are involved in. Let’s just say that’s the prospecting process right, which is the act of getting new customers knocking on a company’s door and buying from your company. If you take that process, and let’s just say it has 4 or 5 steps today, and you implement a CRM that now creates 8 or 10 steps…well Kevin, what do you think the adoption rate is going to be?

[KP]: Probably relatively small.

[WR]: Yeah, pretty bad. Pretty slow. So, the idea is to take a look at what the business processes are that sales professionals are engaged in and look for ways to strip work away from them right, and automate as many things as possible so that they actually have to do less work to achieve a greater outcome than they were able to before.

[KP]: Yeah. Very, very good. Let me ask you…When you look at a preexisting CRM program, what are the things you’re judging? What’s the criteria you’re judging as to whether or not it’s a good program, something a client should stay with or not?

[WR]: There are a lot of CRM systems on the market today. There are some that are what they call “In premise,” which basically means that the software and the hardware sit inside of a company’s data center and involves a pretty substantial IT deployment to get those systems up and running. Then there’re other systems that are in the cloud, so to speak. These are systems that are simply just available and accessible over the internet. Part of what a company has to consider is, you know, which of those two paths they want to go down. That’s one of the very important elements. Now most companies these days are choosing not the data center strategy, but rather the cloud strategy, simply because it’s much easier to implement, turn on, you don’t have all the data costs, etcetera. So, that’s a very important consideration. But what’s probably the most important consideration is taking a look at how an organization actually sells in the marketplace, how they go to market. What are the tools that they’re going to need in order to go to market more effectively? If they need access to collateral on a regular basis, what’s the best way to make that collateral available to sales professionals, marketing professionals, etcetera. If they have a business to business type of sales cycle, that’s going to be different that business to consumers. These are all different things that really need to be considered when picking a CRM that’s most effective for a company’s needs.

[KP]: Very, very good. Talking to Walter Rogers. Talking about really, matching. There’s a lot, I’m sure there’s a lot of different systems that can work for different people. And there is a certain style or specialty involved.

[WR]: Yeah, there is a lot of differences. I’ll tell you, the one that’s getting just a huge amount of traction now is Salesforce.com. You’ve probably heard about it Kevin. They’ve got just an amazing customer base, an amazing product and it’s extremely easy to turn on and enable. We’re finding that a lot of companies really migrating towards Salesforce.com because the ease of its use, how easily it can be configured to meet different business requirements, whether B-2-B or B-2-C, and whether you have inside sales teams or outside sales teams. But at the end of the day, you really need to take a really hard look at, you know, what are the outcomes that a company wants to achieve by implementing one of these systems and then matching those outcomes against the best tools that are in the marketplace. Invariably those outcomes tend to fall in a few areas. They tend to be—

[KP]: W—

[WR]: I’m sorry Kevin. Go ahead.

[KP]: I was just going to say running out of time here real quick. Very important though. Very important to have your system match the needs of your specific clients in a Customer Relationship Management. It’s one of your primary tools for driving down labor costs, maximizing efficiency and really making sure that the customer’s needs are responded to, correct?

[WR]: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.

[KP]: Walter Rogers is with Baker Communications. He is the CEO of Baker Communications. You can check him out at Bakercommunications.com. What’s your phone number there?

[WR]: Oh, our number is 713-627-7700. That’s 713-627-7700.

[KP]: Make sure you check him out there at Bakercommunications.com I tell you, your website in an enormous resource. Also his articles…I’ve got a feeling that you’ve got a book in the works by the type of articles, the quality of articles, the sequential nature of those articles over at Houstonbusinessdaily.com. Is that what you’re thinking about, writing a book?

[WR]: We are going to be writing a book on exactly this series. So you see that there’s 11 points of failure that we’ve identified and each of those represent a chapter and you’re getting a glimpse into what those chapters are about.

[KP]: I love it. Make sure you check it out. Good content there. Walter Rogers. Make sure you get that information there at Houstonbusinessdaily.com and continue to stay with us here throughout our broadcast day on CNN650.