Include Non-Sales Facing Functions

Walter Rogers delves into the importance of securing participation of sales support teams for effective CRM adoption on “Price of Business” with Kevin Price

[Kevin Price]:  Welcome back to the “Price of Business.”  I am your host Kevin Price.  I spent a little time with our friend Walter Rogers.  He is the brains behind a great organization called Baker Communications, the leader in sales marketing and customer relations, the whole nine yards.  Good to have you on today, Walter.

[Walter Rogers]:  Hey, thanks.  Thanks for having me again Kevin.  Really appreciate it.

[KP]:  You bet.  Real quickly, before we get started and you introduce our topic, tell us real quickly what Baker Communications is all about. 

[WR]:  Yeah, sure.  So, we are one of the largest firms in the United States that focus on sales and marketing process optimiz—

[KP]:  Well, that’s not a good thing.  I hope he calls back.  But he got temporarily disconnected.  I’m sure we’ll get him back on in just a second.  That is Walter Rogers.  He is with Baker Communications at Bakercommunications.com and really what they are doing is extraordinary work particularly in the area customer relations management which frankly that’s where the rubber meets the road when it comes to business and of course they have management training, sales effectiveness and I was just trying to cover a little bit of some of the things that you were going to cover I’m sure.  Go right ahead. 

[WR]:  Yeah, I appreciate it Kevin.  Sorry about that.

[KP]:  No problem

[WR]:  The beauty of cell phone technology.  Yeah, we specialize in sales and process, sales and marketing process optimization.  We’re headquartered here in glorious Houston, Texas, but we work all over the world.  We run about 900 performance improvement engagements every single month. 

[KP]:  Very, very good. What do you have for us today? 

[WR]:  So, we’ve been talking a lot over the last number of weeks about the importance of the use of a Customer Relationship Management system, also known as a CRM, inside of any company really, to create sustainable competitive advantage.  What we really haven’t talked about so far is why that toolset is important outside of sales.  Today, we’re going to talk about the importance of including non –sales facing functions into the execution of these systems.

[KP]:  Okay, what would those include?

[WR]:  Well, if you thing about it Kevin, you know, selling is only part of what occurs with a customer experience.  Once something is sold things have to happen in order to actually execute that order, whether that’s shipping a product, or fulfilling a service, or what have you right?  All the way from making sure that the product shows up on somebody’s dock to making sure than an invoice was generated, to making sure that the sales rep’s commission is paid, to making sure that the customer is happy.  All of those are additional functions that are part of the continuum of value that is created for that customer.

[KP]:  Right, and it may appear seamless, but they’re only as seamless as the preparation that went into it. 

[WR]:  Yeah, they appear seamless and you would hope that they’re seamless, but the reality is that most companies have a plethora of tools that sales professionals, finance professionals, procurement professionals all have to work with in order to actually execute any type of transaction and most of the time those tools don’t really talk to each other. 

[KP]:  Okay, okay.  So, what are the steps?  So, the very first thing you do, I know from our interviews that we’ve done up till now, when you’ve got a new Customer Relations Management system, CRM, is that you want to get the management first, the leadership tied in and committed to the program, bought into the program, then you need to get the sales team itself.  How do you spread that to the rest of the team, the support staff and other elements?

[WR]:  Yeah, so what you do is you look for integration points that help take work off of people’s plates as we talked about in previous sessions.  Now so far, we’ve talked about how we can strip work away from the sales organization to make them more effective.  But let me give you some examples of how this can extend further into the company.  So let’s say that you are, you’re working with your customer.  The customer says, “Hey great.  I’m ready to buy.”  You close out in your CRM the fact that a sale has been made.  You mark something as “Won” okay?  All that that’s really done is that has created a record for the sales professional and the management team to recognize, “Hey, something’s ‘won.’”  Good job.  Let’s congratulate the sales rep and be happy about this particular sale.  But now that particular order has to turn into an invoice.  It has to be communicated to perhaps the manufacturing operation that’s actually going to make this product.  Creating an integration between whatever the tool is that the sales professional has that they’re using, the CRM, and then the order entry system so that invoices is programmatically generated and sent to that customer, which actually eliminates a step right?  It reduces the need for an accounting person to actually create that invoice, is an example of a linkage between the sales organization and now the accounting function.  The same thing can happen when you have that integration point into say, your manufacturing activities so that manufacturing is now notified that a particular product was ordered, they can go ahead and build the product or ship the product do whatever they need to do with that product without yet another person having to create a separate entry. 

[KP]:  Okay.  So, basically what you want to do is, sounds like there’s a lot of education involved really.

[WR]:  Yeah, there’s a lot of education, but really there’s some high level thinking that needs to take place at an organizational level where you really take a look at where your value chain inside of your company is and how those linkages between the different organizations actually work.  Then you work on interlocking those different functions so that they work better together and you’re eliminating workload that isn’t really necessary.  Because think about it, why really, create an order in a CRM or mark something as “won” in a CRM only to then have somebody else take the information from that CRM and recreate it inside of an accounting system or take that information and recreate it in a manufacturing reproduction system.  It doesn’t make sense.  So, by looking for ways to interlock those systems you start to really drive true enterprise efficiency.

[KP]:  Very, very good.  Again, talking to Walter Rogers of Baker Communications.  So really what it comes into…It’s not only educating and not only selling people.  Particularly outside the sales process, bedause often there’s almost a sense of animosity between those in sales and those who support sales.  You know what I’m saying?  It’s kind of a tension that’s there.  You really need them to be involved in helping to maximize that incorporating process.

[WR]:  Yeah.  You’re exactly right.  And that animosity…It’s really funny you bring that up.  Isn’t that the truth. 

[KP]:  Yeah.

[WR]:  [laughing]  Because here’s an example of where you get animosity between sales and accounting.  You know, what happens when somebody’s sales commission is incorrect?

[KP]:  [laughing] Oh yeah.

[WR]:  [laughing]  You think that creates some animosity between that sales professional and the accounting person?

[KP]:  No question about it.  There’s no question it.  That’s going to create tension.

[WR]:  Exactly right.  And so why have that right?  If you actually interlock the systems together you can begin to eliminate the vast majority of reason for those commission checks to be incorrect because you’re taking out the manual intervention process that often times creates those errors.  Another example right, looking at it from the other side, is that finance person who is always getting questions from the same sales person about how much my commission check is going to be.  Well they probably get sick of answering that same question multiple times a week or a month or whatever.  It’s like, “Enough Johnny.  You’ve asked me this already,” you know?  Figure it out on your own.  Well if you can give visibility to that sales person around what their actual commission check is going to be, using this example, then you’re eliminating that entire need for that sales professional to communicate and use somebody’s time for that kind of information.

[KP]:  Yeah, no question about it.  No question about it.  So what you’re seeing is that incorporating this properly, there’s no better way to kind of alleviate some of those tensions and really make the job easier for both the sales team and those that support the sales team than a quality CRM program.

[WR]:  That’s exactly right.  You need to really focus on fixing those interlocks and I’ll give you a very specific example.  Let us suppose that you wanted to build the very best car you could ever build okay?  So you go out and you find the best clutch, the best transmission, the best steering wheel, the best set of tires, the best engine, and you take all these pieces and now you try to assemble a car.

[KP]:  Right.

[WR]:  You’re probably not even going to get a car, because these pieces weren’t made to work together.  Well the same thing happens in corporate America today. So many people are focused on fixing their individual function that you can actually fix yourself out of business if you don’t focus on how one function works with another.  Then you really work on streamlining that point.  That’s going to get you the true leverage that you need. 

[KP]:  Yeah, I like that. I like that.  And I think that can make a huge difference in an organization.  And what you’re talking about is that you’re really increasing…you know, you talk about a car having horse power.  You’re really increasing, significantly, manpower without adding any people to this organization.

[WR]:  Yeah, you increase the efficiency that you get out of every part of the company.  So instead of just putting in better gasoline in to that car so that it performs better, you’re actually changing the way in which the engine operates with the transmission and which the transmission operates with, you know, the various other components of a car.  So you’re really looking at it from a holistic perspective versus a functional perspective. 

[KP]:  So, real quickly let’s just kind of do…You know, because you’ve been going piecemeal along the way in kind of a methodical, you know, timeline.  Kind of summarize what the timeline looks like starting with the very beginning of once you’ve determined which CRM program you want to go to and how you implement that in the organization.

[WR]:  The timeline really is: What does a company even have in place today?  That’s the first step.  What tools are available and how are those tools currently helping or hindering the business process that a company has decided is the most optimal business process for which to operate in.  Because these decisions aren’t driven by tools.  They’re driven by the process.  That’s really the first thing that a company needs to decide.  How are we going to run as a business?  Okay?  Once you figure out how you’re going to run as a business, what your process is, then you start to look at what are the tools that we have in place right now and are they going to help us achieve this business process or are in the way of achieving this business process.  You can’t let tools drive the decision and so many times tools are what ends up driving that decision.  You start with process, then you go to tools.  Once you’ve figured out what the tools are, then you’re like okay, great…what are the skills right?  What kind of people do I need to have?  Where do they need to be?  How do they need to be organized?  What skills do they need to have to properly execute the business process that we have using the tools that we identified can actually support that business process.  There’s a very sequential, methodical process that you go through in order to achieve the best outcome.  In most cases what will happen is that companies don’t start at process.  They’ll start at tools or they’ll start at people without having any consideration for how the company should really run.  So you end up six, twelve months down the road with the tool that can’t support the business process or the people organized in a way that doesn’t support the business process or the tool.

[KP]:  Very, very important information.  How do people get in touch with Baker Communications?

[WR]:  Sure.  They can call us at 713-627-7700.  That’s 713-627-7700 or on our website which is BakerCommunications.com

[KP]:  And by the way, there is just a plethora of fantastic articles at Houstonbusinessdaily.com by Walter Rogers that I want to encourage you to check out.  Walter, as always great, great job.  Speaking of those kind of articles and the work that you’re doing…The latest one is “Include Non-Sales Facing Functions in Your CRM Adoption Program.”  That’s exactly what we talked about in the audio.  So if you’re looking for the rest of the story to what he and I talked about on today’s program, you need to go check him out there at Houstonbusinessdaily.com