Driving Revenue and Growing Business with salesforce.com

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication

The potential upside that CRMs promise to provide to sales organizations is fantastic. At this point, you won’t find a credible, successful sales organization on the planet that hasn’t invested in or considered implementing a CRM. The problem is, you will also find most of them scratching their heads, mystified over the fact that the systems aren’t delivering nearly the bang for the buck they had hoped for, mostly because the level of adoption and functionality on the part of their sales teams is distressingly low. Why, in spite of all of the hype and hope, are CRMs missing the mark for most organizations?

Over the years we have built a deep repository of expertise in helping companies significantly boost their level of salesforce.com CRM adoption, and we can trace the difficulty to a handful of issues:

Failure to gain executive leadership and sponsorship. Extracting the true value from a CRM starts at the very top of any organization. CRMs are intended to streamline workflow and increase sales throughput. As such the executive leadership team is responsible for helping the organization transition to a new way of business, one that eliminates as many friction points as possible in the customer pre-sales and support cycle. If executive leadership continues to require old reports, support non-optimized workflows, and resist new technology, then CRM efforts will sure fail.

Failure to focus on Sales Management. Just as important as executive leadership, Sales Managers are the key change agents or change resistors. Sales reps will only follow what the managers will ask them to do. If Sales Managers don’t’ utilize the CRM as the communication platform for coaching, best practices, and team communications then the sales reps will resist any CRM.

Failure to focus on generating Revenue. The purpose of implementing a CRM is not to have a sales accounting system; it is to have a sales enablement system that helps eliminate choke points and bottlenecks that prevent revenue from occurring, ultimately increasing sales throughput. Most CRM implementations focus on pipeline visibility, which helps management but does little to help the Sales Representative retire quota.

Failure to include users in the design or deployment of the system. Too often, CRM systems are thrust upon sales teams, with lots of fancy menus and buttons that look cool but which have no immediate perceived relevance to what they do every day. If the users are the last to know about a change like this, they will not be enthusiastic about using it.

Failure to align CRM processes with sales team processes. Deploying a CRM represents a massive change in workflow. Sales teams already have a process they are comfortable with including order management, pricing and approval systems and document management. The CRM may interrupt or hinder those processes and tools, if it is not aligned with what the team is already doing. Either the CRM must track with the present process and support other tools, or the sales team must be re-tasked to follow a different process that incorporates existing tools into the CRM, in order for true and lasting benefit to be realized. Sadly, they are often allowed to exist in conflict with each other.

Failure to build trust with the sales team. A high percentage of the sales team may perceive a CRM to be another tool of "Big Sales Manager" watching over them, using the data entered by the reps against them during performance reviews or force reductions.

Failure to get buy-in from the users. This is really a by-product of all the above. If users feel the system has been thrust upon them without taking their needs into consideration, or that it is only creating more work for them in the form of entering copious amounts of useless data, and especially if the data is going to be used against them, users will only do the minimum, if that much. Usually they will claim they are just too busy with real work to spend time with the CRM.

Failure to include non sales facing functions. Finance, HR, Support, Operations and other functions all impact customer experience. Not connecting other functions into a CRM decreases the opportunity to eliminate redundant work processes and ultimately the customer’s experience. If an organization is leveraging a CRM for a subset of its customer interactions but asking non-sales groups to use different tools that contain redundant or potentially conflicting information, then a disconnect on where, when and how to leverage a CRM to drive improved customer experiences will persist.

Failure to integrate sales and marketing work streams. Sales and Marketing are often at odds with each other. Even though both Sales and Marketing are ultimately responsible for driving revenue, they often report to different executives with conflicting measurement objectives. As a result, 75% of leads generated by Marketing for Sales never receive a phone call, wasting time and energy of both groups. Both Sales and Marketing processes should come to “life” inside integrated work streams enabled by the CRM.

Failure to deliver effective training. CRMs can be highly complex and intricate. The training and tutorials provided by most organizations during the deployment of the system focus on what the buttons do, but provide very little reinforcement regarding why reps should really care, or what is in it for them if they start using those buttons. It is all very overwhelming; for those reason reps often end up using CRMs as nothing more than hugely expensive address books to manage their customer contacts and record their sales. This leads to the ultimate reason sales teams CRM adoption rates are so low:

Failure to help reps see how the CRM will drive revenue and benefit them. If the CRM doesn’t drive more revenue for the rep, the team and the company, it is truly a colossal waste of time and money. Because communication from upper management is often poor and training is generally insufficient or irrelevant, sales team members never get the vision or the skills to leverage the CRM for its ultimate purpose: driving more sales and improving productivity! Truly, with the right strategic alignment that includes process, skill and tools for the entire sales team (including sales managers and senior executives), CRMs really do drive revenue. Once sales reps discover the power at their fingertips and learn how to use it, sales numbers will begin to climb, enthusiasm for the process builds, adoption increases, and the CRM finally becomes the valuable tool it was always intended to be.

How do I know this? For many years, we have been supporting some of the world’s largest sales organizations in proven, best-practice CRM adoption techniques that have revolutionized their sales teams and driven net new revenue. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work, and in next month’s article, we will expand on each of the 11 failure points described above. if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/salesforce-enablement.htm.

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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