Transformation: Crossing the CRM Chasm

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication

Today‘s sales organizations are discovering that without a renewed commitment to a vigorous, relentless prospecting strategy, they will have problems remaining competitive in this uncertain economy. However, the key to launching and maintaining such a strategy is the ability to track, measure, and evaluate every aspect of each sales rep‘s prospecting activities in order to adjust pipeline forecasts and coach in the moment.

Once upon a time, this monitoring and measuring process was a grinding, labor intensive process that stole a large amount of time away from important customer facing activities. However, today this process can be accomplished in a fraction of the time through the deployment of a CRM system. These systems, either hosted in the cloud or running on your local server, provide a vast array of features and functions that make the management of prospecting activities a breeze. Once the sales organization has fully adopted the CRM system, sales reps can create account plans, define high probability opportunities, schedule calls, record results, send out marcom, roll up proposals, update opportunity status and monitor every customer contact in a matter of minutes. Even more important, sales managers can track all of these activities at a glance and quickly assess the status of each sales rep‘s pipeline, evaluate all customer-facing functions and make decisions regarding how to coach the sales rep going forward.

In light of the powerful potential the CRM brings to the table, sales organizations of all sizes have embraced this technology in hopes that it will give their productivity a much-needed boost. However, many of these organizations have been surprised and disappointed by less than stellar results. What they have discovered is that the CRM is a great tool if, and only if, the organization adopts it on a broad basis and knows how to use the features and functions effectively.

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

Failure to gain executive leadership and sponsorship. The momentum for deploying and adopting the CRM must come from the top down. Where there is no executive enthusiasm, there will be no CRM adoption.

Failure to focus on Sales Managers. 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. 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.

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. If users feel the system has been thrust upon them without taking their needs into consideration, they 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.

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. When properly configured and deployed, the CRM can be used to fully integrate Marketing activities with Sales activities by coordinating sales play development, giving both groups access to the same real time metrics to measure play progress, and linking marketing messages seamlessly and immediately into all sales contacts with customers.

Failure to deliver effective training. This may be the most important key of all. 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. The most effective way to deliver training and drive adoption of the CRM is to embed the training inside a tightly integrated sales play that brings marketing, sales manager and sales reps together to design and deploy a clearly mapped out sales initiative. In this way, sales reps will not only learn how to use CRM features, they will also be have the real-world , real-time experience of seeing how the CRM can help grow the pipeline, generate net new business, and drive more revenue to help retire quota. Training delivered in this way will also help avoid 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.

Action Items:

• Make sure your CRM system is being deployed in a way that aligns all sales and marketing activities.
   
• Regularly reinforce with your sales team that leveraging the CRM to drive prospecting activities will grow pipeline faster and bigger, lead to a significant increase in winning net new business, and help retire quota sooner and even exceed projected revenue goals.
   
• Build your CRM training program around real-time sales plays so that sales team members can experience for themselves the power the CRM has to make them more successful.
  
   

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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