CRM, What is Your Data Plan?

I must say, I am a big fan of data.  In college, my favorite course was Accounting 101, where the textbook was titled “How to Keep Score in Business”.  More recently, I have been given a hard time from friends because I love digging into data to help uncover a story.  The same goes with business, I enjoy getting my hands on as much data as I can, to try to figure out how a sales team can be run more efficiently and effectively.

Of course, in sales, you get a lot of data from finance on how well the sales folks preformed against individual sales quotas, sales team’s sales forecast or a book of business target.  All of the above is good information about sales results, but what does it tell you about your market and your customer’s behaviors? I can often find the story when I pull data from a CRM tool.

Hold on…don’t leave, technology is our friend.  I know a lot of folks have failed (more than once) trying to implement an effective CRM tool.  And the implementation phase of a CRM tool is important, but even more important is a long-term CRM strategy.  We learn from our mistakes and I have learned plenty.  Using a carrot, paying sales-folks for using their CRM tool, will result in the wrong behavior.  Many times you will have sales folks spending too much time entering their activities into their CRM tool or, even worse, entering bogus activities into their CRM tool.  On the other hand, you can use the “big stick” and penalize/threaten sales folks for not using their CRM tool – driving the wrong behavior and killing morale.  In my experience using the “carrot” or the “stick” forces sales folks to put data into their CRM tool that is not real and creates inaccurate reporting.

A sales organization needs to adopt a CRM strategy, that works for them and will promote strong, reliable optics into their sales teams performance.   The strategy will be different across sales organizations, but should include a few key components to drive sales usage.

1. The sales organization, and business as a whole, should adopt a phrase similar to “If it’s not in our CRM tool, it did not happen”.  This is a very important concept and should be used when making decision on things like travel (opportunity should be in a sales stage that justifies the travel investment), account moves (no recent activity on an account) and sales crediting (recent opportunity and activity on the account).
2.  Sales management should be using the CRM system when discussing/coaching on all opportunities and activity.  The steps in the sales in the sales team’s adopted sales process should be loaded into your CRM tool and should be easy to navigate, with the ability to document key customers’ progression in their decision process.
3. It should be easy and interesting for sales folks to get information from the CRM tool, this includes having their calendar within the CRM tool.  If you can build reports (or better yet, DASHBOARDS) that helps the sales folks do their job more efficiently and effectively, CRM adoption will increase.  From my experience, if you can push Sales Performance reports out of the CRM tool to your Sales and Business leaders, CRM adoption will increase.
4. All sales and marketing materials should be located in your CRM tool.  Create easy to use indexes and libraries that can be easily searched and accessed, with the ability to download to their computer. This will help make your CRM tool your sales team’s one-stop shop.

This all takes discipline and it is not easy.  You need the sales team to see value in their CRM tool and not see it as a cumbersome corporate mandate. The CRM should be folded into the fabric of the business and when all of this happens there will be an abundance of useable data.

Oh yes, now back to the data.  Now through your CRM strategy and the company’s execution of that strategy, we have strong optics.  If the CRM becomes a tool that works FOR the sales rep, then we will have meaningful market-based information.  Now, we can see if a sales person’s low performance is the result of lack of activity or demand, or a lack of coaching/training. We can look at our pipeline in the CRM and see if it supports the sales target and forecast and if the business can increase its sales velocity.  A wonderful by-product of a healthy CRM is when we have sales turnover, the transition becomes easier on an open territory if the information doesn’t walk out the door with previous sales rep.

By:
Jim Williams, M.B.A.
Total Innovation Group Inc., Associate
and
Sam O’Rear, M.A.
Total Innovation Group Inc., Senior Partner

Published by TIGI