Posted May 7, 2009

A couple of post ago I talked about relationships, the most is important part of the “relationship sale” model. There is nothing magic about the process of building relationships, but there is a tool that savvy sales people use to help them keep track of the onslaught of information that accompanies the process of forming relationships with lots of new people… the Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). CRM is the heart of  Sales Force Automation systems (SFA). Effective CRM can help you to perform super-human feats of memory, team coordination, and exectution.

At its most basic level, the CRM system helps you keep track of all of the details about your customers and what you have talked with them about.

For an individual, this “system” could be paper based (although I’m not sure anyone would call a paper notebook a CRM system, and it certainly wouldn’t be a SFA system). The real value comes when the system is implemented electronically and customer data is shared among sales people and management.

There are some nuances in the definitions of CRM and SFA, but lets just group them together as CRM and talk about some of the things that good CRM can do for you (notice I didn’t say that it WILL do for you… you still have to use it correctly to get the benefit, and you would be surprised how many CRM systems are not implemented properly):

1) Call note sharing (field rep)

You are about to walk in for your appointment with a big customer. You are feeling good. You have thought about the customer’s needs and are ready to make your big proposal to supply the customer with premium blue widgets. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your counterpart stopped by last week and uncovered that the customer had a bad experience with blue widgets and joked that the next person who came peddling blue widgets would be forced to walk the plank!?

Ok, corny example, but I’ve seen this type of thing happen. CRM is great for allowing multiple people that call on the same customer to record and share information about the customer, their interests, their problems and preferences.

2) Customer purchase history (field rep)

Sure there are other ways to get sales data, but CRM systems that integrate purchase history allow for more efficient use of the highly skilled sales professional’s time.

3) Customer data analysis (field rep)

Yep, I’m greedy. I’m not content to simply have customer data in the field, I want the CRM system to have build in standard and user-configurable reports to help me make sense of the data. Data itself is of no value. Actionable insight is worth it’s weight in gold. Most off the shelf CRM systems provide some form of data analysis. While this is powerful for an individual sales person, it is exponentially more powerful when the same analysis, targeting, segmentation, and frequency models are leveraged across a sales force.

4) Robust sales force wide sales analysis (sales executives)

Ok, you caught me. I wasn’t always the Sales Guy. I spent a few years as the Sales Analysis Guy. What’s that you say?… that’s what you wanted to be when you grew up?! It is a glamorous job, no denying that.

What my time in spreadsheet hell taught me was that if the right data is captured by the CRM system some pretty powerful insight can be gained through looking at trends. Few things can be more valuable to a sales force than a good sales analysis that reveals trainable and repeatable actions that are common among high performers, so that the rest of the sales force can learn those actions and raise their performance. Get your reach, frequency, depth, and segmentation grooves on. Spot the successes earlier and share the successful methods across your sales teams faster to get the most benefit.

5) Management data  (line managers)

Did the big cheese just call and ask for your latest forecast? Might be nice to know how your sales people’s accounts are tracking through the sales cycle? Who appears close to closing, where are you seeing challenges? Management reporting is a key function of good CRM . Giving management more timely information on trends in the field allows for much better decision making and less “what were they thinking” reactions in the field (well, we hope).

This is a short list. There are many other benefits of good CRM , and even more of SFA systems that wrap in other functionality to reduce the administrative burden on the front line sales people.

What features are most important to you?

However, poorly implemented systems often become a burden with very little payback to the customer facing sales professional.

How does your CRM/SFA system stack up?


Jeff Cress, the Sales Guy

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