customer relation ship management-sales force automation

8/14/2019 Customer Relation Ship Management-sales Force Automation

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CASE STUDY ON-SALES FORCE AUTOMATION

Will the Sales Force accept Automation?The Sales Force defies the evolution of the modern company. While the work process of

every other department in the company has been engineered and re-engineered, the work of

the sales force often remains invisible and unknown. From Order Entry to Accounts Payable

to the Warehouse there is a known, visible and measurable flow of work a business

process. And these engineered processes have made significant cost reductions and quality

improvements for businesses of all sizes and in all market verticals.

So why have the sales force remained outside the companys evolution to a known, visible

and measurable set of work flows? And how can Customer Relationship Management help

to bring the sales force on board and integrate their work, perhaps the most important work

in the company, with every other department from finance to operations?The solution requires a deft touch, a combination of this is how we do businesses and this

tool is going to make you a better performer.

We need to both push and pull the sales force into a known, visible and measurable

business process. A good sales manager already understands that to get the most out of his

team he needs to motivate and incite. He pushes through motivational behaviour and tactics;

he pulls through incentive plans. An excellent Customer Relationship Management package

enables push and pull through a variety of mechanisms. Well explore six of them below.

But weve already tried Customer Relationship Management

thats not new

CRM software has been around for at least a decade, and before that there were contact

management systems and other precursors. So what is new? Why do we have a better

chance today than we had on the last attempt?

The good news is that some of the new entrants to the CRM space have gotten the

message. They make access as easy as possible, keep the application simple, easy to learn

and quick to navigate, and provide enormous flexibility no more cookie cutter approach.

The first iteration of CRM software has only itself to blame for its poor reputation. If ever a

piece of software was written that took the end user less into account than the first iteration

of CRM it is no longer remembered. How do people who spend their lives on the road, out of

the office, use software that can only be accessed over the internal network? So access was

a problem and so was functionality: Way too complex and at the same time inflexible a

recipe for disaster. Its hard to believe that a product like that could be delivered, but it was,

and is still, actually.

Also there were several CRM packages that had little to do with managing the customer

relationship. They were, and are, contact management systems with a few bells and

whistles. Some of them can handle prospects, maybe even opportunities and quotes, but

they still cannot handle an actual sale to a live customer. How can you ask a sales person

who lives and dies by time to spend a fair portion of it with an application that does not

recognize sales? When products, individually or as a class, do not meet expectations, a poor

reputation is bound to result.

Six Principles of Success


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First, it is important to point out that there are some myths about sales people and salesforce automation software that need to be debunked. First, sales managers and their salespeople are more used to being measured than any other group in the organization, someasurable work flows should not be a shock. Second, sales people are motivated to

produce and a tool that will help them to produce may take a few knocks during roll out, butwill in the end find an enthusiastic audience if in fact it helps them to produce. In otherwords, sales people do not have an aversion for CRM software in their DNA; when they areconvinced that a software product adds actual value they adopt it. In the Six Principles belowwe will outline the most valuable functions of CRM.

Principle 1: Push Lead Routing

Every sales person appreciates a new lead. Its like a breath of fresh air into the sales

process. If you have heard a couple of Nos this week, and if youre doing your job then you

have, a new lead will be refreshing. How do we capture new leads? How do we manage

territories and route leads? And how do we measure progress with the lead?From a sales management perspective these are crucial questions. Lets answer by asking a

new set of questions. Are we using all the tools available to us to capture leads, and do we

know how we captured them later when we analyze marketing budgets? You may have

spent a fair sum putting up a website, so how many leads have you captured from the site,

and what were they interested in Product? Service? Training? Have you ever sent out an

electronic marketing tool, like a newsletter, with links back to your website? Can you capture

what the prospect found interesting and clicked on in the newsletter?And once you find a new lead how do you hand them over to the sales staff? In a fair andvisible process that cuts down on squabbling and bruised egos? If your sales staff operateswithin assigned territories then it makes sense to route leads in the same way. In this case,

known rules are very useful as they can implement in the software and lead routing isautomated. If sales territories are not a part of your business model then use a round robinapproach still fair and visible.As a Sales Manager you can arrive at work, instantly see new leads and to whom they havebeen routed. Later you can check that the leads have been contacted. How many timeshave you personally left information with an organization and never heard from them? Itsamazing, and it happens every day. Leads disappear! If you are an executive reading this,rest assured, the leads that are lost every day in your organization simply represent the halfof the marketing budget you already knew was a waste of time, effort and cash. Of course,when you see that a lead was not contacted, simply move it along to the next person in line.But measure the process, and be able to say definitively that 95% of leads were contactedwithin 24 hours, 99% within 48 hours. You not only assure senior management that you are

on top of the business, but you have sent an important message to the sales team: Velocitymatters and we expect it.Take away: Lead routing sends an important message to the sales team. The organization isusing the software to attract new leads, find out what they are interested in, route them tosales people, follow up on the leads, and see that they are serviced. And you need to usethis software also, if you want to receive new and qualified leads.

Principle 2: Pull Flexible Software Configuration

The cookie cutter approach might work with some of the departments in your organization,but sales people are a vocal, assertive group and they are not going to adopt a product thatanother company in a completely different business with a different market plan, a different

product/service mix, a different sales methodology also uses as is. On the other hand,


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custom development from scratch is a daunting task for any business, especially in the smalland medium business market.The answer is packaged software that allows you to customaries the system. Add newfields, new records, new forms, new reports that reflect whats important to your companyand sales staff. What information do you need to collect on a prospect to know whether ornot they fit sales people will readily tell anyone who asks that too much of their time isspent with prospects that are not good candidates? Give them the opportunity to gather andstore the information that they need immediately. A Go/No Go decision made right at theoutset saves everyone a lot of time and effort.And over time you accumulate some interesting information. Is there a certain type ofProspect Company that you are missing again and again? Could you meet their need with asmall change in your product/service? Open up a new market?Take Away: Sales people are by nature sceptical, and a cookie cutter software product is notgoing to gain traction. To overcome their scepticism youll need to show them a product thatSpeaks to your company, your products/ services and the sales persons work on every formand report. Sales people arent stubborn; they will adopt software if it makes sense for whatthey do every day.

Principle 3: Push Opportunity Management and Pipeline Analysis

Its one thing to drop a new lead between the cracks; its another thing entirely to drop anopportunity. You have worked with a customer or prospect, spent time and effort, to learnabout potential business, and you may have even gone through the effort of quoting thebusiness, then you drop it through lack of good work flow processes. It sits on the shelf andby the time someone remembers it, it is gone to a competitor. Now thats deflating. And ifthere is one thing that all business people have talked about, thought about and generallyworked over a thousand times it is business speed to market - velocity. From productdevelopment to service delivery we have started to measure everything. So how can salesopportunities defy this trend? Why would the most important activity in the company not beclosely monitored and measured? How long does it take to put together a proposal? Whenand how often have we followed up?Likewise, we can ask the same questions about pipeline management. We not only need tomanage opportunities with all the speed and vigour that we bring to finance and operations,but we need to manage the total pipeline and the pipeline of each individual sales managerand sales person also. We sense that the sales process, from individuals to the entire team,undergoes a series of fairly dramatic ups and down during a year, or even a quarter. Why isthis? We have trained ourselves to look outside of the company for the answer to this rollercoaster effect macro economic reasons - but are we sure that there are not internalreasons also? To keep revenue growing and less volatile we need to smooth the pipeline.By smoothing the pipeline we mean that we should measure the pipeline at every stage according to your companys sales methodology and make changes where appropriate tohelp sales people meet goals, not just this period but consistently. Consistency requiresmeasurable inputs, measurable progress and measurable outputs. Sounds simple, but itsan art and science that not many sales executives practice. Leads, Qualified Prospects withOpportunities, Proposals, Order Negotiations, Actual Sales, these are some of the stages ofthe sales process that we measure and monitor. When we see sales people with no newleads, and two prospects in negotiation, we are both excited by the probability of newbusiness and anxious about the future sales for the company and the individual salesperson. By working with sales people and sales teams to smooth the pipeline we removeanxiety from the sales process and also the desperation a sale person feels with just one ora few deals between success and abject failure.Take Away: Managing opportunities and pipelines gives the organization, the sales teamand individual sales people greater probability for consistent success. Bringing metrics to thesales process achieves the same insights and results that were gained in operations in the

past through a similar regime of measure and improve.


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Principle 4: Pull Up sell Cross Sell

Cross sell and up sell and just fancy new terms for what sales people have known from timeimmemorial: Selling again to a current customer is more time and effort effective than sellingto a prospect. A sale is always about the relationship at some level. And trust is the mostimportant sales currency. Good sales people work hard to position themselves withcompanies, products and services that provide the foundation to create trust with customers.Since sales people and sales management already recognize that trust and its directdescendant Cross Sell, Up sell to the customer are excellent, and easier to obtain,sources of new revenue, this concept will find a very willing audience. Many companies,though they recognize the usefulness of this concept, tend to practice it haphazardly. Inmany industries new sales tend to be much greater than up sales and cross sales which aremore revenue incremental. When times are a little tight, and new customers are hard to find,sales people pick up the phone and start the incremental up sell, cross sell activity. At leastpart of the reason why sales people are always going for the home run instead of the hit isthat cross selling and up selling can be difficult to manage; just the amount of informationthat you need makes it a formidable task. What is the customers business model? Why didthey buy in the first sale? What other opportunities exist to sell to them? Why would they buyagain? What other products or services can previous sales direct us to offer now?If you have ever visited Amazon.com you will immediately understand the advantageelectronic commerce has over brick and mortar retail when it comes to cross sell and up sell.Amazon does not need to mine mountains of data to know that since you bought a book ontying a fly you might also be interested in a new title about great trout rivers of Wyoming. Nomatter your industry there are products which enable the sales staff to immediately see thepossibilities that exist with a current customer, and they can quickly and easily move forwardinto the next sale with the customer. Think about how you could emulate the Amazonexperience with your customer base, youll soon have a list of several possibilities.Take away: Remove the hurdles to cross sell and up sell activity, make it a task easier toorganize and execute, and your sales staff will recognize an enhanced sales tool and a greatopportunity for additional revenue and income.

Principle 5: Push Internal and External Communications

We now have so many different means of communication that the question is no longer howto communicate, but how to communicate effectively. We have the technology, as they say;now we need to use it effectively to reach the right audience with the right message.One of the most challenging tasks for sales management is keeping its disparate team, bothdirect sales and the partners/distributors, in the loop and up to date with the latestinformation on your products and services, your recent new clients how they were won, what theybought, their market and whats coming next in product and service upgrades and changes.And it is more than just facts that you need to communicate; you are really attempting to

communicate the company to them - the companys values, the companys ideas, thecompanys vision.A single application around which all of this communication happens is essential. When yousee a sales force where each member has come up with their own communication solution,you not only have a logistical nightmare but a sales force that is out of step with thecompany, with customers and with each other. Scheduling an in-person or online meetingmust be straightforward and easy; communicating new product and/or service bulletins mustbe regular and easy if you need to update mailing lists before each bulletin then bulletinswill be infrequent and they will exclude someone by oversight; there should be an onlinesales portal with all of the necessary documents and materials that sales people require;and, as we mentioned above, lead routing and incentive compensation, individual and teamsales information new wins in new markets - must be automated and communicated in real

time to have the necessary impact. And we need to deliver all of these different types ofcommunication to both internal sales team members and external partners, again, with aslittle extra effort as possible to avoid oversights and manual errors.


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Communications is not a one way street, so we also give our sale team members a tool tocommunicate with management, themselves through reminders, customer notes, alertsabout data changes - and each other, to schedule a sales support person for a meeting,schedule resources for sales meetings.Take Away: Sales is really all about communication between the prospect and the salesperson. Much of that communication starts in sales management and filters through theranks. You need an effective tool to communicate, weekly, daily, hourly. When your CRMsolution provides this channel of communications, you have taken a giant step toward useradoption.

Principle 6: Pull Incentive Compensation

When we can record actual sales in our CRM and isnt this the very essence of Customer we create several downstream benefits for ourselves. We have already discussed up sellcross sell above, but perhaps the greatest benefit is that we can calculate salescompensation as we record sales. Not only do we automate the calculation for salescompensation perhaps putting to rest all of the spreadsheets where we performed this task

in the past but we also make incentive compensation visible to the sales group as thesales period marches along. Recording actual sales puts the C in CRM and makes salescompensation visible and motivating.Later, as sales managers, we perform the analysis of sales data and incentive compensationto determine if our compensation plans are inciting the sales behaviour that we expected.We then move the data to a spreadsheet, if necessary, to perform what if analysis.Take Away: Actual sales enable real time incentive compensation, freeing valuable saleresources for selling, not calculating, and giving management the basis for understanding ifincentive plans are driving the results for which they were intended.

Conclusion

CRM software is now in its second iteration. The latest entrants to this market have takenthe criticisms of the past to heart and they now offer sales teams and their management anexceptional tool to perform all of the tasks associated with selling. No, they cannot close thedeal, but they can communicate the same message to the entire team: We are about speedto market we never let a lead, prospect or opportunity sit on the shelf; we are aboutflexibility as markets change we change and we provide a tool that recognizes thesechanges; we are about real time data and organization access anytime, anywhere andvisible up to the minute data; we are about communication between the sales person andthe prospect, between sales management and the sales person; and, most importantly, we

are about a known, visible and measurable sales process that gives us all the foundation forimprovement and better results. An excellent CRM package enables you to deliver thismessage and when you do, youll find users adopting the new system with, dare we say,enthusiasm.

customer relation ship management-sales force automation

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