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WALTER ROGERS

Copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. Baker Communications. Houston, Texas.

FAILURE ISN’T FATAL

but failure to

CHANGE could be…

John Wooden


© Copyright 2011 Baker Communications Inc. in cooperation with Bayou Publishing. Printed and bound in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system – with the exception of a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine – without written permission from the publisher. For information, contact: ISBN: 978-1-886298-52-1 For permission to reprint excerpts, submit your permission request in writing by e-mail, fax, or mail. E-mail your request to: [email protected] Fax to 713 587-2051, attention: Permissions Manager. Mail your request to: Baker Communications Inc. 10101 SW Freeway Suite 630, Houston, Texas 77074 In your request, please be sure to include the following information:

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Endorsements

Endorsements for Spark!

"This quick read stresses the importance of CRM adoption, not just for sales teams, but for all individuals and functions in an enterprise. When functional boundaries are blurred and teams work seamlessly with each other, you can make quantum improvements in productivity for an entire enterprise, its supply chain, and its customers."

Maria Martinez Executive Vice President, Customers for Life

salesforce.com ―This book provides a fast, fresh read for any executive interested in sales transformation. It shines a spotlight on simple, actionable steps for leveraging CRM to accelerate sales.‖

Michelle Krans SVP/Strategy and Development

Gannett Co, Inc.

―This is perfect. I don‘t know why we haven‘t seen this type of book before. It maps, quickly and directly, all the steps to build a lasting culture of CRM adoption. Spark! is going to make a big difference for a lot of companies, a lot of people.‖

Andy Lark

Chief Marketing and Online Officer Commonwealth bank

―Spark! is a practical, ‗from the trenches‘ guide for any sales executive interested in quantum productivity improvements. It provides real-life best practices to ignite and sustain revenue growth.‖

Mike Clayville Vice President

North American Sales VMware

―Spark! details actionable best practices and concrete steps for building a world class sales culture leveraging CRM adoption. This engaging read tackles the most common and stubborn CRM adoption obstacles without getting bogged down into technical jargon. For those like me who are always pressed for time but want to drastically improve sales performance with CRM, this is a perfect read.‖

JoAnne Ravielli Director Customer Service & Support

Dell Cloud Business Applications


Endorsements

Endorsements for Spark!

―Spark! is the kind of silver bullet everyone is looking for. It packs in all of the best, quickest tips for breaking through persistent adoption hurdles without making you wade through a lot of complex technical jargon. This is a fast read that anyone can use.‖

Patrick Carmichael Vice President

Best Practices Institute "If you are struggling to find practical tips to drive CRM adoption read this book. Walter does a great job of identifying the most difficult obstacles to adoption and offers some simple methods for busting through these obstacles. Best of all it is a quick read, excellent for those just starting a CRM journey and a jolt of energy for those who have struggled with CRM for a while."

Alex Shootman Chief Revenue Officer.

Eloqua

"Spark! represents the kind of thought leadership that transports us out of our own mindframe, to a place where we can do the kind of heavy lifting around what makes our business teams and linkages with partners successful and viable. What Walter Rogers has written is a playbook. Mark it up, share it, and use it to design those strategies that match the complexity and unique needs of your marketplace."

Steve Horwitz CEO

Astadia

―Walter has brought the subject of Sales Enablement to life. Its highly practical style will provide momentum through best practice examples and guarantee a fast track to Success. I have worked as a partner with Walter over a number of years and his company‘s track record and innovation in this area is second to none.‖

Chris Norton Managing Director

Mentorgroup

―There is so much written about using CRM to transform the sales function and most is just noise. I like Walter‘s practical approach to making CRM work for the people who most need it – Sales Professionals. Focus on his 11 straight forward and practical Best Practices and you will get results.‖

Randy Illig CEO

Ninety Five 5


Contents

INTRODUCTION

BEST PRACTICES

❶ Gain Executive Leadership and Sponsorship With KPIs

❷ Map and Enable Your Customers‘ Buying Processes

❸ Include Users in the Design and Deployment of the System

❹ Integrate Sales and Marketing

❺ Manage the Forward Pipeline

❻ Separate the Prospecting Cycle from the Sales Cycle

❼ Enable Collaboration and Support Tools

❽ Focus on Sales Management

❾ Deliver Effective Strategic and Tactical Training

❿ Include Non-Sales-Facing Functions

⓫ Automate Reports and Alerts

CALL TO ACTION

CO

NT

EN

TS


Introduction

Introduction

There has been tremendous buzz about the Sales 2.0 Revolution —

—the way cloud-based applications transform how sales and

marketing organizations can and must collaborate, interact with

customers, track information, implement solutions and manage sales

teams. But go to any Sales 2.0 conference, or read most Sales 2.0

books, and what you will find is information about technology and its

promise to improve productivity.

Even though the Sales 2.0 movement is certainly enabled by

technology, selling is still a people business. Selling 2.0 is not about

technology. It is fundamentally about changes in selling behavior

enabled by new technology, not the other way around. The more tools

you force upon your sales makers, the more resistance and lack of

adoption you will get in return.

The Sales 2.0 revolution is partially driven by the reality that

customers now use the power of the cloud and its sophisticated

interactive features to control the buying process and customize

solutions to fit their needs. Buyer behavior has drastically changed. In

response, your selling behavior needs to change, not just your tools.

How many sales professionals have you met that are also accountants? Few, if any. The DNA of an accountant is vastly different from the DNA of a sales professional. Unfortunately, most CRM systems are used primarily as ―sales accounting‖ systems. At best, most CRM deployments result in a repository of forecast data. At worst, they become an overpowered and underused contact management system.

Your business is not investing in a CRM system for ―sales accounting.‖ You are investing in a CRM system to change selling behavior, drastically accelerate sales cycles, increase collaboration, integrate customer information silos, leverage actionable analytics, and better predict the future to adjust quickly to rapidly changing market conditions. The CRM system can and should be viewed as your corporate nervous system, instantly providing and reacting to intelligence and enabling greater productivity, agility and visibility.

Even though CRM systems are deployed in nearly all industries and

segments, adoption issues are fairly universal. It doesn‘t matter if a

company is large or small, in technology or healthcare, in the U.S. or

abroad. There is a common pattern and formula—a recipe, if you

will—for CRM success. This formula has eleven ingredients that will

boost revenue and ensure CRM adoption. You see, the problem with

CRM adoption is not the CRM at all; it is the context within which it is

used and presented.

This practical guide outlines eleven best practices critical for the success of any CRM enablement effort. This is NOT a technical guide. CRM enablement is not a technology problem; it is a behavioral problem. Technology solutions, by themselves, do

not change behavior.


1 Best Practice

Best Practice # 1

GAIN EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP AND SPONSORSHIP WITH KPIs

Sales organizations are tasked with building, maturing and closing pipeline. In the current economic climate, these are not easy missions. Everyone is working harder just to stay even. The facts are daunting: Competition is accelerating from unexpected sources, both domestically and internationally, forcing nearly every industry and company into some type of transformation. For some industries, such as music, publishing, print, and manufacturing, these transformation efforts are a matter of survival. Selecting and deploying a CRM system is one of the most important activities you can undertake to enable a world-class sales culture. While most organizations use CRM as a sales accounting system, it should really be used as a corporate nervous system that interdependently connects all of the functions in a company, with the explicit goals of increasing revenue and customer satisfaction, and improving product and service offerings. Without a central corporate nervous system, organizations will no longer be able to anticipate or react fast enough to changing market conditions that can spell opportunity or disaster.

For executives, the key to CRM value is using it to manage the performance of their company, with rapid access to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that influence strategy and tactics. The term KPI is commonly used, but that doesn‘t mean it is always well understood. Does KPI refer to goals? Yes, but not only that. Is it related to sales

quotas or forecasting? Sometimes, but not exclusively. Do KPIs have something to do with measuring performance? Definitely, but they are more than just metrics. Just because you can measure something doesn‘t make it a KPI. In order for KPIs to be useful, everyone must understand not only what is being measured, but also why it is being measured; otherwise, most of the benefit is lost. Something can be defined as a Key Performance Indicator when:

Less than 55% of reps are currently making quota

Customers say “no” 6 times before they say “yes”

65% of sales professionals stop at the second “no”

75% of new leads never receive a sales call

It is KEY to the success of your organization.

It is related to PERFORMANCE.

It is used as an INDICATOR of current and future performance.

1

2

3


1 Best Practice

Once you define your KPIs, what do you do with them?

After identifying your KPIs, you can use them in at least two different ways. Obviously, you will want to use them to manage performance. Start this process by clearly outlining what the KPIs are, why they are valuable, how they will be measured, how often they will be measured, and what will be done with the information gleaned from these measurements. It is crucial that everyone understands every aspect of this process. Create and distribute documentation that everyone can refer to, send out regular performance updates, and make KPI discussion the centerpiece of executive conversations, cascading down the organization. KPIs can also be used to inspire and refocus. Make your KPIs the defining measure of your team‘s culture. Use the KPIs to mold the vision and image of your team. Work them into your conversation and help the team see the KPIs as a crucial guidepost by which to measure results and success. The historical problem with KPIs is that executives are accustomed to acting or reacting to information as it flows up through the organization in the form of static reports that are typically generated once each week in the form of a spreadsheet, or multiple spreadsheets. Executives react to this static information to trigger changes in performance. The difficulty with this process is that, in order to generate these executive reports, sales managers are often required to pull information and perform accounting gymnastics to format it in the way the executives are accustomed to consuming it. This creates substantial work for the sales manager and sales makers, without providing any real benefit. As a result, sales

Lead conversion ratio

Lead response time ratio

Pipeline-to-revenue target ratio

Year-over-year pipeline trend ratio

Time per sales stage ratio

Average revenue per sale

Account share ratio

Account profitability ratio

Year-over-year sales trend ratio

Win-Loss ratio

Here are 10 crucial KPIs that should be tracked in nearly any

company:


1 Best Practice

managers may be slow to adopt any new CRM in the belief that it will create additional reporting workloads. In some cases, sales managers and sales makers will become very resistant to using the CRM. Without sales manager and sales maker support, it will be nearly impossible to glean valuable KPIs. The good news is that with a properly configured CRM system, there is no longer a need for accounting gymnastics or static executive reports. CRM systems can and will deliver rich, detailed performance insight on demand.

Dynamic, on-demand reports will vary in format and frequency, but it only takes a modest adjustment on the executive‘s part to learn how to work with and leverage new and improved reporting formats. Executives will have better information, delivered in a faster and more

actionable style—much more effective than the old weekly static reports—without requiring any extra work from the sales makers or sales management. With improved access to information, executives will be able to make just-in-time decisions in order to be more effective in improving performance and driving more revenue. Once your executive leadership understands the true value and capability a CRM system can provide, drastically improving decision making with KPIs, they will own it, sponsor it, and drive it across your entire organization. That will change the culture of sales management, which will change the culture of sales makers.

Identify Key Performance Indicators that are important to the executive team.

Eliminate as many manually produced executive reports as possible and replace them with KPI dashboards and reports sent programmatically on a pre-set schedule.

Clearly communicate the KPIs to the team so that they understand what they are, why they are important, and how to use them in guiding their own success.

Use KPI data in every coaching session and team meeting. Use KPIs to make better decisions, adjust strategy, inspire and enable.

Key Action 1


2 Best Practice

Best Practice # 2 MAP AND ENABLE YOUR CUSTOMERS’ BUYING PROCESSES Generally, sales makers will resist any extra drag on their schedules, including anything that requires a change to their process that they think is working just fine. They will not make time to learn something new unless it is clear to them that it will help them more quickly reach their goals. Devoting precious time to learning to use a CRM system is not high on their priority list.

Eliminating choke points and reducing sales cycle drag is a very fast way to gain widespread CRM adoption. If a CRM system can simplify, and in some cases automate, selling cycle activities, then users will leverage the system in an effort to reach quota and simplify their lives.

The first step in reducing sales cycle drag is to understand how your customers like to buy your product or service. If you haven‘t revisited your sales process in the last 18 months, then you may be out of step with how your customers currently buy. All organizations are undergoing transformation, which means that buying patterns are changing. If your sales organization is not selling the way customers

and prospects want to buy, then sales cycles will elongate and closing rates will decline. Once you understand your customers‘ buying process, you can design an effective sales process that is in step with how your customers want to buy. Rather than design processes with your internal needs in mind, start with the customer and engineer your sales and marketing processes with a customer-centric orientation.

Once you have an understanding of your customers‘ buying process and a map of your corresponding sales process, the next step is to enable that process in the CRM system. Doing so provides the necessary foundation to build a high-performance, highly responsive sales culture. It will provide a common standard by which the company can truly assess and improve the size and speed of the pipeline. It provides the master framework needed to automate repetitive tasks, eliminate choke points, create performance accountability and provide sales and management a much more accurate view of the business.

Revisit how your customers and prospects are buying. Re-map your sales process to align with your customers’ buying process. Map the new process into CRM.

Key Action 2


3 Best Practice

Best Practice #3 INCLUDE USERS IN THE DESIGN AND DEPLOYMENT OF THE SYSTEM CRM systems can provide powerful, multi-faceted solutions. They can significantly improve an organization‘s ability to track and store information, improve the flow of timely sales intelligence to executives, enhance the sales manager‘s ability to monitor and coach sales maker performance, and provide sales makers with highly effective tools to target and manage their customer relationships. The net result, flowing through all of these channels, is the ability to drive more revenue.

The fulcrum of this leverage is centered squarely on the sales makers and sales managers who interface directly with customers. If, for any reason, the sales makers or their managers are resistant to the idea of taking full advantage of all of the benefits of the CRM system, adoption rates will be low, results will be spotty, and the benefits of the system will largely remain unrealized. For that reason, the organization must invest time and energy in making sure sales makers fully understand that, above all, the system is intended to solve their problems and deliver real value to them.

Adoption problems often arise because of the fundamental divide between sales accounting needs and sales team needs during the CRM design and implementation stage. Too often, CRM projects are launched by executives and business analysts, who are looking for better ways to measure performance and collect data for planning purposes. Most of the time, sales teams are not included when the CRM strategy is being developed. It shouldn‘t be much of a surprise that, having been left in a vacuum with little or no information, they often conclude the worst:

They are going to be asked to dedicate precious time and effort to logging information into the CRM system, which offers no measurable benefit to them but makes other people‘s jobs easier.

The CRM system will be used to track their performance in minute detail, which will be evaluated by ―higher-ups‖ out of context.

The information from the CRM system could be used against them during future performance reviews.

It must be said that these fears are often well founded. Unfortunately, CRM systems are frequently conceived and implemented with little or no consideration given to how the sales professionals will actually use them, much less how they could be configured to deliver the kind of value that would encourage ubiquitous use. If you want to increase the chances that your sales makers will use your expensive new CRM system, involve them early in the development stage. When sales is not consulted to determine what tools or capabilities they would like to see, the message they get is very clear: ―This system was created to make someone else‘s job easier by giving you one more task to perform that doesn‘t help you make more calls or close more business.‖ If the primary intended users—sales professionals—are not consulted or involved in the creation and rollout, they will not be enthusiastic about using it.


3 Best Practice

When it comes to deploying a new CRM system, sales teams are internal customers. They will be hesitant to ―buy‖ any solution that doesn‘t meet a need or make their job easier. Therefore, instead of forcing a pre-configured solution on them, it only makes sense to ask them a few questions, in order to better align the tools to address their needs. Ask them what frustrates them now about their ability to collect, store, track and access various types of customer intelligence. Find out what capabilities they wish they had, or had more of, to analyze customer data and improve critical activities such as account and opportunity planning. Solicit their ideas about the limitations of their current systems, and what improvements or new capabilities would help them the most.

There are numerous questions you can use to uncover the needs and problems your sales teams face every day. The more questions you ask, the more trust you will build and the more insights you will gain on how to properly set up your CRM system. The big payoff, though, is that sales teams will view the CRM as their system, which means they will actually use it in ways that will benefit both themselves and the organization.

Create a sales task force with representation from individual sales makers, sales managers and leadership. Work with them to identify their needs in territory management, account management, opportunity management, lead management, activity management, forecast management, pipeline management, customer communication management, automation and customer research. Document all needs, prioritize them based on value, and create a roadmap. Gain agreement on the roadmap.

Key Action 3


4 Best Practice

Best Practice # 4 INTEGRATE SALES AND MARKETING Leads produced by marketing lose their effectiveness if not called within 24 HOURS.

On average, more than 75% of leads produced by marketing departments never receive a call or email from anyone. There may be no bigger revenue generation obstacle in most companies than this disconnect between sales and marketing. Even though both sales and marketing are ultimately responsible for driving revenue, they often report to different executives, pursue slightly different goals, and use conflicting measurement objectives. This results in sales and marketing frequently being at odds with each other. Marketing focuses on developing a variety of creative campaigns to generate interest in the company‘s products and services. These campaigns can take months to prepare and roll out. Using traditional methods, leads generated by these programs are captured, categorized and delivered to the sales team over days, if not weeks or months. Consequently, the leads generated by marketing campaigns

can be old by the time they reach the sales organization. Leads MUST be called within 24 hours. The longer it takes to call a lead, the less qualified it will be. This time delay between generating a lead and passing it to sales creates tremendous friction between the two organizations, wasting the time and energy of both groups, and leaving both groups pointing fingers at each other. A properly configured CRM system makes it much easier for marketing and sales to communicate, share and transfer information, and carry out planning and strategy initiatives. When everyone has access to the same information and the same capabilities in real time, breakdowns in information flow can be eliminated, and critical benchmarks and deadlines can be more easily met. Leads can flow seamlessly from marketing to sales, enabling rapid response and higher connect and close ratios.

On average,

more than 75% of leads produced by marketing

departments

NEVER receive a call or email

from anyone.


4 Best Practice

Insist that marketing and sales leadership meet weekly to discuss integrated programs. Create a joint sales/marketing dashboard based on your KPIs. Provide sales with a minimum of 2 weeks’ notice before launching marketing campaigns that will produce leads. Flow all leads through the CRM system. Gain agreement from sales to call all leads within 24 hours of receipt.

Key Action 4

The advantages go beyond enhanced communication effectiveness. A properly configured CRM system is a tremendous boost to genuine collaboration so that marketing and sales can begin to work together seamlessly to launch and support highly targeted sales initiatives. By leveraging all the capabilities of CRM, sales and marketing can efficiently collaborate to design a tightly coordinated effort that aligns messaging, product sets, pricing, margin, sales cadence, and sales goals into one seamless effort. CRM can not only automate many routine tasks, including alerting sales makers of new leads in their queue, or alerting managers that leads aren‘t getting called, but it also enables measurement and analysis of the results so that programs can be adjusted.

This type of highly coordinated and unified strategy can eliminate cross-departmental competition and significantly enhance the planning and execution of sales activities. Both sales and marketing processes should come alive inside integrated work streams enabled by CRM, and finally deliver the result that the entire organization is looking for: closing more business at higher

margins.


5 Best Practice

What steps can managers take to guard against the

confusion?

Best Practice # 5 MANAGE THE FORWARD PIPELINE One of a sales manager‘s most important tasks is to monitor the sales production of each sales maker. After all, the success of the entire organization depends on making sure the sales team is generating new business and driving revenue at an ever-increasing rate. If a sales maker isn‘t doing well, the sales manager needs to recognize that quickly, so appropriate coaching can be provided and/or changes in strategy can be implemented. Most sales managers rely on two key tools to monitor sales maker productivity: pipeline and forecasting. However, highly effective sales managers understand that there is a difference between the two. Forecasting is focused on later stage deals—the ones that are far enough along that you can begin to get a feel for the likelihood of success in the current quarter. However, forecasting does little to help with future quarters. Technically, pipeline refers to every opportunity a sales maker might be working on—including the ones that are far enough along to be at the forecast stage—but there are many other opportunities in the pipeline that are not that far along yet. We can designate these deals as being part of the ―forward‖ pipeline, because they are focused on the future development of sales that ultimately impact later forecasts. The problem this creates is that too many sales managers don‘t differentiate between the two, which often leads to sales makers not working hard enough or smart enough to develop the deals farther

back in the pipeline. If this situation persists, sales makers will spend too much time on the forecasted deals and the

opportunities deeper in the pipeline will be neglected, leading to a decline in deals that reach ―forecasted‖ status in the next quarter.

Start by creating a realistic timeline defining how long it takes for an opportunity to move through the pipeline. Many organizations still rely on the old 30-60-90-day predictive approach, as in, ―it looks like this opportunity is about 60 days from closing.‖ The sales maker bases this estimate on the level of progress that still must take place within the account. The

problem with this predictive approach is it makes it very easy for deals to get stuck and die before anyone realizes what has happened. The sales maker can just keep pushing the deal back another 30 days, waiting on things to happen, rather than being proactive and working with the customer to make the deal happen (or put it out of its misery and mark it as lost). A more sensible way to manage the pipeline is to monitor opportunity progress based on the length of the sales cycle, and link the work being done on the opportunity to the time it should take to close the deal. We might call this the ―cadence‖ or ―pace‖ approach. The cadence approach works like this: What is your typical sales cycle? If it is 24 weeks, then begin by determining what tasks need to be done each week in order to guide the opportunity to close in 24 weeks. For example:


5 Best Practice

You get the idea. So, what if you have an opportunity that has been in the pipeline for 10 weeks? If you have a cadence in place, it is a simple matter of checking to see what should have done at Week Ten. If it hasn‘t been done, the opportunity may be in danger of being lost. A sales manager‘s responsibility at that point is to get with the sales maker, find out what the roadblocks are, and provide the coaching and support required for the sales maker to get the opportunity back on schedule. Once sales managers start managing the forward pipeline this way, forecasting becomes less urgent but also more accurate. Sometimes people try to attach a forecast to an opportunity based on the time it has been in the pipeline, which is not helpful or at all accurate. An opportunity shouldn‘t be assigned a forecast status until certain key objectives have been met. For example, does it make any sense to attach a forecast status to a deal when you haven‘t even submitted a proposal? Can you forecast the success of a deal with any degree of

accuracy when the customer hasn‘t agreed to any next steps? As part of your cadence process, you should create a set of benchmarks that define when an opportunity is forecast-worthy; anything that hasn‘t hit those benchmarks remains in the forward pipeline and the sales maker should work diligently to keep it on track. Managing the forward pipeline using the cadence approach makes it much easier for the sales manager to implement effective coaching. Again, using the 24-week sales cycle as an example:

Whom do you contact in the account, and when do you contact them?

What kind of information and materials do you send out each week?

When do you schedule the product demo? What external and internal resources do you need to leverage

to develop the proposal, and when do you meet with those people?

By when should you have the proposal in front of the decision maker?

• Let‘s say that after 10 weeks the sales maker should have developed a thorough needs analysis, built a set of contacts within the customer organization, and prepared a list of solution options to discuss with the customer. If your sales maker is now at 14 weeks with this customer and still doesn‘t have these steps completed, that might be a good indication that he needs help with questioning skills to uncover needs and identify opportunities.

• If, at 20 weeks, the final proposal should be sent off to legal to

be reviewed by both sides, but we are now at 24 weeks and the sales maker is still wrestling with pushback on some issues from the decision maker, this could mean that the sales maker‘s ability to handle objections and move through to

closing is weak.


5 Best Practice

The important take-away is that both the sales maker and the sales manager must work just as hard and just as smart when dealing with the forward pipeline as when trying to bring the forecasted deals in for

a landing. The more seriously you attend to the forward pipeline, the happier everyone will be when the next quarter comes.

Separate your forecast meetings from your pipeline meetings, and don’t confuse forecasting with pipeline management. Consider switching from the 30-60-90 day approach to the sales cycle cadence approach, or at least installing safeguards to keep deals from staying in limbo if you stick with the old method. Define cadence steps for each week of the sales cycle that conform to your sales process and the expectations of the organization. Design coaching plans around each of the steps that can be leveraged to build sales maker skills when working through each stage of the cadence. Refocus pipeline conversations around managing and coaching to the status of the forward pipeline. Use the pipeline meeting to inspect the quota to pipeline ratio (normally 3x or better).

Key Action 5


6 Best Practice

Aggressively communicate and promote

the vision

Best Practice #6 SEPARATE THE PROSPECTING CYCLE FROM THE SALES CYCLE There was a time when sales and prospecting were almost synonymous; it was assumed that anyone in sales would dedicate a great deal of time to identifying and developing new opportunities, also known as prospecting. However, more than a decade of unbridled growth and prosperity, from the mid-1990s up to the present severe downturn, lulled many sales professionals into the belief that prospecting was no longer a priority, because customers were plentiful and ready to buy. Now, with customers postponing purchases and slashing budgets, sales organizations must rapidly shift from farming—nurturing the same customers year over year—to hunting, getting back out into the marketplace and aggressively pursuing new customers, as well as creating new business with existing customers. This is by no means a simple proposition. A change like this requires nothing less than a complete transformation of the underlying culture of the organization, and a distinct and clear separation between the prospecting cycle and the sales cycle. The prospecting cycle is the distinct set of activities required to get a prospect to qualify into or out of a sales cycle. Once a prospect is qualified, then the sales cycle begins. Attitudes must change, values must change, strategies must change, expectations must change, and in many cases, personnel must be replaced or retrained as the entire organization takes on a new mission and a new identity. A major component of this new strategy is a commitment to prospecting; sales professionals must increase their level of influence to work with higher-level decision makers at their current customers, and also expand to find new opportunities with companies they have never engaged before. A change this profound—one that will force

every single person in the organization to adopt new priorities and learn new skills—creates a lot of pushback and institutional drag. Change can only come from the top, and it will only succeed if the people at the top refocus their priorities and activities to make sure the organization doesn‘t falter until the vision is achieved. There are five discrete steps to separating the prospecting cycle from the sales cycle.

As mentioned, the pushback and institutional drag related to moving from

a sales culture based on farming to one based on hunting can be very significant, for a variety of reasons. Change is hard, inconvenient, confusing, and threatening. People naturally resist and try to avoid it

because they prefer comfort and stability. Especially if the organization

has a history of announcing new (and short-lived) initiatives, most people will pay lip service to the change, but keep the status quo in practice, based on the assumption that ―this too shall pass.‖ For this reason, the new vision must be consistently and prominently promoted across the organization. Messaging must be created around the new vision, spelling out the reasons for the change, the outcomes that the change will achieve, the process for the change, and how the change will challenge and benefit everyone in the organization. This can‘t be accomplished with a global email and flyers posted on break room walls; the new messaging must

1


6 Best Practice

Align training and activities

with the prospecting

vision

infect the vocabulary of every manager and become the foundation of every sales meeting. People will initially have questions and concerns. Managers and senior leadership must be prepared to answer these questions in ways that provide clarity and direction.

This is where the battle for transformation is won or lost. The skills and processes

required to succeed in an order-taking/farming culture have very little in common with a hunting /prospecting culture. Senior executives often fail to grasp just

how profound these differences are, and assume that by simply redefining

the outcomes they want, the sales teams will shift gears and get the job done. Nothing

could be further from the truth. Farming usually involves responding to requests from the customer, who will then make their final decision based on features and price. Of course, there are opportunities for farmers to provide value propositions and up-sell to a certain extent, but most of the time they are starting with warm, qualified leads who have already decided to

buyit is just a matter of determining from whom, and for how much. Prospecting, on the other hand, requires the sales maker to find the customer, contact the customer, uncover viable opportunities, and work with the customer to develop the opportunity and close the deal. Skills needed to successfully implement a prospecting strategy include:

Market research

List building

Methodical organization

Voice mail/email techniques

Rejection management

Qualification skills

Telephone techniques

Rapid rapport building

Questioning and listening skills

Handling objections

In addition, sales managers must acquire confidence in training and coaching to these new behaviors. In most instances this will require extensive training programs for the managers as well. Senior leadership must embrace the reality that they must invest whatever it takes to deliver comprehensive, ongoing training and activity management programs to help sales makers obtain the necessary skills, and support and encourage them while they become proficient. One possible shortcut to ramping up a sales force with the right skills to support a prospecting culture is to hire experienced and highly successful sales professionals with a proven track record in this area. It is understood within the industry that some people are inclined toward hunting while others are more naturally suited for farming. Sometimes a shifting culture may—regrettably—require making changes in personnel. There will always be room for some farmers in any sales organization, but you may not be able to keep all of your farmers. During the training process, be aware of who is making progress and who isn‘t. Don‘t make the mistake of hoping some people will get better when it is clear that ―better‖ may still not be good enough. Keep those you can, hire the best hunters you can find to round out the team, and keep on training for success.

2


6 Best Practice

Measure for prospecting performance

Most companies do a pretty good job of measuring the sales cycle. The most

common metrics include number of opportunities by stage, value of opportunities by stage, pipeline to quota ratio, and closed/won ratio. Prospecting is quite different—and in fact must be measured

separately—from the sales cycle. Like the sales cycle, prospecting has

its own unique set of stages, and each stage has to be measured in order to identify

performance gaps on an individual basis. Overcomplicating the prospecting cycle leads to confusion; keeping the stage count to five allows the sales maker to stay on track while providing management the metrics needed to monitor and enable the process. These stages are:

3

Pending – No activity has occurred yet at this stage. This is a high-probability prospect that has been identified, either by marketing or by the sales professional, as someone with a propensity to buy, and placed on the sales maker‘s call list. Management should use this stage to assess whether or not the sales maker is ready to take on

more prospecting activities.

Unqualified – This stage is used when a meaningful interaction with a prospect is completed and the prospect is not a fit. Once a prospect passes through this gate, marketing should kick off an automated

lead-nurturing program.

Qualified – This stage is used when a meaningful interaction with a prospect is completed and specific qualification criteria are confirmed. If a prospect passes through this gate, then the regular sales cycle

kicks in.

Unable to connect – This stage is used only after the multi-stage contact strategy fails to deliver any

meaningful interaction with the prospect.

Launched – In this stage, the sales maker has kicked off a set of marketing and calling activities to generate interest from their prospects. We recommend a multi-stage contact strategy to connect with prospects, including 5 to 6 connection points with a blend of email and telephone calls. Some companies will measure each of these as discrete stages.


6 Best Practice

Direct and equip sales managers

to coach for prospecting performance

With these stages in place, you have the ability to identify choke points, on an organizational and individual basis, and specific prospecting metrics can be measured. Each sales maker can then be coached on specific skill gaps. Key metrics to follow and coach to are:

% of prospects that convert from Launched to Qualified – this is

an indicator of sales maker effectiveness in following a specific multi-contact strategy

% of prospects in Pending vs. total – this is an indicator of sales maker effectiveness in starting and maintaining a prospecting cadence

% of Qualified to Unqualified – this is an indicator of sales maker effectiveness in communicating the value proposition with prospects and gaining prospect interest

Nothing will get the message across that your organization is serious about shifting to a prospecting culture like consistently tracking these kinds of metrics and holding people accountable to improve them.

This is the Achilles‘ heel of many prospecting organizations, even when

the rest of the culture seems to be properly aligned. Sales managers are charged with overseeing the performance of their sales teams, but too often sales manager activities are focused on

managing—evaluating metrics, filing reports, conducting pipeline

meetings and sales meetings, and solving personnel issues. This leaves the sales

team to fend for themselves when it comes to most customer-facing activities. In this environment, most sales makers do the best they can, but they don‘t know what they don‘t know, and often they don‘t find out until the sales manager calls them in for a heart-to-heart about their poor performance. If your organization wants to excel in a prospecting culture, your sales managers must be equipped and empowered to spend whatever time and resources it takes to support and train their team members through regular coaching. The metrics outlined in the section above provide managers with specific areas to monitor and coach. The sales manager must be able to create a coaching plan to help each team member continue to grow and improve. Coaching puts the teeth in accountability, and delivers the solutions that team members need to achieve the goals the organization has set for them.

4


6 Best Practice

Reward based on

prospecting performance

In order to improve and sustain sales team buy-in for a prospecting culture,

make sure that rewards are tracked to prospecting activities as well as to overall results. Sure, they usually work hand-in-glove, but rewards tracked to key prospecting activities

can reinforce the message that the prospecting culture is here to stay.

Spread the rewards around, but make sure everyone can connect the dots and see that the

rewards are keyed to prospecting activities, rather than just getting lucky with a big deal from a run-rate customer. Here are some ideas for rewarding the team or an individual sales maker:

Highest % of Qualified prospects

Lowest % of Pending prospects

Highest sales volume from NEW customers

Highest % of reactivated customers

Highest margin on NEW customers Shifting from farming to hunting, especially in a large organization, can take a long time; it might take a couple of years or more, and it may involve significant personnel adjustments along the way. However, in the end, the organization will not only survive but thrive in any economy, anytime, anywhere. It is hard work, but a small price to pay for lasting success.

• Separate the Sales Cycle from the Prospecting Cycle

• Aggressively communicate and promote the vision

• Align training and activities with the prospecting vision

• Measure for prospecting performance

• Direct and equip sales managers to coach for prospecting performance

• Reward based on prospecting performance

Key Action 6

5


7 Best Practice

Best Practice # 7 ENABLE COLLABORATION AND SUPPORT TOOLS Depending on how complex or simple your products and services are, you will have a variety of sales activities, supported by specific tools that surround the overall sales process such as Lead Management, Territory Planning, Account Planning, Opportunity Management, Forecast Management and more. However, the social media revolution has spawned an amazing new set of innovative and intuitive tools that allow teams and individuals to collaborate more effectively, address performance gaps, and close new business faster and with higher margins. This revolution in sales enablement has three key components:

SOCIAL Businesses are now finding ways to tap this technology and energy in ways that enable their teams to collaborate more effectively and easily in real time and across geographical barriers. Using virtual platforms and new software applications, teams can now share ideas, conduct research, and plan/implement new programs.

MOBILE The social networking revolution has migrated from PC/Laptops to handheld devices, beginning with smartphones and then to iPads and other tablets. These devices give team members access to these social tools and platforms anywhere, anytime. This next generation of social collaboration creates incredible boosts in productivity by enabling teams to share vital information more quickly and adjust critical activities in the need of the moment, eliminating delays that can lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue.

OPEN Perhaps the most important component, openness is the primary driver of success in this brave new business world where rapid access to accurate, important information drives your competitive edge. These new social, mobile technologies make critical content immediately accessible to everyone on the team regardless of time zone or geo, which in turn generates valuable feedback and intel across the entire organization. Training, coaching, planning, data harvesting, assessment, and redeployment of important assessments and activities become simple and seamless.


7 Best Practice

With this powerful set of tools at their fingertips, the only thing lacking for teams is a comprehensive deployment strategy to help them leverage all the possibilities. Many CRMs have already integrated Social, Mobile and Open networking into their solutions with other CRMs aligning and adopting at a rapid pace. You will need to make some decisions about which tools will become the best practice standard. Some will be simple to enable, and others will be complex. Regardless of complexity, if the tools all reside in the same place, the likelihood of adoption and use will drastically increase. On the other hand, if the tools conflict with your CRM, you will drive down the adoption rates of both and complicate the CRM learning curve. Every organization is different, and you will need to decide which tools are most important in your situation.

Identify the key tools used by your sales organization. Rationalize them and pick the best of the breed. Enable them in the CRM system.

Social Collaboration Quick Tips When connecting via social networks, remember:

Keep it brief

Be professional

Don‘t like/repost everything everyone says and does

Post useful assets and resources

Don‘t be afraid to ask for help

Offer help whenever you can

Use hash tags and other tools properly Key Action 7


8 Best Practice

Best Practice # 8 FOCUS ON SALES MANAGEMENT Front-line sales managers are the most important lever in any sales transformation or CRM adoption effort. Gain their support, and change will happen. Ignoring or alienating them will virtually ensure a failed project. Sales managers are measured on how well their teams grow, mature and close the pipeline—end of story. If a team isn‘t meeting quota, it is the fault of the sales manager. The sales manager is charged with making sure the team—as individuals and as a group—is driving revenue. A CRM system is a powerful engine for improving sales performance. Used correctly, CRM can provide the nervous system for all sales performance and coaching conversation, replacing the process of filling out tedious reports. A properly configured and deployed CRM system can become a revenue-driving engine for the entire sales team. It comes down to this: information is power, and CRM puts an incredible amount of real-time information at the sales manager‘s fingertips. Information can be available on demand 24-7. Without having to call a meeting or make a phone call, managers can find out:

CRM systems enable sales managers to coach their sales makers and improve their selling behaviors based on real customer data. With this information available on demand, sales managers can quickly shift priorities and develop new strategies that respond effectively to changing conditions within specific accounts. Managers can also conduct more productive account reviews and provide effective just-in-time coaching that will immediately impact sales performance. All of this serves to drive revenue in a powerful and even exponential way. Once the sales manager figures this out, CRM adoption is easy. In a previous section, we discussed Executive KPIs. Sales manager KPIs are simply a reflection of the executive KPIs. Once sales managers‘ KPIs are identified, they can be used in at least two different ways.

At this point, CRM becomes a sales

manager’s ally instead of just another task to

manage.

What deals their reps have in their pipeline

How many calls their sales team made this week

Who the sales team called on

What the account plan is and how they are tracking against it

And much more…


8 Best Practice

1 2

First, you can use it to manage performance. You start

this process by clearly detailing what metrics are being followed, why they are valuable, how they will be measured,

how often, and what will be done with the information gleaned from these measurements. It is crucial that everyone on the team understands every aspect of this process. Create and distribute documentation, send out regular performance updates, and make discussions of these measurements a part of regular weekly one-on-one and team coaching. Use these metrics as a guidepost to publicly measure progress. When progress is lagging, this data becomes the lever that guides the performance improvement coaching strategy.

Secondly, CRM data can be used to inspire and refocus

the team. Make the data the defining measure of your team‘s culture. Use it to mold the vision and image of your

team. Work the information into your conversations with team members. Help the team see that leveraging these metrics is the key to improving performance and driving more revenue. Once your team knows and understands the role that CRM plays in helping them achieve and measure success, their ability to meet and even exceed your expectations will rise dramatically.

Key Action 8

Select your top 10 Key Performance Indicators. Use the list above as a starting point. Communicate the list to the team and include a discussion of each of these KPIs in your weekly team and one-on-one meetings.


9 Best Practice

Best Practice # 9 DELIVER EFFECTIVE STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL TRAINING We have all experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed by the learning curve that comes with learning a new skill or system, including CRM. The good news is that CRM systems usually come with many self-paced training tutorials that can help users learn what all the buttons do. The bad news is that this type of training is almost exclusively about features and functions; users will not learn much about how the CRM enables new sales behaviors that can improve the quality and quantity of customer communication, and ultimately enhance their ability to increase revenue. In addition, most training is delivered in one- to three-day classroom training sessions.

When deploying a new CRM system, nothing is more important than ensuring sales teams receive contextual, comprehensive, ongoing training and coaching on strategies and tactics leveraging for CRM to drive revenue, reach quota faster, and accelerate sales growth. CRM is a powerful sales enablement tool, and with the right training, sales teams will learn how to navigate smoothly and confidently through all the functions of the system, and to use those functions to support sales activities in all of their accounts. CRM strategy and tactics training has an entirely different purpose than functional training. Functional training is all about acquiring knowledge: it only helps sales makers understand what each button does and how to access and manipulate data on each screen. CRM strategy and tactics training is about changing behavior; the focus is using CRM as a tool to help sales teams to do their jobs more effectively. In other words, strategic and tactical CRM training will transform the way sales makers approach the sales process by:

Users don’t learn by sitting in a classroom. They learn by doing.


9 Best Practice

‗

Involve the sales training organization in the design of the CRM enablement plan. Identify opportunities to integrate CRM training with existing sales training. Create a training plan that relies on short bursts of live or virtual training, no longer than 60 minutes per session, delivered over multi-week periods and tied to specific sales missions.

Key Action 9

Employing a team collaboration focus

Relying on measurement as an integral component

Using real world sales calls to reinforce learning and application

Incorporating ongoing pipeline coaching

Drawing out best practices

Developing and reinforcing sales management behaviors

Leveraging CRM analytics to gain opportunity intelligence

Implementing a cadence of weekly sales coaching, training, and best practices

Customizing CRM features and weekly metrics to support sales activities

Above all, building all activities around generating revenue

As sales teams are exposed to this type of practical, results-driven training and coaching, their productivity and profitability will improve incrementally, week after week.


10 Best Practice

Best Practice # 10 INCLUDE NON-SALES-FACING FUNCTIONS

So far in this guide, the focus has been on best practices to boost support and participation from sales teams. These are arguably the most important to insuring that CRM is used as a sales enablement tool instead of a sales accounting tool. However, as important as it is to accomplish that mission, you must also connect a few other non-sales functions in order to fully realize the benefits a CRM system can provide your entire organization.

Begin by making sure that non-sales-facing functions are included in the planning, design and implementation process for your CRM. Remember, the CRM is supposed to be a turnkey customer relationship management system that gives your organization the ability to deliver the most efficient and effective customer experience. Finance, HR, Support, Operations, and other functions all have an impact on the customer‘s experience. Not connecting these other functions with your CRM system limits your ability to eliminate redundant work processes, and ultimately degrades the customer experience. If an organization is leveraging 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 there is a disconnect about where, when and how to leverage the CRM. When CRM is appropriately configured and deployed, it enables a central data-sharing and collaboration platform accessed and leveraged by all functions within the organization.

The easiest way to ensure high-value customer intelligence and resulting high CRM adoption rates is to integrate the CRM with the financial and order-entry systems. Make this a priority in order to reduce double entry and to provide your teams a 360-degree view of customer purchasing patterns that will ultimately enable better investment decisions and go-to-market plans.

The CRM becomes much more than a sales accounting or sales enablement tool. It becomes the corporate nervous system, used to collaborate, store, collect, analyze, and share customer intelligence throughout the organization.

Key Action 10


11 Best Practice

Best Practice # 11 AUTOMATE REPORTS AND ALERTS One of the key benefits of understanding the customer buying process, and of mapping the sales process and tools in your CRM, is that you can now automate many reports that were previously created manually, and eliminate time-consuming periodic process checks. For example, there should never be a need for sales managers or sales makers to produce and send a forecast or pipeline report. With a consistently applied sales process, these types of reports can be built just once and placed on a delivery schedule. Every organization has different reporting and inspection requirements, but listed on the following pages are the most commonly automated reports and alerts:

DASHBOARD NAMES DEFINITIONS SR MNGR

Campaign/Performance DB Tracks prospecting activity, pipeline management & results

Company Metrics Shows earned revenue trend GM by LOB/Rep & YoY Top accounts list by revenue

Earned Income Tracks earned Income by LOB M/QR/Y

Forecast Tracks forecasting & historical data by LOB

Lead Trends Tracks lead generation by source

Attainment DB Tracks actual performance vs. goals by M/QT/Y

Opportunity Accountability

Corresponds to Opportunity Push Counter Reports. Tracks deals with:

Closed dates pushed more than 3 times Closing Deals with no activities in last week

Open Deals with NO activities

Stuck & Stale Deals

Deals with No Decision Maker

Key Action 11


11 Best Practice

l

WORKFLOW COMPONENTS DEFINITIONS SR MNGR

LEADS ALERTS

Pending Lead Notifies specified users or groups when a lead is in a pending status more than X days

No Contact on Lead Notifies specified users or groups when a lead has not been contacted for more than X

days

PIPELINE ALERTS

New Opportunity Notifies manager when a new opportunity is created

Prospecting Stage Notifies specified users or groups when opportunities are in prospecting stage for more

than X days

Critical Stage Notifies specified users or groups when an opportunity is marked as commit

Closed Lost Notifies specified users or groups when an opportunity is marked as closed lost

Closed Won Notifies specified users or groups when an opportunity is marked as closed won

Update Close Date Notifies opportunity owner when an open opportunity is past its close date

Opportunity Push Counter Notifies specified users or groups how many times an opportunity close date has been

changed

ACTIVITY ALERTS

Task Follow Up Notifies specified users or groups to follow up on won opportunity after X days/months

Past Due Task Notifies specified users or groups of past due follow up activity on won opportunity after

X days


11 Best Practice

REPORT NAMES DEFINITIONS SR MNGR

PROSPECTING CYCLE REPORTS

Weekly Lead Trend Total record count of leads generated per week

Converted Leads List of converted Leads by PM List of converted Leads by PW

Unqualified Lead Trend CQ leads that have been unqualified due to no contact

PIPELINE REPORTS

Open Pipeline CQ & NQ open opportunities

Pipeline closing this Month All open opportunities with closed date = current month

Committed Opportunities list of opportunities marked as ―commit‘ for CQ

PQ Closed Won Opportunities List of won opportunities for the past 90 days

Lost Opportunities by Industry List of lost opportunities by Industry Segment based on closed/lost date

ACCOUNT REPORTS

Accounts by GM% Monthly Account List with won opportunities by GM%

Top Accounts by spend & LOB Top X Accounts ranked by spend and LOB. 3-year trend

Top Accounts by Rev Ratio Top accounts ranked by revenue ratio based on PY & CY

Can be segmented further by revenue size


12 Call to Action

This book outlines best practices for breaking through the most stubborn obstacles to CRM adoption. These best practices have transformed some of the most entrenched cultures at organizations of all levels and industries. However, none of that is

as important as what they can accomplish for YOUR organization. Complete the F21 CRM Diagnostic to gain an

assessment of your current situation and identify opportunities for improvement.

Once you complete the diagnostic, you will receive a customized assessment of your situation and a recommended path forward.

Key Action 12

You can complete this

F21 CRM Diagnostic

by going to:

To submit your organization for recognition in a Best Practice in a future publication, please visit

www.bakercommunications.com/

spark/test

www.bakercommunications.com/spark/submit

http://www.bakercommunications.com/spark/test

http://www.bakercommunications.com/spark/test

http://www.bakercommunications.com/spark/submit

http://www.bakercommunications.com/spark/submit


About the Author

About the Author WALTER ROGERS

Walter Rogers is President and CEO of Baker Communications. He has created and led businesses in 13 countries on 3 continents. He was a finalist for the 2000 and 2001 Texas eCommerce Awards, is a guest instructor on the topics of entrepreneurship, sales and marketing at the University of Texas, and has been interviewed on

ABC News, CNN, CBS, Sales Rep Radio and WF Radio on the topic of Sales and Marketing Integration. He currently hosts a segment on CBS650 Radio focused on Sales Effectiveness and CRM. During his time with Baker Communications, he has increased sales by over 1000% and pushed the organization into new products, services and markets. Baker Communications partners with 1000 active clients per year, including 50% of the F500.

Prior to Baker Communications, he self-funded and led two companies, Asset Optimization Group and CertiSource, both of which were acquired. Asset Optimization group was acquired by VMware (NYSE: VMW) in 2005 and CertiSource was acquired by VerticalNet (NASDAQ: VERT) in 1999. Prior to founding his first company, he was Vice President of Asia Pacific Marketing for Marcam, a leading process ERP Software Company. In his role at Marcam he was responsible for all marketing and channel development initiatives in 11 countries ranging from Korea to Australia. Prior to his role at Marcam, he founded and led Market Solutions Group, a consultancy specializing in the development of integrated marketing strategies. Market Solutions Group developed and implemented sales performance improvement strategies in the US and Asia for IBM, Marcam, Praxair and other Fortune 1000 enterprises.

Mr. Rogers is a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin.

http://www.bakercommunications.com/CBS

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