Using a CRM is like eating broccoli
Friday, October 31, 2008 at 6:59AM
Why did I choose that article title? Because using a CRM is exactly like eating broccoli…It’s. Just. No. Fun.
I’ve tried. I’ve really tried but there’s just no way to make entering leads, accounts, contacts and such be fun. It. Just. Isn’t.
So there…I said it. Me, a partner in a firm that specializes in implementing relationship management solutions a la Salesforce.com and whose very same company uses Salesforce as the backbone of our operations.
If there’s anyone who disagrees with me, shout out -- while the rest of us agree to my above sentiments. There’s no doubt either, that the more “creative” folks in “creative” functions – like sales and marketing – will rebel against using them because of the discipline required to create new records and maintain activity histories.
And guess what?
Use your CRM anyway for the same reason you should eat broccoli. CRMs are good for you and will help you keep your business <erm> well-greased.
Then why use a CRM?
Here’s why. If you will discipline yourself and your staff to dutifully keep your contacts, opportunities, and activities up-to-date in your CRM, then you will save enormous amounts of time later from your efficiency and you’ll gain everything from a high-level down to a granular level view of your business results.
For one thing, you can keep other co-workers up-to-date on your activities without investing time in chasing after them. For example, at Intellicore Design Consulting, we’re fanatical archivists, we log all our activities with a prospect, customer, or vendor. The benefit is a quick and easy way to keep up-to-date on each other’s activities – and puts us ahead of the game to provide customer service.
Additionally, because we save copies of our written communications – especially proposals – in the contact or opportunity records, we can easily see exactly what we provided to the customer or prospect.
Then there’s the beauty of automation.
Let me give you an example. Within our own Intellicore Design kingdom, we’re layering in automation to our own business installation of Salesforce.com. Check this out. Our proposal process is about as automated as possible.
We started with a template design we use and a partial boilerplate. This is information we tend to include in every solution-specific solution and, in our proposal template, we’ve broken them into indexed sections.
In Salesforce, we have each a content blurb for each of these boilerplate, indexed sections.
When it’s time for moi to prepare a proposal, I pick and choose the components I want to include in the proposal based on what the prospect is interested in. We merge the contact information and some of the account description into the proposal. Viola! About 60% – 80% of the proposal content generation is completed through automation.
That also means I spend the most time on the most important part of the proposal – the prospect’s business needs, summarizing how our solution will meet their needs, and determining pricing.
We’ve cut down the time to prepare a proposal from a half a day or more to about 1-2 hours, depending on the depth of the proposed solution. Translation – we have the potential to earn a higher profitability per contract, and I have more time to invest in other sales and marketing activities that have the potential to lead to more proposals and more contracts.
It’s a beautiful thing.
Summary
So yeah, it’s a roaring bore entering data into our Salesforce system, just like it is in any CRM.
Know what’s not boring?
Running pipeline reports and seeing all our prospect opportunities tally up, all visible-like because we suffered through the boredom of creating the records in the first place.
That, folks, is the cheese you pour over the broccoli to make it more tasty. More tasty indeed.
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Reader Comments (4)
Yes and no, data entry is only boring if one enters data for other people, rather than oneself. A combination of a succesful communication, training and implementation can make the tool suited in relation to each user. It's fun for a sales rep to have its CRM tell him who to contact, when, where to go. Fun for a manager to know what his team is doing without having to ask. It's fun for a CRM admin to pretend being a magician and to make the data smart.
Oh I agree with you, Pierre. I love the intelligence I can gain from the data respository. Especially when I look at Opportunities!
Awesome hook, Kathy! You snared many a commenter on LinkedIn. Sorry did not click through to your blog on my initial comment!
For the record, I like broccoli but I agree with other commenters that some butter, herbs, or (gasp! Velveeta) will bring the broccoli fans out of the woodwork. Another analogy: CRM is a car with an empty gas tank -- it might be a Ferrari or it might be a Ford (we all have different needs & budgets) -- but without fuel, neither one is taking you anywhere.
CRM looks like broccoli (or a car on empty) to the average sales person because it was built primarily as a management & reporting tool, not as a selling tool. As a result, sales people often grudgingly "adopt" CRM by doing the bare minimum. They'll check it for in-bound leads, then leave to do actual qualification, research, prospecting outside of their CRM. Then they'll return when it becomes an opportunity (at which point it's going to be on sales management's radar so no surprise that sandbagging occurs at this stage.)
The bulk of a sales person's active selling hours constitute all of the stuff that happens BEFORE and AFTER this basic record keeping occurs in the CRM for leads & opportunities. Reps are leaving their CRM to prospect and research across dozens of sources -- which is good for the sake of being informed, prepared, and relevant when engaging with prospects, but it's bad in that it is extremely time consuming. And as information proliferates, information overload will continue to worsen.
We've studied sales people for years, looking at what they do and where they go across various stages of the sales cycle -- list building, lead qualification, named account prospecting & research, territory planning, etc. And trust me, they're going all over the place. On average, at least 4-5 different sources are used regularly and closer to 12-14 are used somewhat regularly.
So we developed an approach that...
A) brings together all of the traditional (e.g. Hoovers, D&B, Reuters), Web 2.0 (e.g. Jigsaw, ZoomInfo), and social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, 20,000+ online news sources, hundreds of job boards)
B) analyzes all of this data to find you actionable sales opportunities ("trigger events") and company connections your reps don't even know exist (e.g. through your existing customers, or their previous employers)
C) and then injects this actionable intelligence directly into your CRM via mash-ups in your native Account, Lead, Opportunity, and Contact page layouts (so your reps don't have to do anything "extra" or actively search for something... everytime they view a record in their CRM, we load the latest & greatest intelligence then & there. It's kind of like having a personal research assistant riding shotgun with you as you go through your CRM.
The impact of integrating in this fashion with CRM was surprising to us. We obviously had our own selfish motivations in that it drove adoption of our application (since CRM is the "system of record", or at least most companies strive for it to be). But we've seen big gains in CRM adoption itself, much more so than we anticipated. The reason (as our customers explain it to us) is simple -- we've helped turn their CRM into a real selling tool vs. just a tracking/reporting tool. Individual reps see value because their CRM is now a dynamic content & intelligence portal customized to their interests (i.e. their leads, accounts, territory)... similar to what an igoogle or myyahoo page does for us as consumers. They now have a reason to be in their CRM throughout the sales cycle because the data is always changing -- they see new trigger events (e.g. leadership changes, product launches, m&a activity, cost cutting), new connections between their prospect and their existing customer list, new jobs listings that indicate if & how a company is growing, and the latest & greatest contacts aggregated from multiple best-of-breed sources.
Give our FREE version a spin. It's free indefinitely, not a 30 day trial. We'd love to hear your feedback, good/bad/ugly :o)
http://www.insideview.com/demo
Naughty, naughty, Marc. This article should be a place for discussion and not long-winded sales pitches.
To give you your due, Inside Sales does have an interesting product. However, your solution is only one part of the sales process -- and generating lists of companies and capturing published info about them is not the same as qualifying those leads.
That's where automated lead scoring comes into play. In a recent article, I discussed the importance of capturing both tangible and behavioral data about prospects and customers to help score leads. From this information, sales and marketing teams will be well-armed to identify when:
* Leads still need nurturing by Marketing, and
* When leads are qualified enough to activate Sales activities.
And for those sorts of solutions, that's where Salesforce is extremely strong. We're happy to talk to folks how Intellicore Design would deploy Salesforce to do this...and if anyone is interested, let's have an off-line discussion about your needs because I don't want this article or comments to be sales pitches.