Having managed sales teams for over 30 years, I've found that the biggest sales problem has always been tracking customer interactions and status. I've always managed to get around the problem, but by using other systems - reports, spreadsheets, databases - all generating paper. CRM systems were supposed to be the all encompassing solution to this problem. When looked at closely, today's CRM systems have automated the paper-based systems we've always used.
As with paper-based systems, the sales staff require significant effort to input and update details of their interactions with their customer. This invariably leads to the complaint by sales staff that they spend too much time inputting data instead of doing the job they are paid for - direct customer contact to identify, propose and sell the solution to the customer's need. Granted, some CRM systems allow some customer communication to be automatically record without additional sales staff effort. But fundamentally, it still comes down to the fact that today's CRM systems are basically automated paper-based systems.
What sales managers really want to track is where their sales staff are in the sales process with the customer. Whether a customer has been called on schedule or emailed a brochure is not all that important. Sales is paid for results - results that are a result of a process. What a sales amanger wants to know in the end is when will the customer order, and this can be better understood with understanding where the sales staff is in the process.
A critical factor in the use of a sales process is sales training. If you do not have sales staff that understand the process, they cannot actually tell you where they are with their customer's order. But sales training is another topic.
What's the solution to the problem? I've evaulated several sales process systems over the past year. It had to work the way the sales staff intuitively work. It had to provide the status of the customer order - uniformly across all sales staff. It had to allow evaluation of each sales staff against their peer group to allow for coaching or other action. We've found one!
There are many more reasons for our choice ... but if you'd like to discuss, give us a call.
