Stop Updating the CRM
We were coaching the staff of a large call center for a company offering voice and data packages to clients who then sold them on to their own customers.
These reps were supposed to be taking orders all week long. But in fact, they did zero selling on Friday. This was known as ‘CRM day’. They had to catch up and input all their data from the four days just passed. The requirements of the CRM were so intensive that the sales force invested over 20% of their work week in data entry!
Management is excited. The new sales CRM has been installed and it’s time to launch. It has been touted as the great panacea for improving sales. Now, is it expected, the pipeline will flow, deal information will be available, forecasts will be a snap, targets will be hit, and the bottom-line will be a cup overflowing.
Right. What actually happens is something quite different.
Account managers spend three days in intensive CRM training. No provision is made for reduction of sales expectations. Now, they are farther behind their targets.
The training is presented as mandatory, with attendance and follow-up test scores entered into their personnel files. Now, they’re not only behind on their sales targets, they are thoroughly p***** off!
The new CRM system is loaded with fields to be completed, because other departments – purchasing, finance, supply chain, HR, marketing, and products – are all mandated to use its information. This requires on average five more hours per week of data entry than the previous system. Now, salespeople are…you get the picture.
We’ve rarely met salespeople who love their CRM. It’s a shame, because, when it is designed well and used wisely, a CRM is a tool that salespeople can use to save time, avoid repetitive meetings, secure internal resources, drive their pipeline, and increase their earnings.
Unfortunately, most CRMs are neither designed well nor used wisely.
They are designed to serve the information needs of senior management, not the planning needs of the sales force.
They require data-entry from the one group of people in the company who most hate doing it – the sales force.
The ‘sales process’ baked into the CRM often fails utterly to match reality, and the information salespeople enter is then used as a stick to beat them with. Not surprisingly, salespeople start gaming the system to avoid the pain.
The CRM data are accessed by other departments who put additional pressure on the sales force to gather more data that seems senseless to salespeople and with which they continue to be flogged (until morale improves, of course).
Here's the bottom line: salespeople will do just about anything that really helps them to sell more and make more money. They detest and resist doing things that prevent this from happening.
In the good old days, salespeople owned their performance and their daily statistics. They kept their stats because the stats helped them succeed. Their managers helped them use those stats to develop their skills and make more money. That simple logic worked:
Plan your inputs to create outputs.
Track your inputs so you know what happened.
Use your tracking to improve your selling.
When CRM designers and the senior managers who are depending on accurate data recognize these simple facts, then CRMs fulfill their promise of being engines for success.
CRMs are designed around the selling methodology a company has designed for its business.
Salespeople use the CRM to plan their selling activity instead of merely reporting on it.
Data is current and accurate because salespeople have entered the data ahead of their actions.
Managers know what their salespeople are going to do, what they have done, and they stop bombarding them with requests for updates, reviews, and all the other workarounds and crap that happens when CRM information isn’t accurate and trusted.
Here's a dialogue we had with the CFO of one of our global clients.
‘We just aren’t getting accurate forecasting information from our salespeople,’ he said.
‘How are you receiving the inaccurate information?’ we asked.
‘It’s simple,’ he said, ‘In our CRM we ask them to estimate how far along they are in the selling process. We give them a range to choose from – 10 to 80% - but they’re just not taking it seriously.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because they never pick a percentage over 30%! Things stay at 25-30% for weeks or months, and then the deal suddenly closes or drops away.’
‘What happens when they pick a number higher than 30%?’
‘Well, ‘the CFO replied., “Finance contacts the salesperson and asks for a detailed financial forecast of the deal’s revenue for the next several quarters.’
‘I think you’ve just solved the mystery.’
Given that your chances of quickly changing your company's CRM system are somewhere between nil and zero, we suggest taking the following steps with your sales team.
Accept the inconvenient truth that, until your people want to enter this data instead of having to enter it, you are engaged in an uphill battle.
Speak one-to-one with your people. Find out if there is anything in the CRM that can help them plan their selling activity so they can be more successful. Stay smart. Do not suggest that they ignore the rest of it! Just find out what really works for them.
This is the tricky part. Compile everything you’ve learned from all your people, develop a strategy that helps your people use the parts of the CRM that really help them sell and avoid as much of the rest of it as they can.
Clear your strategy with your manager! Make sure they have your back, and then enroll your team into using the CRM for their own benefit and gradually change things for the better.
Obviously, this requires some real finesse on your part. Go ahead. Do it well. See where it leads.