CRM Paradigm Shift

Must Read: Never Buy Another Sales 2.0 Application

When Donal Daly posted "Don't Buy Another Sales 2.0 Application"  to his blog today I thought what a cool drink of water.  I reached the same conclusion late last year and hadn’t seen anyone else write about it.

Sales 2.0 applications collectively are the lipstick on the pig spoken of by Gerhard Gschwandtner in a recent SellingPower online conversation.

Let me expalin.  While each Sales 2.0 application presumably facilitate sales, collectively they are:

• Expensive and labor intensive to maintain
• Have vary degrees of functionality and capabilities
• Difficult to integrate into a single holistic selling system
• Don’t resolve more than a quarter of the complex issues of a B2B sales ecosystem

Interestingly enough finance, accounting and manufacturing had the same hodgepodge of spaghetti systems, band-aids if you will, until ERP systems provided all stakeholders with simplicity, transparency, accurate data, quality control under a single system umbrella.

Who or what will be sales’ ERP?

Staying Focused

In the most recent issue of Velocity, a quarterly publication of the Strategic Account management Association, Greg Bartlett, Velocity’s editor, asked rhetorically, “why can’t we remain focused on the long term when it’s clearly in our best interest?”

Great question.  If you’re a strategic account manager, and account executive or an entry level sales person or someone tasked with managing one of the above, the answer to Greg’s question may simply be “numbers.”

“Numbers” in the form of cold calls to make, pipelines to fill, and deals to close today, this week, before the end of the month or by the end of the quarter.  A sales person who doesn’t hit the “numbers,” may not be around long enough to experience the long term.

Every salesperson has “numbers.”  From the car salesman up to the strategic account manager over seeing the $40 million IBM account for Hilton, everyone has “numbers” to meet.  Sometimes management puts fancy names on them like targets, objective or goals but at the end of the day it’s a “number.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with numbers, goals and targets per say, but those “numbers” always seem to be accompanied by a date by which the objective will be achieved.   End of month or, the ever popular in B2B circles, end of quarter.

Good sales people and their managers will do anything to hit their “numbers.”  Anything!  Their maniacal focus on short term objectives (hitting their numbers) ensures good results and continuity not just for the sales person but his manager and the extended sales ecosystem as well.  This will remain true as long as sales people continue to be achievement oriented.

Should this focus be changed?  No.  But executives can modify or adjust sales’ maniacal short term focus on “numbers” by moving beyond existing sales systems.

CRM systems are derisively referred to by some as sales accounting systems.  While CRM looks backward tracking activities and task already completed, staying focused on hitting the “numbers” demands looking to the future and what must be done, by whom, and by when to get targeted deal closed in time to meet the deadline.

When CRM and sales enablement systems help management guide sales people through the complex sales cycle, helping them make sense of the waterfall of facts, data and intelligence coming at them, channeling their short-term sales’ focus on helping them hit their “numbers,” then management will have the means to lock the their sales team’s focus on the long term.

Can Sales Give As Good As It Gets?

When Joe Galvin of Sirius Decisions wrote "sales enablement is about knowledge transfer" last month, he spoke about how Salespeople need to access and acquire constantly changing information from a variety of internal sources to maintain their state of knowledge readiness and be able transfer that knowledge to their customers.

Joe is right of course, but he only has half of the picture.   He should have also included the two way exchange of knowledge that must exist if a sales and marketing organization is to flourish?

Not only must knowledge in the form of content, insight and data flow to the sales person, but insight, understanding and even raw data must flow back to other sales ecosystem stakeholders supporting the sales as well.

For instance, lead gen groups need up-to-the-minute and accurate knowledge of lead status and campaign effectiveness passed to them to make adjustments in the current campaigns or plan their next initiative or event.

Product marketing teams need to know how their product is fairing and what sales material is driving sales conversations forward.

Finance and legal teams need knowledge of the terms and conditions agreed to and the customers performance against those targets the prior year as they consider pricing on new projects and opportunities with the same client.

The sales operations group needs a damn near perfect knowledge of where each opportunity sits in the pipeline, how likely, for how much and when the deal is to close to generate a forecast executives can take to the street.

Professional services leaders need to see what service level agreements are being extended to ensure the appropriate resources are trained and available when the value promised must be delivered.

C-level executives need knowledge about the strength of the pipeline and current status of strategic opportunities and clients to determine where their time is best applied to drive forecasted results.

Enabling sales people is a first step, but in a world where everyone sells, sales enablement must take on more of a two way, enterprise wide exchange of information and knowledge.

Is The Factory Floor A Model for Sales?

As the CRM paradigm shifts away from flat database tools towards enterprise systems that assist stakeholders involved in the selling process convey value and build long term relationships, what will selling systems of the future look like.

Hard to say precisely.  But one consultant and industry thought leader is starting to paint a picture of the input, measurement, and feedback components those systems must embrace.

Michael Webb, author of Sales And Marketing The Six Sigma way and founder of Sales Performance Consultants in Atlanta is suggesting that sales follow the example of manufacturing production systems.  Said systems, first implemented in the 50’s and 60’s by Deming in Japan and then in the 80’s and 90’s here in the United States, led to improved quality, lower inventories, faster production cycles and lower cost.

What CEO, CFO or CSO doesn’t seek higher quality leads and prospects, fewer dormant opportunities in the pipeline, faster sales cycles and lower SG&A?

Here one of Michael's more recent blog post about sales productivity system:    Need to Fix Low Sales Productivity?

What do you think?  Is Mike on to something?

Look Ma, No Hands – Reinventing the Sales Funnel

In his article “THE B2B BUYING-DECISION JOURNEY” posted on Modern Selling (http://www.modernselling.com/sales-news-headlines/b2b-buying-decision-journey-20093457.aspx), Bob Apollo, of Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, makes the case that the sales funnel is an “increasingly inadequate metaphor” for the progress being made by prospects through a B2B seller’s sales process.

Bob argues the traditional approach of measuring buyer progress through the sales funnel in terms of sales activity taken by the seller (i.e. 1st call, 1st meeting, discover conducted, proposal, etc.) is inappropriate if the gap between deals forecasted and deals that actually closed is to be reduced and eventually eliminated altogether.

Instead Bob contends sales leaders must insist on some form of observable evidence of prospect activity, facts, or behavior before allowing the sales person to claim that any given opportunity has moved from one stage forward to the next.

“I can’t stress this strongly enough,” Bob writes in red and bold text, “until the salesperson has observable evidence that someone in the prospect’s organization with a strong vested interest in solving the problem and the authority to commit resources has said ‘if you can find a way of dealing with this problem economically I will find the budget and make it happen’, the deal is not real and should not be forecast at any value.”

This is common sense but regretfully not common practice in B2B sales. Why? One reason is that traditional CRM systems are incapable of capturing or measuring buyer behavior other than what the salesperson inputs into its static database fields. We all know how slow sales people are to update their CRM and when they do, how woefully inaccurate the data can be.

Emerging sales and marketing automation systems come equipped with intelligence and capacity to watch, monitor and analyze sales activity as it happens, accurately reporting prospect progress based on benchmarks achieved, mile stones met and commitments made independent of seller's input.

The CRM paradigm is shifting.