I have bought four books on sales…in the past week. They are all quite new and very different. If I have a glance around my bookshelves, I have anywhere between fifty and a hundred books devoted to sales, salespeople and sales management.

The reason I am reviewing them now is that I am writing my second book, which is devoted to sales methodology (my first book mixed in a bit of technology). It’s good to see what has already been done before you embark on a project you feel has something new to say about a subject. When I review books on the sales process, it strikes me that the human interplay between customer and salesperson must be complex; if that wasn’t the case, how could so much be written about it?

The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all of these books targeting salespeople are tactical. I use the word tactical to describe the actions of the salesperson as they are in front of the customer, whether it is what questions to ask, what to listen for, what information to retrieve, and the like. The emphasis is on the interaction with the customer as it happens in these few minutes or hours, on this day in time. The results of the tactic will hopefully contribute to the overall strategy in place to win that particular sale.

I don’t have any problem with learning the tactics of winning, but I do feel that most salespeople are faced with consuming these ideas before they know the intrinsic dynamic of the sale cycle itself. A thorough understanding of the progression of the sales cycle as it reacts to ebb and flow of the customer’s natural buying process makes tactical selling much easier.

I took a random sample of six sales books from the shelf and looked to see how many of them had “Sales Cycle” in the index. Guess what? One out of six.

I was looking at a recent article by Denis Pombriant. I’ve known Denis as a perceptive analyst for a number of years, and fortunately he and I have mostly seen eye to eye about CRM fundamentals (although not always). Denis has the ability to look at all the stuff about the CRM space and to locate something lurking in there that most other people have missed.

The latest example of this that struck me was his observation regarding the spreadsheet. Denis wrote:

“I have always believed that, to figure out what new applications would be appearing in the near future, all you have to do is understand what people are tracking on spreadsheets.”

I see this observation come to life in my other world, as the head of a company specializing in delivering CRM solutions If I had to pick just one technology that was supporting the endeavors of most companies implementing their CRM, it would be Microsoft Excel. This is because the spreadsheet is the best list making tool in the world.

Recently (2002) I was an interim CEO for the Canadian division of a global bioscience company where their future sales projections depended on the spreadsheet. The giant spreadsheet would arrive from head office, and you typed into the part you for which you were responsible. You e-mailed it back, and it got rolled up with scores of other region’s results. Then you got it back again to see how you were performing. At that time there was no company-wide CRM tool—each region did its own thing. But head office wanted to know what was going on, so they used Excel to figure it out. A dozen business analysts were needed at head office just to keep the spreadsheet routine working.

Don’t get me wrong, of course, spreadsheets are powerful analytical and reporting tools, but, to use spreadsheets throughout an organization without any kind of connecting glue underpinning it is a recipe for waste of effort and inefficiencies. They don’t link very well, they don’t share common data very well—they are cumbersome and need lots of tender loving care to make them work. You manually dig the information out from somewhere else and type it into the spreadsheet.

The CRM system has to be the central repository that contains all the information (accurate and up to date) ready for the spreadsheet to use. Press a button and the CRM information automatically flows into the spreadsheet, which then automatically digests the data and spits it out into predefined formats. No one types data into the spreadsheet.

It is the reliance on the spreadsheet that slows a company down in evolving to a proper CRM solution. The attitude is, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and the pressure of continuing business prevents people from sitting back, taking a breath, and recognizing just how wasteful and time consuming the spreadsheet process really is. From my experience the best thing to do is to implement a solid CRM product in parallel, and to slowly wean the business off the spreadsheet, and relegate it to a pure reporting and analysis tool.