Strategic customer relationship management has been my focus for the last twelve years. During this time I have worked with sales executives, managers and directors at major software vendors and consulting firms. I have always faced one major challenge: how to sell software or services to people who just don’t believe it can help them. “This is going to waste my time” they say.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why CRM still does not have the same impact on sales as it does for marketing and service organizations.

Recently, I have completed some research which asked sales executives the major benefits that CRM brought to sales organizations. Most of them said that even considering indirect benefits related to their activities such as communications or reduction in administrative overhead, CRM did not help on its main promise: “increase sales productivity and revenues”.

In fact, sales automation, when associated to mobile order entry is quite well recognized as an important tool. However, when associated with increased sales effectiveness with any kind of structured methodology, sales reps just turn their faces: “I´m afraid that it will take me too much time”, they say, “I do not see it as something that could make me work better”.

Working in the consulting business for the last 5 years, I could not find anything really new in this business. That is until a sales rep at one of my clients said to me: “Hey Enio, I´m in control of all my opportunities” and showed me a PDA running a piece of software with an interesting dashboard. According to him, it was the first software that was worth using, because “time invested on data entry, results in fantastic results”. He told me “you should try it yourself!”

It was the first time in many years that a sales rep told me that sales software was helping him to sell. I decided to check the methodology behind that software. And guess what? I found the book ‘Sales Automation Done Right’. Based on the ideas in the book, SalesWays was able to build ‘Sales Cycle Manager’, the software that makes the methodology come alive.

Enio Klein
Principal at K&G

Opportunity Portfolio Management (OPM) is the sales training course using the methods and ideas that are mostly (but not entirely) described in my first book, Sales Automation Done Right. Most of the analytical stuff from OPM is encapsulated in a range of mature SalesWays software products bearing the Sales Cycle Manager name.

Sales Automation Done Right has a chapter on new technologies that are having a huge impact on selling. The point that I tried to make here was that good sales methodology developed with technology in mind would fit all the diverse new technology tools that are springing up so quickly. Two important ones are mobile computing and subscription CRM. We’ll talk about mobile in a future entry, but right now, I’m pleased to say that Sales Cycle Manager is now available for Salesforce.com on their AppExchange platform.

On page 248 of SADR, I show the Sales Advisor Dashboard embedded in Salesforce.com. I must admit that we did this in 2003, before Salesforce.com had fully developed their AppExchange technology. We saw the potential here and literally hacked our stuff in. That experiment proved that the methodology fitted well within the Salesforce.com CRM framework.

But now AppExchange is here, and is a wonderful way for third party developers to make their material available to Salesforce.com users. The technology is solid, has the backing of Salesforce, and the marketing message to show what’s available—this should be a win-win situation for both Salesforce and their partner community.

I did an audio-visual presentation on the new AppExchange product, which you may be interested in seeing here.

This posting is from John Darrin, an old friend who has been involved with sales and marketing for most of his career, with a few interludes - starting and running his own businesses. John worked with me during much of the time that the ideas in Sales Automation Done Right came to being, and was a valuable observer and commentator in those discussions. I hope John will be a frequent contributor to the SalesWays site.

- Keith Thompson

First, the disclaimer. I have been selling for over thirty years. Selling a broad variety of products and services from multi-million dollar projects to $200 electronics to the luncheon special. I have read the Sales Automation Done Right book, and I use similar processes and methodologies and techniques.

In the book, sales automation is defined (Page 7), and I paraphrase that definition to read “efficient and effective, technology-assisted selling.” The precision of that definition, the importance of both effectiveness and efficiency, and the ability of modern technology to support them, is critical to success in selling today.

Now I want to get something relevant to this definition off my chest. Something that continues to nag at me whenever my sales staff, or peers, or even bosses or clients, postulate one particularly absurd assumption. Here is my rant:

IT ISN’T ALL UP THERE.

One of the silliest things I ever heard came from a young, very aggressive, very ambitious, and otherwise very intelligent salesman, while he tapped his head with his index finger. “It’s all up here,” he said.

He meant that he didn’t need technology to record and save and use his sales opportunity information to help him sell, because he kept it all in his head. Technology was good for keeping his contact information and his calendar, but that’s all. Presumably, recording these bits of information on his computer left room for everything else to fit in his head.

Sales people are often smug, pretty confident, sure of themselves. We have to be able to get up every day and go out there and try to convince people to do something. Usually something they should do anyway but are dragging their feet for some reason, and usually with someone else trying to convince them otherwise. Often, we succeed, and this success can blind us to some realities. And when we fail, many times we don’t know why.

I don’t care who you are, or what you sell, it is critical to understand that it isn’t all up there. Some of it is. Maybe even enough to enjoy some success. But never all. If it was all up there, then you would be solving the big bang theory, or playing with super strings, or something equally esoteric. Or, you would be closing 100% of your opportunities.

But you’re not.

Look at it this way – if you had just one opportunity to work, and you could devote 100% of your time, your resources, and your talent to it, and as long as it wasn’t selling a fleet of 747’s or something equally complex, you would have virtually a 100% closing rate. It’s as simple as that.

As more opportunities are added, or as opportunities become more complex and require more activity, focus gets blurred, information remains undiscovered, chances are missed. And sales are lost.

So, whatever you can do as a salesman to focus all of your might on one opportunity before you move on to the next, do it. Even if you have a hundred open opportunities and you have to switch gears fifty times a day, technology can make the transition smooth.

When you do switch those gears, focus on the one opportunity. Treat it like it was your only one. And let technology keep track of the other ninety-nine until it’s their turn.

Do that, and it never will be the only one.

I received a comment to a previous post that got me thinking. It seems that there needs to be parallel efforts in maintaining both Acquisition and Retention, with equal focus, and not one at the expense of the other. In my post I said I thought that Acquisition was the mandate of Sales Force Automation (SFA), whereas Retention was in the realm of CRM. I did that, because I am fixated with trying to disentangle these two terms.

If we drive down to the departmental level, it seems that Marketing and Sales should drive Acquisition, and after sales service should drive Retention. In my book I discuss the “long winded title of Acquisition and Retention loop” (page 27) – long winded, because I could not find any other description that was suitable.

So after I write this, I realize that I was wrong—sales is not the only group responsible for acquisition, marketing is in there too.

Definitely everything falls under the umbrella of CRM, but that term has become so all encompassing that it is tough to look below and see what it all means.

Perhaps, if companies are focusing too much on Retention at the expense of Acquisition, or vice versa, one department may be more powerful than the other, in other words they don’t have a unified CRM program that’s working well. If they did the normal departmental interplay would help them achieve the right balance.

I subscibe to the “inside 1to1” newsletter from the the Peppers and Rogers Group. As everyone knows, Peppers and Rogers were the early proponents of the CRM philosophy, and have published some very successful books on this topic. An article in this morning’s edition was titled Customer Acquisition Makes a Comeback. The opening sentence is “After a solid 18 months of obsession with customer retention, the customer strategy pendulum may be swinging toward customer acquisition.”

Retention of the customer means the process of developing a loyal customer base, and making sure that they stay happy and provide more business. Acquisition means that the enterprise puts its efforts into finding new customers.

I was surprised that big business has actually been homing in on one of these strategies at the expense of the other. I thought that you had to do both. Fortunately as I read on, one of the analysts comments supported my feelings—“you need a balanced attack of both existing customer development and involvement in your brand coupled with smart strategies to acquire new customers.”

It struck me that for most businesses, Retention is more about CRM, and Acquisition about SFA. The marketing and sales departments will be involved in both initiatives – but the goals are distinctly different.

It’s interesting how business is segregated into distinct categories and the analysts go to work spelling out what is proper in each category. In CRM, there always seems to be a different reflection on what is going on in the SME (small to mid-sized enterprise) versus the Fortune companies – if that is what they are still called. The last time I looked SME covers a vast range in size and scope; 15 to 1000 employees and revenues of $5M to $1B.

This leads me to my point, which is easiest to phrase in the form of a question. Are the CRM or SFA requirements for multi billion-dollar companies any different from the smaller enterprises out there that make up the bulk of the economic drive and job creation throughout the world?

The answer is a bold, unanimous no. There is absolutely no difference between the CRM and SFA requirements of a global enterprise as a 12-man operation doing $2M in business a year. The core issues of CRM and SFA are the same across all markets.

Companies of all shapes, sizes and markets need a complete, accurate and clean store of critical customer information. To stay competitive, they require a seamless and smooth method of gathering information at every level of the organization. All of this has to be laid out on a collaborative network structure that allows crucial information to be accessed by any member of the team. Armed with this information, companies can best address the needs of their customers.

If you are among the majority of small-to-mid market enterprises out there, don’t assume that only multi-billion-dollar companies can take advantage of the potential of sound CRM and SFA solutions. The reality is, the sooner SME companies recognize how CRM and SFA fit into their own “grand scheme of things,” the quicker they get to realize their own potential.

I was looking at a recent article by Denis Pombriant (his blog is highly recommended). 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.

Welcome to SalesWays, an informative blog-centric portal dedicated to innovations in sales and technology. Sales and technology are the core themes that run through my book sales automation done right, which encapsulates ideas and methods that have taken me half a lifetime to see come to fruition.

Challenges facing salespeople today are greater than they have ever been. Competition is as strong as ever, and even though salespeople have numerous technologies at their disposal, there has been no evident push to ensure that the synergy between sales and technology truly works to their full advantage. That’s where we come in. SalesWays is devoted to the ways that technology can make the whole process of selling come alive.

We will keep these pages filled with content that is relevant to the theme of bringing technology to sales. Topics will span from probing to PDAs, CRM to connectivity, sales cycles to speech recognition and everything you can imagine in between. We’ll show you how easy it is for the paths of sales and technology to intersect, bringing harmony to the way you sell.

Our panel of contributors will provide you with insightful tidbits that you can apply, from your daily sales activities all the way down to the core of your sales processes. And if you’re a bit intimidated and don’t know how to go about doing this, you’ve come to the right place; we’re here to get you started. Technology is the single largest innovator, the force behind the biggest changes that the sales community has ever seen, and we’re here to create a sense of renewed excitement in the ways people sell. This is our philosophy behind SalesWays; we hope you’re just as excited about the possibilities of employing technology in sales as we are.