I hear people complain far too often, “I can’t get our sales team to use our CRM. They might enter basic contact info, but that’s about it. It’s useless.”
It’s a shame. A good Customer Relationship Management system can significantly improve your sales processes and give you critical information about your future sales and current prospects. Great data collection will tell you where to place your attention and how to spend your marketing dollars to receive the biggest payoff. I’ve seen organizations that fully embrace these systems discover things about their customers that they never suspected until they collected the data and took a hard look at it. I’ve seen them discover huge sales opportunities and eliminate bottlenecks in their sales cycles that cut out days, weeks, and even months. And I’ve seen it show exactly who on the sales team is doing the work that will keep them successful. Imagine what your sales would look like if you could see exactly what your most successful sales people are doing and then shape everyone else to be exactly like them. That’s what a great CRM can do for you.
It’s clear why sales people resist it. They want to be doing the work of sales, making calls, taking meetings and making the final deal. But the true predictor of future sales isn’t past sales - it’s current activity. That’s what a good CRM will tell you. You can see which members of your sales team are doing the work today that will make them successful next quarter.
But some CRMs are clumsy and difficult to use. Your CRM choice should make it completely natural for your sales team members to capture what they’re doing at every moment including who they’re calling or meeting with, what future activities are planned or promised, and collect increasingly detailed information about the prospects they’re working with. If your sales team is collecting lots of data, but waiting until the end of the day or the week to put it into a system, it will never get done and you won’t get what you need from your system.
There are some terrific options available today. Solutions like Salesforce.com are affordable and very powerful. But some organizations need very specific processes and data collected and don’t find most packaged solutions to be a good fit. We’ve worked with a number of customers like this and built them custom solutions that are designed to be a natural part of their sales workflow.
For example, here’s what our customer, Matt Berry, has to say about the CRM tools we designed and built for Healthlinx:
“The tools that Minds On created for us have absolutely revolutionized how we do business,” says HealthLinx COO Matt Berry. “We’ve seen a huge spike in productivity, a substantial decrease in sales rep training time, and an overall increase in awareness of our sales process. This last piece, the Scorecard, is astonishing. It will transform our business. All reps know exactly what their numbers are and we know, too. Everyone is tracking the same thing. And we can get to the root of what makes a sales rep successful.”
You can’t cajole, punish or even torture your sales team into using a CRM, but you can make it a natural part of the sales process. If you do, you’ll take greater control of your business. I’d love to talk to you about how you can do this for your business or how to make your existing CRM a more natural part of your sales process. Give me a call 740.548.1645 or send me an e-mail.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sales Empowerment Means Flexible, Customizable Sales Tools and Materials
Everybody has his or her own particular pet peeve. For some it may be that person at the supermarket taking a full cart to the “15 items or less” checkout while you wait in a long line with only twenty items. Or that person talking during a movie.
As you might expect, a lot of my peeves have to do with marketing. One of the biggest of these is seeing sales people cobbling together their own presentations and materials.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through sales pitches where an otherwise competent sales person has put together a “custom” presentation. They’ve included our logo. They pulled it off a website and it’s distorted and has a mismatched background to their PowerPoint slide. Furthermore, the slides have clip art (word of advice: NEVER use clip art!), every transition in the book, and nausea inducing background colors. Often these presentations are for companies that have carefully thought out marketing and clear branding, but none of that was presented. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen sales people pull out a chart or graph that they’ve put together on their own. It carries the heart of their message, but it’s so badly designed that it’s useless.
I understand why they do it. Sales people have a very difficult job and they want to communicate clearly and directly with a prospect or client. That’s a laudable attitude. Often they can’t or don’t get the help they need from marketing. But every time they put one of these presentations together, or assemble a special little brochure on their home computer, they diminish the impact of your marketing and branding.
Perhaps the thing that most sets me on edge is the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way. All sales teams should be equipped with the basic tools that they can use to sell and reinforce your branding, not take away from it.
For our clients, we often help them build systems that include presentation templates, icons/diagrams, brochures, and sales letter samples – all sorts of tools, each designed to allow a sales person to make minor customization while preserving the company branding and marketing goals. We’ve even gone so far as to create an entire internal e-commerce application that companies can use to let sales people order materials from an online library – things they can customize and download as PDFs or presentation files, or even be printed and delivered directly to them or the client.
By equipping your sales teams this way, you are much more likely to find them on the phone or on the road rather than sitting in a cube struggling with PowerPoint. You have to find a way to eliminate the bottlenecks that your marketing program has created and enable your sales teams... empower them with tools and materials and most importantly, standards.
This is a hot point with me and I’d love to talk with you about how you can enable and empower your sales teams while enhancing your branding and marketing reach.
Do you have a marketing pet peeve? Please share it here in the comments!
As you might expect, a lot of my peeves have to do with marketing. One of the biggest of these is seeing sales people cobbling together their own presentations and materials.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through sales pitches where an otherwise competent sales person has put together a “custom” presentation. They’ve included our logo. They pulled it off a website and it’s distorted and has a mismatched background to their PowerPoint slide. Furthermore, the slides have clip art (word of advice: NEVER use clip art!), every transition in the book, and nausea inducing background colors. Often these presentations are for companies that have carefully thought out marketing and clear branding, but none of that was presented. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen sales people pull out a chart or graph that they’ve put together on their own. It carries the heart of their message, but it’s so badly designed that it’s useless.
I understand why they do it. Sales people have a very difficult job and they want to communicate clearly and directly with a prospect or client. That’s a laudable attitude. Often they can’t or don’t get the help they need from marketing. But every time they put one of these presentations together, or assemble a special little brochure on their home computer, they diminish the impact of your marketing and branding.
Perhaps the thing that most sets me on edge is the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way. All sales teams should be equipped with the basic tools that they can use to sell and reinforce your branding, not take away from it.
For our clients, we often help them build systems that include presentation templates, icons/diagrams, brochures, and sales letter samples – all sorts of tools, each designed to allow a sales person to make minor customization while preserving the company branding and marketing goals. We’ve even gone so far as to create an entire internal e-commerce application that companies can use to let sales people order materials from an online library – things they can customize and download as PDFs or presentation files, or even be printed and delivered directly to them or the client.
By equipping your sales teams this way, you are much more likely to find them on the phone or on the road rather than sitting in a cube struggling with PowerPoint. You have to find a way to eliminate the bottlenecks that your marketing program has created and enable your sales teams... empower them with tools and materials and most importantly, standards.
This is a hot point with me and I’d love to talk with you about how you can enable and empower your sales teams while enhancing your branding and marketing reach.
Do you have a marketing pet peeve? Please share it here in the comments!
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Empower Your Sales Team – Let Marketing Take the Lead
The popular image of marketing is this: Someone trying to convince you to buy something you don’t want and don’t need. I suppose that’s slightly better than the stereotypical image of all sales people as used car salesmen. But it’s still far from the truth, especially in B2B sales. There’s no point in trying to sell people something they don’t need. The key is finding prospects that do need what you sell.
While all sales people are not the embodiment of that overly slick reptile that will do anything to put you in a car today, we have other stereotypes that don’t help as well... The lone gunman or the rainmaker, the “they can get away with anything as long as they beat their quota”. None of these are helpful in your long-term success. Furthermore, they help to create that divide between your sales and marketing teams.
You’ve probably tried to fix this from the top down, but the most effective way I’ve seen to fully empower your sales team and to get marketing and sales to work together, is to have your marketing team take the lead. What I mean by this is to make marketing’s first priority the empowerment of your sales team. This may seem contrary to what most people do. For many companies, they charge their marketing team with generating a certain number of prospects, but I’ve found that this leads to a greater disconnect and doesn’t result in higher sales.
I’ve seen if for myself. Take, for instance, a company that sells a product that starts out at a quarter of a million dollars. The marketing team is charged with generating one hundred leads per sales rep every month. The reps don’t have the time to follow up on a hundred new leads when they’re working with a small handful of prospects that need to close soon and another few that need to close in the next quarter. Management is unhappy with sales because they don’t close enough business. Marketing complains that they generate the leads, but sales does nothing with them. There’s a big disconnect here. Rather than generating one hundred leads per rep, this organization would be much better off generating only ten, especially if these leads are highly qualified.
Marketing departments that really understand their company’s sales cycle and methods should be organized around supercharging the sales effort. Any reps, no matter how busy they are, have time to make at least ten calls. And they’ll want to if they know that all of these leads are eager to talk with them.
These numbers might not be what you need to sell, but you can figure out what you do need. If you give your sales and marketing teams different and separate goals, you’ll probably struggle to have them work together. But if you give them a single goal and charge your marketing team with making it happen, you’ve got a great chance at success.
There are many ways your marketing team and efforts can empower your sales team. I’d love to share with you more of what I’d learned. Feel free to contact me and we can discuss how to empower your sales efforts.
While all sales people are not the embodiment of that overly slick reptile that will do anything to put you in a car today, we have other stereotypes that don’t help as well... The lone gunman or the rainmaker, the “they can get away with anything as long as they beat their quota”. None of these are helpful in your long-term success. Furthermore, they help to create that divide between your sales and marketing teams.
You’ve probably tried to fix this from the top down, but the most effective way I’ve seen to fully empower your sales team and to get marketing and sales to work together, is to have your marketing team take the lead. What I mean by this is to make marketing’s first priority the empowerment of your sales team. This may seem contrary to what most people do. For many companies, they charge their marketing team with generating a certain number of prospects, but I’ve found that this leads to a greater disconnect and doesn’t result in higher sales.
I’ve seen if for myself. Take, for instance, a company that sells a product that starts out at a quarter of a million dollars. The marketing team is charged with generating one hundred leads per sales rep every month. The reps don’t have the time to follow up on a hundred new leads when they’re working with a small handful of prospects that need to close soon and another few that need to close in the next quarter. Management is unhappy with sales because they don’t close enough business. Marketing complains that they generate the leads, but sales does nothing with them. There’s a big disconnect here. Rather than generating one hundred leads per rep, this organization would be much better off generating only ten, especially if these leads are highly qualified.
Marketing departments that really understand their company’s sales cycle and methods should be organized around supercharging the sales effort. Any reps, no matter how busy they are, have time to make at least ten calls. And they’ll want to if they know that all of these leads are eager to talk with them.
These numbers might not be what you need to sell, but you can figure out what you do need. If you give your sales and marketing teams different and separate goals, you’ll probably struggle to have them work together. But if you give them a single goal and charge your marketing team with making it happen, you’ve got a great chance at success.
There are many ways your marketing team and efforts can empower your sales team. I’d love to share with you more of what I’d learned. Feel free to contact me and we can discuss how to empower your sales efforts.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Empower Your Sales Team
It is a mystery to me how so many organizations have conflicts between their sales and marketing teams. It just doesn’t make any sense. And in today’s business environment, there’s no excuse why it should be the reason you’re missing your full potential in sales.
How many times do you hear a sales person complain that they don’t have the right sales tools and materials? How often do you hear marketing complain that they can’t get sales input on a new brochure or mailer? And how often do you find sales reps wasting valuable time putting together their own presentations and materials?
Here’s a simple step to get things started: send your marketing staff on sales calls. Every member of your marketing department needs to sit in on sales calls with one of your sales reps, both in person and on the phone, and observe how your sales team interacts with customers and prospects. They’re not there to sell, they’re there to watch and learn.
If you can get your marketing team to take just four days a year and sit in on calls and meetings, you’ll find that they will naturally break down any barriers the two departments have built up and you’ll begin the dialog that you need. There’s plenty more to do, but just four days across a year will stir things up.
In return, every person in your sales department needs to devote time to participate in the materials development process in marketing. That means participating in what materials will be developed and reviewing and commenting on materials and programs before they go into production. We’ll talk about that more in a future post.
I’ve got a lot of things to say about empowering sales and I’ll detail some of them in future posts on this topic – Empowering Your Sales Team. And I’d be happy to talk with you about how you can remove this barrier inside your organization and dramatically increase your sales in the coming year.
How many times do you hear a sales person complain that they don’t have the right sales tools and materials? How often do you hear marketing complain that they can’t get sales input on a new brochure or mailer? And how often do you find sales reps wasting valuable time putting together their own presentations and materials?
Here’s a simple step to get things started: send your marketing staff on sales calls. Every member of your marketing department needs to sit in on sales calls with one of your sales reps, both in person and on the phone, and observe how your sales team interacts with customers and prospects. They’re not there to sell, they’re there to watch and learn.
If you can get your marketing team to take just four days a year and sit in on calls and meetings, you’ll find that they will naturally break down any barriers the two departments have built up and you’ll begin the dialog that you need. There’s plenty more to do, but just four days across a year will stir things up.
In return, every person in your sales department needs to devote time to participate in the materials development process in marketing. That means participating in what materials will be developed and reviewing and commenting on materials and programs before they go into production. We’ll talk about that more in a future post.
I’ve got a lot of things to say about empowering sales and I’ll detail some of them in future posts on this topic – Empowering Your Sales Team. And I’d be happy to talk with you about how you can remove this barrier inside your organization and dramatically increase your sales in the coming year.
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