When was the last time you heard a salesperson sing the praises of their CRM? Unless you’re very lucky, it’s probably only ever happened in your dreams. More likely, you spend part of every week wrangling with your salespeople to please put their data in the system so you can print reports so you can do your job. And they spend part of every week groaning about it.
The problem is, you didn’t choose the CRM, and neither did your salespeople. It was probably chosen by someone in marketing or IT, for their own purposes, and then sold to your team as a productivity tool. But it’s not a productivity tool, and you know it and so do your salespeople.
But it should be. It’s time to change how we view CRM.
A new view of CRM
At its heart, CRM is really quite simple. It is just a database, with a user interface and tools attached to it. Unfortunately, the tools that come packaged with most CRM systems were designed with the needs of marketing, IT, and executive leadership in mind—not salespeople and their managers.
The trick to transforming CRM into a productivity tool, is to understand what you want the system to do for your team, and then determine the tools that need to sit on top of the database to serve that purpose. The resulting system will be so much more than a CRM. It will be a genuine sales effectiveness platform.
Which tools do you actually need?
A common mistake sales organizations make when purchasing a CRM is to choose a system based on the size of their organization. A better approach is to start with these three questions:
- Transactional or complex?
- B2B or B2C?
- Proactive or reactive?
Transactional vs complex
The needs of a transactional sales team are different in several major ways from those in a complex environment. In a transactional environment, the salesperson might only need to collect basic contact information and a credit card number. The process may be as simple as answering a few questions and taking an order. In this environment, the CRM tools can be equally simple.
A more complex environment may require the salesperson to engage in multiple touches over several months or years. There may be multiple stakeholders and decision committees to track. In high performing complex environments, there may be formal processes, playbooks, and methodologies to apply. The salesperson may also need access to sales enablement materials. In such an environment, the tools that sit on top of the CRM database are particularly important.
B2B vs B2C
In a B2B environment, the CRM may require an interface that collects detailed information on each contact including their company, role, relationship to other decision makers, attitude toward the sale, level of influence in the decision, and much more. Plus, you may need to maintain organizational charts and adhere to a complex and dynamic sales process.
In contrast, a B2C process will require relatively simple tools.
Proactive vs reactive
While many sales processes are more effective when they are proactive, in some environments the process is necessarily reactive. For instance, government contracts are usually awarded on an RFP basis. An RFP sales process is a reactive process.
At the other end of the spectrum, organizations whose salespeople use social media and other tactics for finding and courting prospects early in the process are engaged in a proactive sales process.
If your organization is involved in a proactive sales process, your effectiveness system should include tools for identifying and tracking prospects. It should allow you to embed a customer-focused sales process into the system that guides salespeople through the sales cycle.
If you’re engaged in reactive sales, then your system won’t need prospecting tools, but should include tools for assembling RFPs and maintaining a consistent message across multiple RFP responses.
Selecting the right package
Most CRMs come packaged with a collection of tools. Unfortunately, these collections are rarely designed for sales effectiveness. Instead, you will probably have to assemble your plugins and tools yourself.
However, some companies do offer packages designed for specific environments, which can provide a helpful start. If your company is engaged in complex B2B sales in a proactive environment, a tool like Membrain gives you everything you need to build a true sales effectiveness platform. Membrain can stand alone on its own database, or be used as a plugin inside Salesforce.
Other packages, such as the one that comes with Hubspot’s free CRM, are built for transactional environments. Meanwhile, Pandadoc has a credible set of tools for assembling RFPs in a reactive environment.
Once you understand the type of organization you are, you’ll be better prepared to build the sales effectiveness platform that will work for your team.