Your company implemented a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. After weeks or months of comparing Salesforce.com to Oracle, to Microsoft, to Sage, to everyone else, you selected the application that best fits your needs, and now you have it up and running. So, are you done yet? Not by a long shot!
As part of our 14th annual Sales Performance Optimization study, CSO Insights surveyed more than 1,500 firms worldwide to assess the challenges that are facing sales organizations and, more importantly, what they are doing to address those issues. One area on which we focus each year is the adoption of CRM tools.
In reviewing the data from the 2008 survey, we found an interesting trend. As more and more sales organizations have implemented core CRM systems — territory management, contact management, opportunity management, forecasting, and the like — they are finding that they need to expand their CRM functionality platforms through the addition of other complementary applications in order to fully meet the needs of their sales organizations. (See Fig. 1.)
Topping the list of recently implemented or planned additional CRM tools are sales force collaboration tools — systems such as GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Live Meeting. While such tools have become a mainstay for marketing organizations to use in conducting webinars, sales teams are also finding numerous uses for them.
Sales operations use the meeting capability to conduct virtual sales training courses. Representatives can leverage the tools to do online demonstrations or presentations for prospects, and buyers and sellers use them to meet virtually for a walk through contracts or proposals. All of these collaborative systems allow a salesperson to perform many aspects of the sell cycle without having to meet face-to-face with the client.
Follow the Lead
Lead generation is not just a task for marketing but for sales reps as well. In fact, our 2008 study found that 50.1 percent of all leads that reps pursue are self-generated. To support this task, we have seen dozens of firms, including Eloqua, Marketo, Vrentz, and Manticore, start to get traction in the marketplace helping salespeople design, execute, and manage their own lead development/incubation campaigns to ensure they have enough activity at the top of their sales funnel.
For more than two decades, we have been asking reps to put information into sales force automation (SFA)/CRM systems. Now, with the emergence of a new group of sales analytics solutions, sales managers are finally in a position to mine the “data gold” in those systems. Firms such as Cloud9 Analytics, LucidEra, and Market-Partners have developed systems that integrate with your existing CRM and business applications, while some of the core CRM solution providers are beefing up the analytics capabilities in their systems.
The net result is that sales executives can now easily start to answer questions such as, “What does my perfect prospect look like?” “Who are my most profitable customers?” “How likely are we to hit our number next quarter?” Through relying on metrics versus hunches, CSOs and their teams will make smarter, more informed decisions about how to optimize their sales performance.
Sales Savvy
Sales knowledge management is a category of CRM that has a lot of different options. Firms like Dow Jones, OneSource, ZoomInfo, Stratascope, Generate, and Jigsaw provide sales teams with a wealth of knowledge on prospect companies, their executives, and their financials that they can use to decide which accounts to target and determine how to create a winning sales strategy.
Other firms like Kadient, OutStart, Sant, and SAVO are focused on tapping into the sales knowledge that already exists inside your company — sample proposals, presentations, sales best practices, and the like. They help companies collect, synthesize, and then share those insights across the sales team. With this enhanced access to internal and external knowledge, salespeople can greatly reduce the time they need to spend finding answers on how best to sell to a client.
We are also seeing more instances of CRM and sales processes being blended together to optimize the workflow of salespeople. Examples of this are coming from several different fronts.
Leading sales training firms, such as SPI Solution Selling and The TAS Group, have released wiki-based offerings (SalesWiki and TASPedia, respectively) that allow users of their specific sales methodologies to get training reinforcement, sales insights, and coaching via the Web. CanDoGo is taking the approach of providing advice from dozens of authors on sales, marketing, and sales management in bite-sized chunks of text, audio, and video, again available via the Web.
Still other firms, like Kadient, ShadeTree Technology, Knowledge-Advantage, and Sales Research Institute, provide their clients with CRM tools for developing customized sales strategies, depending on the specific prospect to which a sales rep is selling.
Incent Insight
Another trend we’ve noticed is that an increasing number of firms are opting out of using Excel-based shadow-accounting spreadsheets for doing compensation management. They are instead turning to applications from firms like Xactly, Varicent, Callidus, and Centive to model, implement, and optimize incentive management programs. Leveraging these robust applications, they are more easily and more effectively designing, implementing, and managing programs to motivate the sales teams to do the right things, the right way.
So are these capabilities needed? Based on the performance challenges that the 2008 survey participants reported, we can make a pretty good case for all of these CRM add-ons. But how do you justify the expense? Our suggestion: take a realistic look at how you are selling today and first determine what the cost is of doing nothing.
If you are losing sales because your sales teams can’t easily work together, if your lead flow is too low, if your forecast accuracy is a disaster, all of those things are costing you money. Based on our benchmarking of successful sales effectiveness projects, we think you will find the cost of not addressing these problems far exceeds the cost of fixing them.
Jim Dickie is a partner with CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking CRM and sales effectiveness initiatives. He can be reached at jim.dickie@csoinsights.com.
