salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Giving Up On CRM Adoption?

October 7, 2008 at 10:11 am · Filed under rant, crm

I read my latest Selling Power newsletter on crm last night. They mentioned a piece of PR they’d received from the boss of a crm vendor. It was satisfying that they disagreed with a third of what he set out in order to raise adoption of crm systems.

Back in the cowboy days of the Nineties, my exasperation with reps not using the software I was repping (and passionate about to the point of possibly being in need of medical attention) prompted my then superior (the Founder) to stun me. Don’t bang your head against a brick wall, he intoned. They’ve paid for it, we’ve done all we can to help them use it. So what if the reps spurn it? Microsoft have made billions shafting their customers so where’s our problem?

Well, thankfully times have changed. Firms no longer pay huge sums upfront for software. The ability to ‘rent’ databases that require potentially no internal IT resource has meant many companies are trying a new system with every new regime, or even financial year, to pinpoint one that works for them.

Of course, as the industry knows, none of the systems ends up working for them. Crm adoption is on the floor. It was heartening to note that Selling Power shared my experience that salesreps cannot be told that they’d only get commission if the crm was filled-in (”Coercion creates resistance”). They prefer to see extra bonuses for such diligence.

But then, I wondered if anyone had ever mapped crm adoption? When on-demand pioneer Salesforce announced their ‘adoption dashboard’, they must have realised it would expose them. I wonder what “safeguards” they built in?

The last person running a salesteam that I spoke to expressed the usual laments about paltry crm usage. He had 8 reps on the road. I suggested it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Of those 8, I suggested 2 would be addictive users. Another 2 would have never even logged on (although the likelihood bizarrely was that these were 2 of the top reps so maybe there wasn’t a huge problem!) and the other 4 could be nagged, chased and tazered into using it and when they did, at least the bare miniumum would go typed in. He acknowledged how accurate my numbers were. I wonder whether these are the same the world over?

This is a chap that switched recently from Salesforce to NetSuite. So I guess he’s paying around £400 a month. How does he evaluate if he’s getting value for money? I bet he doesn’t have to. Because even in these downturn times such an amount will forever be below the radar, as whenever the bean counters question it, they’ll simply be told they have to have it…

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Consider Your Shadow Reporting

September 8, 2008 at 11:53 am · Filed under crm

During a thoroughly enoyable meeting with a chap that ran a salesteam of eight about their reporting needs as a company, the issue of Shadow Reporting arose. I was exploring more knowledge of what makes crm installs collapse so dramatically. In this case, they’d tried Salesforce, Maximiser & Netsuite. There was little success to show for each endeavour.

I threw in the possibility that they’d yet to measure up because they weren’t geared around capturing what the individual reps wanted to track, and instead were too focused on management policing attributes. I suggested that those who didn’t appear to engage with their crm were probably keeping their own records locally, hidden from view. If you could create a way for that knowledge to be captured openly in a way that wasn’t Big Brother, then activity intel would naturally be recorded from it whilst providing genuine usefulness for the rep.

It turned out that the reps were indeed doing just this, as various documents had been publicly discussed. How much better off would every sales team and the reps within it be, if their Shadow Reports were actually the only reporting required?

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Another Forecast Spreadsheet

September 3, 2008 at 10:32 am · Filed under grapevine, crm

One of my customers shared with me the parallel reporting that has since resoundingly taken the place of their ditched Goldmine crm. It’s a single worksheet they call the Schiffman Board. It seems that with usage of Goldmine having tailed off to practically no use at all, a new Manager (an American emigré) introduced this spreadsheet.

Web surfing doesn’t shed much light on its origins, although a New Yorker with decades of sales support appears the front runner.

The good news for those exasperated with crm, and bad news for those who promote its use, is that this team appear to fill-in their ‘Board’ and email updates to the Boss on a weekly basis with little grudge. One fella even boasts how it’s improved his forecasting accuracy to such an extent that he’s only a couple of hundred quid out each month.

The spreadsheet has five areas to input:

1st Appointments
10% close chance
50%
90%
Closed

A cheeky macro then populates a trio of forecast figures multiplying the percentage by the deal values; Realistic, Midrange & Longshot.

Whether the probablities chosen are from Mr Schiffman’s recommendation or the team’s boss is unknown. What I feel is critical to its usage though, is the clarity that is given to the thresholds that must be crossed to progress from first appointment through to close.

In this case, after your initial meeting you must have an agreed Needs Analysis to earn a 10% chance. Then a Trial with an agreed feedback meeting ensures a 50% chance. And for 90% certainty, you must have been given the verbal nod.

These can quite readily be adpated to most solution selling situations I’m sure.

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Head Off Boardroom Embarrassment

August 14, 2008 at 10:17 am · Filed under crm

Met up with someone influenced by over a dozen years of sales management and talked crm for a while. We lamented how so many crm implementations go pear-shaped by virtue of attempting to re-build the space shuttle.

In addition, one key criteria gets left off specs by those leading sales teams. Think about how to avoid being shown up in a Board meeting. What are fellow Board members likely to ask about any specific one of the number of deals you’re working on? And how can you look good by having the answer at your fingertips?

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Admin Burden Overload

May 2, 2008 at 8:14 pm · Filed under crm

I’ve a client that has highly expensive sales software across the globe. Their management has long lamented that the reps never fill anything in on it. Not only should it have detailed transactional reporting of what happened on calls, but it should also hold key intel on what the prospect currently has in place which they can replace and add to.

Two things have happened since the start of the year that the reps are unhappy about. The first is that an analysis of user habits revealed that much of the updating was done in what they consider to be prime selling time. Like 1120 before lunchtime. An edict has apparently gone out saying that such input should take place outside key selling time. The reps clearly see this as an attempt to pressurise them into evening and weekend shift patterns. Now, winning reps don’t follow the 37½hr week of course, but still, when turning the blue-chip millstone there are limits for many an upstanding corporate citizen nonetheless.

Then there’s a new layer of reporting. Dashboards must now be filled in on spreadsheets with data such as days in the month left, how their budget is split between deals and what’s the progress month on month and with slippage. The reps are expected to spend one day a month on such info. So that’s 12 less selling days. Or around 5% less time. And what makes it even worse, is that their spangly crm should be able to pull out this kind of stuff anyway. But of course, it cannot.

Another example of crm analysis paralysis, the reps say. Naturally, this type of shadow reporting shouldn’t be new to most of us, but steps should be taken to lift the monitoring burden off reps without rewarding them for laziness or non-compliance.

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Selling To Sellers

April 7, 2008 at 5:19 pm · Filed under crm

“When I were a lad…” Yes, buckle in for a trip down memory lane. In the 80s I was involved in selling computers. They were easy to spot. No matter how new they were, they always looked grubby. The screens weren’t much better. Epilepsy inducing green flickering text on a blackboard. If you paid more, mister customer, how about the delightful amber text instead? Then a long lead would disappear against the skirting board, held by gaffer tape, leading to a windowless air-conditioned room. Inside a bespectacled bloke would sit in silence. Probably weighing up which day of next month to wash his hair. He must have been busy, ‘cos everytime you asked him to do something, he’d take his head out of what looked to be a large industrial top-loading washing machine, tell you he was busy and that you should come back in stardate 1277.1.

Yet how awe-inspiring.

For anyone in sales, and perhaps all those that weren’t, unless you were already on the financial barrow-boy greasy pole, you simply had to force your way into selling computers. It was a bonanza of clubbing seals proportions. And just as analogous, once begun, unethically nothing good ever came of the project.

Then manufacturers discovered the Far East. Plummeting hardware prices meant less commission. So the reps jumped ship. The natural liferaft was in software. Produce code that could do the job of a real person in less of the time, and people’s pockets were suddenly deep. The trick for a rep was to calculate the difference to as tiny an amount as possible. If someone costs their employer $100 a day, why don’t we charge them $99. Wow, just think of all that saving, an extra whole percentage point slashed off your costs and added onto your margins. The City will love you. With business bursting with software, every bean was counted, every widget shipped. Then someone realised that the last bastion to repel the tide could now be tamed. Welcome to sales software. Life would never be the same again. Where did I park my Ferrari?

Then programmers discovered the Indian sub-continent. First desktop, then web-accessed code benefitted from software factories where the average annual salary for a Masters qualified webmonkey was only $4,000.

And the reps salivated. Even more margin.

The software was an essential component of every management control plan. Was it any good? Did it work? What value did it add? Who cared. Tick in the box achieved, let’s get back to that dodgy email from that irate customer.

But at long last, the swindle caught up with them. So now what does every sales operation use? Well, the equivalent of quill and abacus. And I’m not joking. Ask yourself why no field-based reps use their crm to the full and what do they do to keep records themselves?

One meeting with a prospect I had recently started with this unpromising gambit from the prospect, “so you’re yet another person selling me information, why should I be interested when I can’t digest all the info that I currently get?”

Ouch.

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CRM On Hold

March 4, 2008 at 8:02 pm · Filed under crm

Met a thoroughly engaging chap running the £109m salesteam at a major 30,000 industrial products supplier. They seemed to be doing well according to the numbers. Their crm though, has fallen in to disrepute. Their main database was Pivotal. They also had some data mining capability, including from Cognos. As a business, they’re moving to a single global platform. This means implementing JD Edwards financials during 2008. I visibly whinced when I heard that. The poor sales team will get nothing done for ages now.

Anyhow, ‘integrating’ JD Edwards and Pivotal is a stated aim of the project later in the year. Yet presently, everyone’s stopped using their crm. Sales Management’s plan is to re-introduce the system once said integration has taken place. The reason why Management reckon the sales people no longer use Pivotal is because there’s nothing in it for them. So when they do recommence with it, he aims to get them starting off by updating their database, so that HQ’s internal sales teams can start to build relationships with the road-based reps’ clients which should of course, lead to extra revenue for them.

It’s a laudable plan, and one I believe I can help him with better than with the current idea of getting some temps in to help.

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What Are You Losing In The Shadows?

November 13, 2007 at 10:32 am · Filed under crm

I was trying to work out ways of helping a customer with their crm headaches yesterday. Depending on which scare story you believe, a quickfire trawl around any one of the several sites trying to be crm info portals will throw up all sorts of alarming figures. They often claim that anywhere between 50 & 70% of reps fail to use their requisite software (regardless of whether it’s desktop or web-based).

I remember selling sales software in the 90s and, exasperated by a key piece of functionality that clients had requested inexplicably missing from the latest release, crying about it into my beer one night with the MD. He was a sales animal, and his response was simply “Microsoft showed the way and since every other software vendor has followed suit in ripping off their customers - no software works anywhere, it’s all a scam”. Incredible.

Sales teams are losing out on two scores. Firstly, reps are disengaged from the central system. Of even more concern, is the fact that they often do want to keep some kind of record of their activity. So what they do is create their own ’system’ of documenting what they’ve done and what they need to do. I’ll call it a shadow system, as definitions for this kind of thing already exist, eg:

“A shadow system is a set of records maintained at a local level independent of the official records”

This doesn’t just include call reports and actions, but can often spread to areas like keeping a separate account of their sales figures for commission purposes. No lesser outfit than Accenture even suggest ‘estimates of productive selling time lost to shadow activities can range from one-half day to two days per month per salesperson’.

I’m looking into ways for them that any time and data lost to shadow activity can be reclaimed.

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CRM Malaise Not Restricted To Reps

September 3, 2007 at 10:06 am · Filed under crm, sales knowledge management

I am really made up that I’ve just hatched a new product idea, given the experiences from two of my customers recently.

Both have around 20 sales people in the UK, strewn all over the place. One has Goldmine as their crm - the reps only use it when they want commissions as they ‘back-fill’ data into it then - and the other has always resisted getting the German parent’s system imposed and prefer to have nothing.

Both have more post-sales resource than pre-. Yet both realised that a wealth of intel was being missed out on. The post-sales experts were party to wonderful insights that the salespeople never got to build on or use.

The logical answer was to use existing systems to capture it. But as you can imagine, trying to cobble a crm to capture this was a non-starter. Then they tried to issue word docs to the post-sales people, so they could fill them out, and send them back into HQ. Again, disaster. Amazingly, installation and consultative service guys turned out to be as anti-filling in boxes on screens as their sales colleagues! Does anybody, anyone at all, use sales software?!

Regardless of this, there is probably a ton of intel your post-sales guys gather, yet you never get to learn about it. Don’t rely on some central function to unleash it. Instead, make sure you create a routine to catch it yourself and keep to it so you become even more of a winner.

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More Compliance Trauma

August 27, 2007 at 11:08 am · Filed under crm

Someone showed me how they use Oracle’s Sales Online the other day. Or more accurately, why they don’t bother with it. Part of a $500m technology-related business, founded in Chicago back in 55, all their global reps are expected to use the system. Yet none do. Whenever the Brits moan about it, the response from Corporate is simply “it works in America”. How helpful.

Then I saw the very front screen they log onto. It was worse than a spreadsheet. A very software-looking listing with columns for; opportunity name, value, status & likelihood. The screen I was shown even had opportunities still live which had been won, and the most common value was virtually ubiquituous, $50,000, and every status was set to ‘open’. They’d asked for a couple of mods, but 12 months later still no appearance.

Not much use and not much used.

And then I spoke to one of my long-time customer’s that I really think are moving in the right direction and have a lot of time for. They use Saratoga’s Avenue. Their head of sales dropped the bombshell that no-one uses it, and he was getting grief from HQ in Europe about it. He responded he’d asked for a couple of mods, but 12 months later still no appearance. Sounds familiar…

So I spoke to both chaps about their view of crm. It’s heart-wrenching. Along with me, they are both huge fans of what crm should accomplish. Yet it never gets anywhere near success. Martin summed it up really well something like this:

‘What sales guys need is a sales tool, and all they ever get is a management tool. And the sales guys know this. The only thing they get consistently asked for is their ‘number’, so the only thing they really ever input is what the finger-in-air value of deal will be and roughly when it’ll hopefully come in, so management can create a pipeline spreadsheet and everyone’s off their backs for another month.”

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salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Archive for crm

Giving Up On CRM Adoption?

Consider Your Shadow Reporting

Another Forecast Spreadsheet

Head Off Boardroom Embarrassment

Admin Burden Overload

Selling To Sellers

CRM On Hold

What Are You Losing In The Shadows?

CRM Malaise Not Restricted To Reps

More Compliance Trauma

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