How Sales Teams Should Use CRM is a post over on the CRM blog. This quote caught my eye:
"Salespeople "are coin operated," says Mark Vayda, executive vice president of global sales and alliances at BearingPoint. "Anything that keeps them updated on their ability to make money is a huge motivator."
Well said. Which made me think about the whole CRM fascination. CRM is a tool for managment. It's an administrative time drain for sales teams. I mean, taking commissions into consideration, how much do they earn while they're entering all that data about leads? And how much double or triple entry is required at your company because marketing and sales aren't connected in a meaningful way?
I'm not saying that CRM isn't worthwhile, because it is. Managers and executives rely on the information it delivers to do their jobs. My interest is in how it's deployed for use by the sales team. When you evaluate what a sales person needs to do his job, that would be leads and prospects he's currently working with, yes. But, more importantly, he needs the tools to make the sale. Without the sale, no commission.
I'm proposing that it makes more sense to consolidate the tasks the sales person needs to accomplish by tying them to your sales portal. If you provide the tools to generate business letters and then package them up in company letterhead to either be printed and mailed or more likely emailed, plus extract the pertinent information about the lead into the CRM database, you've saved him time.
If that information is now available to be utilized by the sales portal's proposal generation tool, then he can quickly and comptently prepare the proposal, generate a PDF and email it directly to the prospect. The system should then update the lead with the information from the proposal, feeding it right into the manager's reports at the CRM level.
By analyzing the way the sales team uses information and does their jobs, processes can be created that utilize the necessity and benefit of a CRM system and deliver streamlined administrative tasks to the sales person.
To take this further, if marketing is loading information into the sales portal that's useful, taking feedback from the sales team about what works and what they want more of, and then supplying it, you have a system where the sales person can quickly prepare for sales meetings and move their prospects through the system turning them into sales with less effort.
Which means more time to sell more.
Which means more commissions.
Which means everyone wins.
What are you doing in your company to help your sales team sell more, faster?
