Sales

If you are responsible for the oversight, administration or operations of a SFA or CRM, repeat after me: “It’s not about the data.” Repeat, “It’s not about the data.” Your data will never be perfect. It will always be out of date. When your boss asks, you will never be able to run a query on. “All the left handed prospects with birthdays between 1980 and 1990,” because you know you only have those prospect’s children’s names in your data base, and not the prospect’s actual birthdays. Too many people obsess about the quality of their data as the first thing to fix. This is like worrying about the quality of the html code for your website.

Final Postscript for senior management: If you are saying your data is crap, you may not be helping and may actually be hurting your chances at establishing a process that can help you sell more stuff. Crappy data is a symptom. You don’t need to treat the sysmptom, your need to treat the causes.

Who owns the SFA system? Oversight, Ownership, Administration and Change Management.

This could easily be the first question. It’s essential to know the differences between the above. If different players don’t know their roles or responsibilities, then nothing gets accomplished. In many organizations, failure becomes a matter of not clearly assigning roles.

My first experience with Sales Force Automation was when a VP of Sales asked me to make it work for his people. As with most important challenges, he indicated I had very little time for this change. I knew this demand would be an obstacle to diagnosing the real problem so I decided to buy myself some time. I went to his top three sales people and asked, “If they could change just one thing about the system, what would it be?”

One major reason for lack of usage is lack of training, though training has to be applied at the right times. Training is best when an employee first joins the company, not when some other issue has prevented the acceptance of the SFA and become an excuse for why it isn’t being used according to your company policy. So if you want the bear to ride his bicycle in the circus, it’s worthwhile asking if the bear is trained.

I ran into someone at a conference who wanted his SFA system to also do his billing. I want to go on record as saying a database is a database and anything is possible. But if you want to train a bear to ride a bicycle, it’s usually a good idea to start with a bear. In the last eight years, SFA has exploded with core capabilities and compatible software (witness SalesForce.com and their original AppExchange). However, it still is prudent to ask, “Does the system have the core functionality required to meet our needs?” (i.e., Are we sure the bear isn’t going to eat us before we get the training wheels off the bike?)

If you want to get to the bottom of something…start at the bottom. Before shaving the bear, it might be a good idea to find out when the last time it ate was, or if it even feels particularly warm and would like a trim. When you want to properly diagnose and solve problems with SFA systems, you need to start at the bottom. One way to do this is to ask, “Is the ‘sales’ or ‘customer relationship management’ process you want to emulate with your SFA/CRM system well defined?

In general, senior managers are not paid to solve problems; they are paid to think about the consequences of problems and then get other people to solve them. However, in my experience, they are not very good at it. They often succumb to the “Shaving the Bear” syndrome. If faced with Global Warming, do you really want to shave polar bears?