The other day I needed to get a quote on a service costing tens of thousands of dollars.  I visited a website of a well known vendor, spent five minutes trying to find the information I needed, then looked for the “Contact Us” page.  The page had no phone number, only an email form.  Looking further, I finally found a number and called.

I got an automated phone system, listened to the endless array of options and pushed the number that sounded the most likely.  I was routed to India or Pakistan and immediately asked for my name and telephone number.  Patiently I gave the information and explained what I was looking for.  Twenty minutes later, after numerous checks with the attendant’s “supervisor,” I gave up.  The person on the phone had failed to understand my need.  That company was Equifax.

Five minute later I was talking to Trans Union.  I found the number quickly on the Internet, dialed and talked to a person who stuck with me, forwarded my request to a business sales person who called back within 30 minutes, and gave me a full quote.  The value of the transaction could be up to $65,000.

Of course you’re familiar with this phenomenon.  But my question is this.  If we are all familiar, and have experiences like this, then why does the difficulty of helping a prospect via the Internet or phone still persist?  VPs of Marketing, what will your CEO find when he calls his own company? Surf your own sites.  Call your own number.  You might be surprised.

Do great things.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (cell 24×7)

Share

The reason I’ve dedicated the last nine posts on Sales Force Automation is that it’s a key bridge between marketing and sales.  Having a well organized and smooth running SFA or CRM process helps both marketing and sales, and improves the communications between the disciplines.  But nowhere in these posts have I mentioned “The Data”. 

People have asked me, “What about the data?  Don’t I need to assure accurate or quality data in the system?”

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  It will always be out of date.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.

Of course the data is important.  This doesn’t mean you don’t clean, de-dup and add data.  But your data doesn’t mean anything unless the system is easy to use, or your people are trained or you have a consistent sales process.  When you address some of the issues outlined in the last nine posts, you will find that your data quality will miraculously improve.  Sales people will start using the system and entering critical information.  For example, you will find that you don’t need to de-dup because users are following your rules for account name generation.  Reports will become more accurate as management sees the value and begins to require compliance of your lone rangers who resist its use. In the end, it’s not about the data, it’s about the overall process for using and managing your data.

The problem is that management often wants perfection immediately.  When faced with managment questions, your response should be, “What are you trying to accomplish with this information?  What are your goals?”  There is always a way to get information that can answer the immediate question. But your job is to get them to focus on the bigger picture.  Guide your management through the diagnostic questions and use their energy or frustration to help build the overall process.

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 symptom, your need to treat the causes.

Share

Who owns the 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.

As senior management, your job is oversight.  You are the customer for the system.  Management should get paid to think of the consequences of problems, decide priorities and then get others to solve those problems.  It is not your job to solve the problem itself.

In many organizations, ownership for the SFA system is often vague or shared.  It can be owned by IT, (which is the wrong place for it), or by sales (sales has other battles to fight), or by operations, most often sales operations reporting up to sales.  When ownership is unclear, nothing gets done.  But we need to know:

a.  Who owns what?
b.  Do they know it?
c.   Have they accepted it?
d.  Do they have the skills?
e.   Can they do it?

Ownership means that person is responsible for the success of the system.  Success is defined by the metrics you put in place.  It doesn’t mean this person does all the dirty work, but rather they lead a team, assign tasks, measure results and report progress and needs to management.

Administration is the technical support trained in the SFA and having database expertise.  Training and support of this person is essential.

Lastly, having reached a point where your SFA is running and you’ve reached your primary goals, it’s essential to put in place a Change Management System for continued improvements (See Diagnostic Question #6).

When you take a systemic approach to diagnosing and improving your SFA or CRM system, you will find the improvements have a multiplying effect on each other.  Following this diagnostic process will allow you to focus on the business and not the system.

Good luck and thanks to all those who have helped me through this process.  If you’ve stuck with me through this series, here is a quick chart to help guide you.

Share

The old adage is still true, when you have to invest more energy into something than you get out, you tend to stop doing it.  This is especially true with the use of SFA by sales people.  As an adjunct to the last diagnostic question on whether the system is easy to use, the number one request from sales people is “let me see my own stuff.”  This is important enough to call out as its own diagnostic question.  Do your sales people have easy visibility to their own information?

Fortunately, sales dashboards and easy reporting have become features of popular SFAs.  However, in my experience many organizations still don’t provide this core capability.  It’s important that people experience the benefit of seeing their own pipeline.  It helps when the find they don’t have to spend hours putting together Excel spreadsheets to report to management.  It helps sales management when they don’t have to spend hours combining sales reports in Excel.

So it’s useful to ask:

1. Do reps have their own sales reports?
2. Are they trained to run their own queries?
3. Do we have the standard reports we need?
4. Are they accurate and up to date?

Without a firm reporting foundation, you’re stuck asking, “Can the Bear can see himself?”

Share

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 to make this one happen.  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 you could change just one thing about the SFA system, what would it be?”  Then I changed those three things.  It didn’t matter that they might not have been the correct things to change.  But a question I’ve learned when it comes to systems is….

Is the system easy enough to use?

You can have a great sales process that’s modeled accurately with usage policies, training and compliance, but if the system is hard to use, then it isn’t going to be used.  Ask yourself:

1. Is the SFA system easy to use?
2. What is it not doing that it needs to?
3. What three things could you change about the system that would make your sales people happy?
4. Is it providing value to the users as well as management?

Following the success of the first three changes, I put in a change management process (that was easy to use and embedded in the SFA) that resulted in over 200 suggestions from sales and 150 changes within the first six months.   They started to like the taste of blueberries. 

Share

Are your people trained in using your SFA system?

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.

1. Is there a training program?
2. Is it thorough (documented, on-line, classroom, time allowed for it) or an after-thought?
3. Is each discipline trained on the process and the SFA?  Note: Training is different for different disciplines.
4. Is there adequate support in place for employees to follow up on their training?

There are lots of aspects to effective training, and it’s often worthwhile to involve a professional trainer in SFA implementation.  Training for sales effectiveness is a lot like training for sports; there is a certain muscle memory that comes into play.  So training can’t be just an event, it has to be a sustained process.

Share

Ok. I’ve just about beat the bear metaphor to death, but the next question to ask is, “Are your usage policies in compliance?”

Simply put, you can have mandatory usage policies, but your sales management or operations teams might not be enforcing them.  First line sales management is usually the worst offender.

Ask:

a.  Are the usage policies followed?
b. If not, why not?

The answer to the second question is usually a litany of excuses.  “It’s too hard.  The data is screwed up. My people can’t log-on, ad infinitum.”

Most of the problematic or hipshot SFA diagnoses by senior management occur as a result of these responses.  Some of them will be accurate and others not.  So be careful about accepting everything at face value. 

Share

I was interviewing a sales candidate the other day, and I asked him to give me an example of how he’d used sales automation to achieve his sales goals.  He replied, “Oh I’m too busy to use it; and my manager doesn’t care, so long as I’m on forecast.”   I followed with, “How are doing against this year’s forecast?”  “A little behind, but I’m optimistic,” was the reply.  Then he added, “I just wish I didn’t have to do all the sales reports, it’s a real time sink.”  I was transported back to the early ‘90s.

The third Sales Force Automation Diagnostic Question is, “Do you have a usage policy?”

You can lead a sales person to a SFA system, but you can’t make them use it.  Or can you?  Poor training, poor data entry and perceived time sinks all contribute to lack of usage.  But SFA is a chicken and egg scenario.  The more it’s used, the more valuable it is–both to the user and to management.

If you’re considering a usage policy, it is best to apply the carrot and stick approach.  Start with the stick.  You’ve invested lots of money in a sales process and SFA.  Given your economic investment, why would its use be optional?  It shouldn’t be.  Secondly, on the carrot side, if the system doesn’t provide any real value to the sales person, they won’t use it. (I’ll cover this in diagnostic question # 6.)  It is part of management’s job to be an advocate for the sales person.  One way to do this is use the system yourself.  Lead by example.

The questions to ask around usage policies are:

1. Do you have usage policies in place?
2. Are they mandatory?
3. Are there specific usage policies for different disciplines (i.e. sales versus order processing)?

It’s been my observation that the most effective sales people figure out how to use resources to their maximum effectiveness. Sales Force Automation is no exception. 

Share

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?)

Perhaps the biggest dichotomy and area of potential disconnect is the difference between systems that model the sales process and those that model the customer relationship process.   It’s easy to think of a SFA system as a database for managing the sales pipeline up to and including the sale, and a CRM system one that manages the interaction after the sale.  Many systems successfully bridge the divide.  But, we need to be careful before asking this bear to ride a bike.  It’s been my experience that SFA and CRM exhibit the characteristics of two very different bears.  If you want to manage revenue and not pipeline, you need to take a look at the core functionality and which side of the nexus you are on.

Just as there may be different sales processes to model, you should also make sure you have an understanding of which side of the progression you are interested in, or both. 

The next thing to consider is how much of the function is standard “out of the box” and how it would need to be configured (What can an average bear be expected to do?).  After that you can consider “customization” or adding additional capabilities through other software programs.  For example, do you want your SFA to interface with Jigsaw (an email provider)?

So the key questions you can ask at this point are:

1. Does the SFA system model the specific process you want?
2. Does the SFA system have the core capability in order to perform this model?
3. Is this something we want the SFA to do, or is there another way to do it?  Apply the KISS (Keep It Simple) principle here.
4. Do we need to re-configure or incorporate another add-on to the SFA?
5. Do we need or want to “customize” the application? (Note: I won’t get into a detailed discussion about the differences between configuration and customization)

The tough part about diagnosing problems in this stage is making sure you know whether or not you really want and need the bear to ride the bicycle. 

Share

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?”

As I’ve indicated in other posts, everything starts with “Sales Process.”  This is the foundation on which you have to build.  When the foundation is shaky, the SFA or CRM system you put in place to model the process is going to be shaky.  So the key questions in assessing the strength of this building block are:

1. Do we even have a sales process that’s reproducible?
2. Do we have multiple processes… for example, one for direct sales, one for partner sales and one for post sales and service?
3. Which ones do we want to model in our SFA?
4. Have we done this?  Or are we expecting one size to fit all?

90% of most SFA implementations go awry at this point.  Often in the haste of resource or time crunches to install a new SFA system, these questions are ignored.  When the system gets up and running, it’s no wonder it doesn’t do exactly what we want.  The key to success is rigorously documenting each of the sales processes you wish to implement.

(Please note, as a corollary, very few senior managers are willing to admit they don’t have a sales process.)

Share