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 “Contact Us” page had no phone number, only an email form. Looking further, I finally found a number and called. VPs of Marketing, what will your CEO find when he calls his own company?
Read MoreIf 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 It will always be out of date.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.
Read MoreWho 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.
Read MoreThe 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.”
Read MoreMy 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?”
Read MoreOne 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.
Read MoreI’ve just about beat the bear metaphor to death and mixed it to the point of confusion, 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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreI 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?)
Read MoreIf 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?
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