The difference between a CRM failure and a CRM implementation that delivers a high return on investment — often comes down to user acceptance. If users don’t enthusiastically embrace CRM, then the initiative may not only fall short of the ROI objective, the entire CRM initiative will surely be at risk. Sales users only embrace a CRM initiative if the toolset delivers to their self-interest — optimizing the productive interaction between the salesperson and the customer/prospect.
The following article by TopLine Strategies CEO, Tim Fargo, provides an insightful checklist for CRM success. Whether you are in the formative stages of a CRM project or wondering how to get your current CRM system on track, I am confident Tim’s article will serve you well.
Sales Enablement: User Acceptance Means More Sales
Industry Perspective | Strategy
To achieve the increases in productivity that lead
to rising revenues, sales force acceptance and usage
of the sales component of a CRM system is crucial.
by Tim Fargo
In many CRM installations, sales automation is installed first, sales personnel are the most dominant user community, and sales performance is the key metric of the CRM initiative’s success. For CRM to succeed, salespeople must use it with enthusiasm.
CRM customers are demanding revamps to their applications to make them substantially more attractive and useful to the field and inside salesperson. The sales representative’s adoption of the CRM system hinges on a system that delivers a sales productivity benefit and a user-friendly interface. To meet the needs of the firm, a CRM system must focus on optimizing the productive interaction between the salesperson and the customer/prospect.
Usability vs. Functionality: First Things First
The fundamental purpose of a CRM initiative is to drive sales performance and foster profitable customer relationships. If the application’s features successfully catalyze the relationship between the account owner and the account, then the CRM system will add value to the company. Functionality is defined as the feature set of any given application. Below are three common sense guidelines when a company is evaluating CRM functionality relative to the likelihood of sales representative adoption:
• Inclusion of hundreds of functions without regard to their probable usage does not produce a more powerful or productive CRM experience.
• Each required function must tie back to an ability to catalyze the relationship between account owner and account.
• What makes a CRM application viable is the usability of important features, not that they exist.
If the individual receives value from the CRM system then they will use it. If they don’t, they won’t. Salesperson acceptance is embedded in individual self-interest. The objective is user acceptance by the largest part of that constituency. Although there is no way that everyone in sales is going to immediately adopt a CRM system. The greatest level of initial penetration will occur if self-interest is addressed effectively.
Understanding Customer Relationships
The specific focus is to catalyze the relationship between the account owners during the various stages of an account’s life-cycle. Interest in sales automation will be peaked for the salesperson if:
• The new tools enable a higher rate of target accounts to be nurtured into opportunities. There has been an increasingly sharp understanding that a customer relationship begins by nurturing a target account into an inquiry, then an opportunity. A good CRM system must have effective structures (i.e. Leads separated from Accounts) and tools that aid this nurturing process from raw lead, to qualified lead, to suspect, to prospect.
• An opportunity is advantaged with tools that aid advancing the prospect thru the cycle. Managing a sale through the stages of a sales cycle is a traditional domain of Sales Force Automation; but forecast reporting to management has been the primary sales cycle function. Forecasting is important, but functions that improve close rates are more important for the sales person. CRM success starts with motivated usage, and motivated usage in turn drives universal adoption. Then adoption along with solid sales process and discipline will leads to an accurate forecast.
• Prospective opportunities within the existing client base are more easily discovered and closed. Most organizations find relationships considerably more profitable after the initial sale. Enhancing opportunity identification within existing accounts, making the offer, and moving the prospect easily to new opportunity management is perhaps the best chance to drive account owner self-interest.
What Are These Changes That Have To Be Made To Sales Force Automation To Make It Useable For Salespeople?
1. Usability
Here are a few known CRM user interface guidelines that have been tested to make a difference for the sales staff:
• A clean, easy-to-use interface
• Is visually appealing
• Has an uncluttered look
• Incorporates big buttons
• Uses clear labels
• Has simple-to-access tab interface
• uses easy drag-and-drop capabilities
• Contains something as simple as a “go back” key
• And provides a “recent records” button
Usability increases odds of sales staff acceptance.
2. Effective Account Management Tools
There is a distinction between a slick technological function and an actually useful account management feature. For example, it is a slick to have customer auto call for one of the Web features, but not necessarily a feature all that frequently used. Here are three features that will make the CRM application a real-time tool:
• Easy lookups on all the fields of an application
• Very robust “speed” search capabilities that allow exploration and discovery
• A salesperson requires the freedom to navigate the system. The application must allow the flexibility to move from account to contact to notes to opportunity to customer service readily without being encumbered by the database structure behind the technology.
3. Easy Integration with Familiar Desktop Applications like Outlook
Over 150 million people are using Outlook and Lotus Notes combined. Easy integration between these applications and the customer-facing CRM application is a fundamental requirement.
4. Seamless Integration with the Back Office
For salespeople to manage an account well it is often necessary to have both accurate knowledge of and timely access to back office activities such as product inventory status, order status, accounts receivable, catalog look-ups, and subscription management. The application should provide:
• Seamless integration with the organization’s back office, legacy and Web systems if these systems house information important to account management or opportunity identification.
• Transparent “back office” access; not requiring the salesperson to leave the familiar environment of the CRM sales automation application.
The less time a salesperson has to “stand in line” for accounting answers and the more direct access the rep has to back-office information, the more time he or she has to sell. Seamless integration is a critical factor in improving salesperson effectiveness. Pre-built integrations to major back-office systems can reduce the time and complexity of integrating to those systems, but can be constrained and limited. To achieve the objective, an application has to have an open environment that supports the integration technology that is most appropriate for the business. Good integration provides access to all meaningful information (timely and accurate), not just some.
5. Adaptable and Flexible Business Processes Capabilities that Fit
Mid-sized businesses and enterprise divisions are unique and so are their business processes. Even companies in the same industry have unique processes they have developed which differentiate them from their competition. A variety of best practices and sustainable business processes are going to be embedded in any CRM application. An extremely important part of making the salesperson comfortable is a CRM system that is adaptable to those unique business processes. What makes the system usable is the degree of flexibility to mold to the organization’s unique sales and business processes. Equally important is the system’s capability to change as the organization grows and acquires new processes.
6. Embedding Sales Methodologies into the Applications is a Qualified Benefit
There are a substantial number of successful sales methodologies that have been part of many a sales toolkit.
Corporations spend thousands of dollars to train their sales personnel in Solution Selling® or Miller Heiman or other prominent methodologies. Many companies even develop their own unique selling methodologies developed over the years of selling in a particular industry.
• A good sales automation application will embed the best and most widely accepted sales methodologies or allow new ones to be easily created.
• The application should give the sales person the means to either access or ignore these methodologies.
• The methodology should discipline forecast-ability — and suggest the close rating of the prospect
For the new salesperson, this is an especially important feature allowing them to conform to a methodology at an early stage of their sales career.
7. Tools that Enhance Interactions with the Customers
Access to your prospects and customers with multiple communications channels makes a huge difference in user comfort levels:
• Web
• phone
• email
• hand-held
• social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter…)
A CRM system that automatically tracks these important interactions with customers and prospects is essential.
8. High Level of Personalization so that the Individual Salespeople can have a System that is “Them”
Each human has a personality that is his or her own. On the other hand, in a corporation of any substance, it is clear that there needs to be universal business procedures that govern the general method of doing corporate business.
Configurability, or personalization, is the answer. Individual salesperson can incorporate their comfortable quirks and approaches into the system (within limits) without affecting anyone else’s use of the system. A user should be able to create their own:
• Customer and prospect lists,
• Tab structures,
• Sales letters, and
• Even screen colors that fit their own way of being efficient; not a rigid application that enforces its own idea of efficiency on users.
This is not customization, which is traditionally not done by the end user but rather by the IT department.
9. A Highly Mobile Sales Force — Access and Mobility
An effective CRM application will provide today’s highly mobile workforce access in both a connected or disconnected environment, with PDAs, Tablet PCs, and laptops. Mobility is a critical technology that enables users to share up-to-date customer and sales information in the field. Approaches vary widely – as do the amount of success they achieve. Evaluating a solution’s mobility system can help avoid problems that have doomed many CRM projects to failure. The judgment as to which mobility system best meets a particular company’s needs is, of course, a business decision. It must support the overall goals of an organization including providing salespeople with more time to sell and real-time access to customer information, fostering a more efficient sales process, and yielding up-to-the-minute and accurate forecasts.
The mobility system that best meets these needs best serves its users and owners.
10. Comprehensive, interactive business analytics tool Business Analytics can transform your CRM data into actionable information.
An effective business analytics tool puts rich information at your sales force, manager’s and executive’s fingertips; giving you the visibility you need to keep a pulse on key performance indicators and to focus your teams’ efforts on the most effective activities. Sale force analytics provides the ability to:
• Analyze critical business metrics with customizable dashboard views that illustrate your organization’s state-of-health
• Should provide rep and manager: KPIs, Maps, Ranking, Forecast, Win/Loss, Opportunities, Activities, Marketing, Customer Service, and contextual details on a “click”
• Enable fast, reliable business decisions based on accurate and usable information
• Integrated with data security so users will see only the data their security profile allows
• Optimize your human investment with a reporting connection that links up with customer data stores to extend business intelligence — and help monitor changes or trends.
• Leverage seamless integration of customer details from your CRM database.
• Optimal if in separate data repository architected to optimize data load time, but minimize query affects on response time of live CRM environment
11. Tribal Knowledge
With so much useful tactical information in a sales organization, the greatest problem remains access to the critical information when it is needed. Here are five common symptoms that poor access to critical information is affecting sales performance:
• Sales managers spend too much valuable time answering repetitive questions from their team members,
• Sales reps are re-creating similar presentations and proposals
• Crucial new competitive information is never logged
• New product positioning is missed
• Customer references are not reliable and
• Incredibly valuable sales innovations stay locked in the tool-kits of the “eagles.”
Perhaps the most dramatic opportunity to drive sales performance is the availability of “answer on demand” resources for the sales representative. The emerging breed of sales intelligence systems included at least these five categories of advantages:
• The application is operated with common email interfaces and as a result takes little to no time for the sales reps to learn to operate.
• Access to information is highly mobile; the application can be operated from a PDA including Blackberry, a laptop, or cell phone.
• The library not only stores information but rates the information; combining the best attributes of a document library with an Amazon.com-like reader rating system.
• The application supports business incentives to use the tool; providing combinations of innovative incentives, constituent usage statistics, and reminders that motivate field intelligence contribution.
• Delivers the obvious value of anytime/anywhere responsiveness to questions on pricing, availability, objection handling, competition, references, subject-matter expert identification, best of breed proposals and letters, and much more.
Conclusion
Automating the sales organization is almost always the first task of any CRM initiative. Nearly 90 percent of all successful CRM implementations have sales automation installed. Over 90 percent of the CRM users in the mid-sized and enterprise division segment are sales users. Therefore, sales force enablement is a critical outcome to any CRM effort.
The sales enablement value chain works like this:
• First salespeople accept the system; then,
• Sales force productivity increases,
• Finally, sales force productivity drives sustainable sales performance.
Deliver a tool that provides your salespeople value and usability. In return, you will have a system that people actually use, and that is what ultimately benefits the entire organization.
About the author: Tim Fargo has over 30 years experience managing and leading IT organizations that deliver large-scale project management, consulting, commercial application software development, and software and system service. Tim spent over fifteen years as CEO of AIS, Advanced Information Services, and managing partner of its parent corporation. AIS grew from 9MM to $250MM and was sold to a Fortune 500 corporation. While managing SalesLogix, Tim reported directly to Interact Commerce chairman and founder, and recognized software entrepreneur Pat Sullivan. At Interact Commerce, Tim was responsible for all aspects of the CRM product line, including product development, sales, marketing, channel management, professional service, and technical support. During his tenure, SalesLogix led the industry and was rated by Gartner in it’s “Magic Quadrant, and by Destination CRM as the industry’s leading mid-market product. Tim is currently chairman and CEO of AEP LLC’s (AncAla Equity Partners), and it’s subsidiaries, including TopLine Strategies, Top IT Staff, and the Venture Resource Group.
