Your CRM or Your Salespeople? Understanding CRM Performance Beyond Just Features and Functionality

A CRM system is much more than just customer relationship management. CRM systems have become the “work stream” whereby revenue management happens. So, your CRM system is really a revenue management system. Customer relationship management, though extremely important, is now a sub-activity in the overall requirement of managing revenue.

CRM systems are now a big part of every Salesperson’s day. It’s their workflow. The CRM is the freeway that enables the management of the lifeblood of your company – your sales. As a Sales Manager, you get this. As a Salesperson, you might not get this. Why? The value seen by using a CRM system has typically been at the Manager and Executive level – many times, the value does not make it to the field level.

If you are experiencing poor CRM adoption, corrupt client and forecasting data, and an overall feeling by your Sales Team that your CRM system is just flat out broken, it might not be your CRM system that is causing the problems. It could be you and your people. When a company purchases a CRM system, many times, 95% of the budget is spent on the technology and only 5% on the training of the users. Why? Because the technology is the most tangible part of the solution...but it only comprises 20% of the solution. The other 80% of the solution is not so tangible.

That 80% is made up of people and process. A CRM system is only as good as the people using it and the processes they need to follow. If the behaviors of your Salespeople are not aligned to a consistent process and specific expectations, then it does not matter how great your CRM system is, your people will not effectively use it.
To improve the effectiveness of your CRM system, focus on four things: Process, Technology, People, and Data.

Process
CRM systems don’t come with a best practice sales process and methodology. A sales process is the steps that your Salespeople take from prospecting to closing an opportunity, to then managing and expanding that account. A methodology is the combined “what” the Salespeople will do in each step of your process to achieve the desired results.

In the next two weeks, I will post more thoughts on this topic and cover the remaining sections about technology, people and data.

Thanks for your time.