How To Create Sales Warriors
By Louis Columbus
Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The high achieving sales people – I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business in every day – are the lifeblood of any company. They bring the voice of the customer into any company.
Conversely anyone who has ever been in engineering, marketing, product development or product management realizes that there is a constant tension between what sales wants and what any given company’s products and strategies can deliver – obviously that’s because no product or service can be all things to all people. Sales warriors learn how to sell using the knowledge of the entire organizations and instead of whining about what a product is or isn’t find creative ways to sell using all the knowledge in other teams.
To net out the pros and cons of sales, the best companies I have ever worked for or tracked for analysis are driven by sales and have a passion for measuring results.
CRM: Unfilled Promise or Over-promised solution?
With such a push to make their processes even more efficient, enterprise software vendors aim to sell the concept of giving everyone the chance to excel with their CRM systems. Automating processes only goes so far however – and where the automation ends, the person’s ambition, drive, intelligence and talent begins.
In watching the best salespeople work, here is what becomes apparent:
- Relationships rule over process. Call this heretical versus the latest push to make all things process-centric in enterprise software, yet it is very true. Travel with your company’s best salespersons and you’ll not see rigorous effort at synchronizing with mountains of data in the CRM records but a genuine concern for their customers – the relationships they have are why they are successful. So fundamental and so true – but so overlooked in the haste of making processes the core focus of re-engineering any company.
- The best salespeople have simple, manual systems that have relationships in the center, not just transactions. Again, this is clear in the highest achieving sales people I’ve met. They know how to track relationships already and don’t need a state-of-the-art CRM system to do it. They could use help with the drudgery of entering names, doing mailings and tracking changes electronically to customer status. Enter integration.
- Integration rules. As you travel with any of the top salespersons the biggest complaint you constantly hear is being too disconnected from corporate. In pricing, in customer shipment data, in backlog reports, in just about anything sales reps struggle to stay informed. So instead of needing a CRM systems with enough features to land an astronaut on Mars they just need one simple to use that melds to their relationships instead of transactions.
Bottom line: Salespeople who excel have found a passion in enriching their customers and the relationships they have with them. They honestly care about the people they serve, and that is much more powerful than any compensation program. If CRM systems are to grow sales warriors the systems have to find a way to engender trust and respect in selling relationships, not just pure efficiency of transactions.
Posted by LOUISCOLUMBUS on August 4, 2005 at 09:05 PM in Customer Dialogue | Permalink
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