CRM systems and sales management

CRM Systems Are Futile Without An Integrative Sales Management Strategy

Within any enterprise exists the PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY and PROCESS spheres that are core functional dimensions in the value creation and delivery ecosystem. As you think about these as three broad circles overlapping each other – it is important to understand the intersection of these zones as the ‘sweet spot‘ of collaboration and human intelligence – where true Augmented Intelligence arises. Being a proponent of the notion, this is the zone where technology is fused with human capital to create unprecedented levels of insight, process adherence, emergence and execution in the organisational domain. This manifests through pursuit of sales and marketing initiatives that are focused on driving revenue growth or process improvement programmes that are vested with unifying various business departments and teams across b2c and b2b channels or integrating the marketing efforts more closely with sales force management so that sales cycles and teams have a shared understanding of what constitutes a qualified lead, as well as your ideal customer profile.

Organisational responses to these challenges have seen the uptake of a variety of mainstream and disruptive CRM systems that are vastly different in configuration, pricing, technological deployment and interfaces but which in unify and aggregate with the sales cycle terminology across leads, deals, potentials, accounts and contacts. One can sign up to CRM systems that are supercharged version of excel spreadsheets or those that are fully integrated business applications that offer semi-production to production push and a host of 3rd party connectivity aimed at unifying the marketing and sales management divide. These often come with custom fields, out of the box workflows and automations and offer significant flexibility when it comes to shaping the sales process in the context of your enterprise – regardless of industry. 

So tell me what point is it when you can generate so many leads through your distribution channels when the system is not configured to effectively track and monitor what is happening in the pipeline? Its endemic to sales force management to understand what happens in between – not simply if leads are coming into the pipeline and being converted to appropriate deals and potentials!

What often happens here is that the sales process is often articulated from those with explicit knowledge, often by gurus or senior management and there can often be a disconnect between what they know versus the mechanics that is exposed to front line teams (the people doing the sales!) whom are embracing implicit knowledge that is emergent. Here, we study and leverage best practices and implement them as  a shoe-in solution to the enterprise and then without sufficient training or understanding of the front line; feel that the system will work and streamline the sales cycle.

Evidently, this is often not the best approach, as its important to work to understand and scope behaviours and user stories so as to nudge inputs into the right type of throughputs that product outputs. Put simply, you need to configure and align your CRM system configuration against your sales management process. This will determine how the sales team will use and experience the CRM. This is significant as using your CRM as the glue will in fact improve marketings’ efforts to create gravity with prospects, and sales’ ability to accelerate the sales cycle. This is supported by a recent Harvard Business Review Article wherein it was clear that:

“The pivotal role in driving CRM success is not individual sales people. It’s sales management. They will determine how the sales team uses and experiences the CRM. If they use it solely to check on the amount of activity, call/deal volume, or other measures of efficiency, it’s of low value to the sales team and likely be rejected or filled with fictional data. Instead use it as a tool to jointly create strategies for major opportunities, and help the sales team to maximize opportunities by coaching them throughout the sales process.”

Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2018/12/why-crm-projects-fail-and-how-to-make-them-more-successful