I'll answer this question by focusing on some big issues:
- Sales and marketing are different departments and like it that way
- Glengarry Glen Ross School of Selling
- The 80's buying experience
- Service and support ghetto
Usually when planning CRM implementations we focus on resolving 'sales issues'. We focus on resolving problems we have been programmed to think about by CRM vendors. Spend a few minutes watching some of the videos on the salesforce.com website and you will be exposed to endless functionality. Here's a small sample of what it can do for you:
- Sales - Much needed visibility into the sales and pipeline, lead conversion rates, competitive losses. Sales dashboard. Manage complex sales with ease (incorporating sales methodologies into salesforce), customize salesforce for unique needs, and manage complex territories. Everything a rep needs on their desktop, exactly when they need it. Improved processes such as lead routing. Integration with service and support to get a complete customer view.
- Marketing - track ROI instantly, conduct marketing analysis - campaign performance, campaign to sales life cycle tracking.
- Service - ensure agents have access to information they need, managers and execs have access to key performance indicators to improve service and decrease costs.
The reason our executives are questioning the value of CRM has nothing to do with the capabilities of CRM, but rather the problems in our go-to-market approaches which remain long after CRM is implemented. These problems exist because we tend to focus solely on the needs of the sales team when implementing CRM - usually because we are looking for the quickest return, which we hope might come from increased sales. Without looking across the organization for all buyer touch points, however, we miss out on some great opportunities for a better return on investment.
A broader view of CRM as a true Customer Relationship Management system is our starting point. We need to focus on our relationship with buyers through higher quality interactions with them. CRM implemented right should improve the way everyone in our company interacts with buyers and customers.
So let's dive right into the problems we identified at the beginning.
Sales and marketing are different departments and like it that way
This is likely the biggest problem and I will talk about it the most. In any implementation of CRM the gateway between marketing and sales is a lead. While this makes sense from a sales process perspective, it leaves a lot to be desired as the only integration point. When lead management is the only bridge between these two groups there tends to be a lot of friction between them. When I hear sales people complaining about lead quality and marketing complaining about sales' ability to convert leads into opportunities, it provides me with evidence of the typical sales/marketing relationship.
The problem originates when marketing is creating 'impressions' based on positioning your brand and solutions. The solution positioning is usually the result of research which identifies the top pain points for each of your target markets.
Marketing creates leads based on this high level solution positioning, often creating a high volume of interest, which it channels into the lead funnel. Many leads originating from this process are of poor quality. Even after a first call by inside sales, the lead quality is still suspect. It may still take sales considerable effort to make any progress in processing these leads and once they process too many bad ones in a row, they begin to lose confidence in the leads generated by marketing altogether. This is very distressing for the marketing lead who has invested marketing dollars in generating every one of these leads.
This happens for some very basic reasons:
- Marketing is under pressure to create a high volume of leads. In fact they usually have lead creation targets. Any lead is a good lead to marketing. And yes, I know marketing has other measures - I have seen everything from 'lead to opportunity conversion rates' to 'opportunity acceleration' (one of my personal favorites). But when the President joins the marketing meeting he wants to know one thing - 'How many leads am I getting from having these marketing guys around?', followed by 'Is my brand being mentioned at kitchen tables yet?' (and if time allows, “Are people's appetites affected in a positive way when they are talking about my brand around the kitchen table?”)
- Inside sales is ill-equipped to process leads. Marketing is casting a very wide net, often handing a high percentage of leads over to sales for qualification. Normally some leads should be filtered out and some sorting done before the leads are sent to sales. And maybe at this point you say, "Wait a minute, our telesales / telemarketing colleagues process the leads and send the best ones to sales". To which we say – these inside sales roles generally earn some percentage of their compensation based on lead creation volumes. Additionally, telesales / telemarketing generally have poor tools and training for sorting through leads, sometimes relying almost exclusively on BANT (qualification using Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) as their only tool.
- Marketing operates at a high level with positioning that does not resonate with buyers. One of my favorites is the Volkswagen commercials with the 'das auto' delivered at the conclusion of their commercial by the big German voice (have you figured that one out yet?). Our buyers are dealing with day-to-day problems at a much more granular and much less sexy level than the high level marketing positioning. As a result, marketing is able to generate a small glimmer of interest (or sometimes more) from a buyer, which puts the buyer in a slightly vulnerable position where we are allowed to market or sell to them one-to-one. Unfortunately, our first response is to hammer them with the hard-selling telemarketer / telesales person. The telemarketer / telesales person is either trying to convert the lead into an opportunity, or determine if it is a cold lead to go into the nurturing bucket (which is generally a dead-end). This results in the buyer experiencing an entirely different dialog which ignores their problems and our solutions to address them. Instead, our inside sales person qualifies them. Many well organized buyers with low vendor expectations make their way through this process just fine, but if you look at the percentage of leads on average that get closed or rejected, this is clearly an issue.
Buyers desire an entirely different dialog with us early in the sales process (back when we are still trying to put them into the lead management process or convert them into an opportunity). My work has led me to believe this dialog changes based on any number of attributes of the buyer and the buying organization. Attributes of the buyer organization such as industry, country of operation, global-reach, and company size have a significant impact on the dialog with anyone at the buying organization. In the case of the individual buyer, their role in the company and various psychographic variables will greatly impact both buyer solution preferences and their approach to acquiring it. You can't sell leading edge technology to an individual who is risk averse.
Once again, this is an opportunity for many of you to say - 'We are already doing this.' On some level you likely are, as you may already have whole areas of your website dedicated to your target segments, perhaps by industry or company size. A classic example might be solution offerings specifically for mid-sized professional services companies.
While this might be a great start, it does not go nearly far enough. Static pages which offer specialized information are necessary, but don't qualify as a two-way buyer dialog. Online product configurators are better, but only if they configure solutions based on buyer needs and not solution features.
We need to move to a buying process where the dialog goes to the heart of the buyer's problems. This requires mass customization and one-to-one marketing which in turn requires a deep understanding of buyer’s problems, the impact of those problems on their business, resulting needs, and how your solutions address them. Secondly, this dialog must be conducted consistently throughout all of the buyer touch points, whether automated through an online presence, email or in a real-time conversation.
This means a lot of work for Marketing. Also, this information needs to be delivered to your organization and your buyers via a repository which resides in your CRM system. All of the buyer touch points must also be tracked and stored in CRM.
Glengarry Glen Ross School of Selling
If you haven't seen this movie yet, put it on your list of movies to see. Here is a refresher of one of the best parts (don't forget to come back and read the rest of this blog!). My entire career has been spent in and around sales. I was always amazed to see the new sales people pick up all of the same habits as the more experienced sales people. Regrettably, they learned many bad habits.
With technologies we have available to us and the sophistication of most buyers, I am surprised to see most selling models are still quite adversarial. It's ‘us’ trying to convince the buyer to acquire our solutions through a process of us being better sales people than the competition. Now, I'm not saying being good in sales isn’t important. Obviously, well trained sales people with good selling skills make more sales than those without the skills and training.
But have you ever closely watched a sales person who is consistently successful over many years (and maybe even over a career that spans many different companies and products)?
In short, sales people who excel over a long career are good problem solvers and team players. They build strong internal networks in their own companies to allow them to broker the best capabilities of their company to create solutions to solve buyer problems. In a buyer dialog, most of the questions they ask go to the heart of uncovering buyer problems and the impact of those problems. Early in the process, very few questions are asked which only serve the interest of the seller, such as pure qualification questions. When the accomplished seller resorts to asking qualification questions, they do so after earning the right to ask them, having created some value for the buyer by helping the buyer to better understand their problems and potential solutions. We call this the Problem, Impact, Need, Solution selling model (lousy acronym – maybe we’ll think of something better later). It forms the basis of our Guided Customer Buying go-to-market framework. We believe sales must be trained to sell this way. And we think the marketing content that we identified earlier must be provided to sales as “sales-ready” content to be used in customer dialogs.
The 80’s buying experience
We can no longer provide static web pages with tons of content for buyers to sort their way through as our only approach to engaging in an online dialog. The very same content marketing is creating for sales to support real-time dialogs must also be made available through your corporate website to facilitate one-to-one dialogs with buyers.
This would take the form of an online interaction where the buyer identifies their problems and the impact of those problems. Throughout the online interaction the buyer would be provided with supporting information to facilitate learning. This learning is valued by buyers, and it does not simply imply teaching them about your solutions. Buyers want to learn about the problems other customers in their industry are facing, how to assess the impact of various problems, and finally, how others may have successfully addressed those problems.
If this dialog is done well, the buyer should uncover problems for which they might not as yet have visibility. If you do a good job providing this online dialog with the buyer, you will allow the buyer to learn a great deal about the depth and impact of their problems. This online dialog can be further enriched with the deployment of community tools to facilitate an interaction between your buyers and your customer and partner community.
As we mentioned earlier, psychographics will also impact the way the buyer wants to buy. Some buyers will require a great deal of information and will invest significant time in an exhaustive dialog, while others will desire a very high level, rapid fire dialog where they can get to the solution as quickly as possible. Your selling process and sales-ready content must facilitate all types of buyer preferences.
Service and Support Ghetto
For solutions with a significant implementation or post-sales support component, we find the poorest served team within the selling organization is the service and support group. Usually the promises and expectations made by sales are not well documented, other than in the proposal or quote completed mid-way through the sales process. This puts service and support in the position of “promise breaking”. Nothing is more devastating for a buyer, now turned customer, to deal with the frustration of re-educating a new team, only to discover the vision they bought from sales looks unattainable or more expensive. In defence of the sales team, these broken promises are not generally a misrepresentation of the solution capabilities, but rather a lack of understanding on behalf of service and support about the priorities that were agreed upon during the buying process.
As a result, the buyer feels they are re-educating the seller’s organization, and service and sales will eventually do everything they can to avoid the conflict that may arise while the customer’s frustration elevates. This leads to eroded service margins, and even more mistakes. It becomes something of a downward spiral.
You’ve likely already guessed where I am going with the solution to this problem. If the information we collected from the buyer during the buying process, either through our online presence or from buyer conversations with sales, were made available in our CRM, service and support will have a critical repository from which to identify the promises and customer priorities identified during the sales process.
In progressive companies, sales and service partner early in the sales process prior to the buyer becoming a customer. A CRM-driven approach as we are discussing here serves as a tool to be used during business discovery, and also ensures service and support are aware of customer priorities and expectations set during the sales process. The customer information and approach to conducting business discovery also becomes a great learning tool for everyone involved, including the service and support team.
Implementing CRM as the repository with sales-ready content to support customer dialogs is a powerful tool. Sales-ready content developed by marketing in partnership with sales, using a standard framework such as problem, impact, need, solution will be embraced by your sales team and buyers. Your online vision of this sales-ready content facilitates a one-to-one dialog, which is supported by mass-customization. The addition of online communities to this environment will enrich the buyer experience substantially.
We are no longer limited by technologies to implement a powerful vision of the guided customer buying experience. CRM technologies are easily customized to enable this vision and community/social networking tools may be integrated into our online presence. We simply need to overcome the limitations we impose on ourselves, whether it is the inability of sales and marketing to partner to develop sales-ready content, the adversarial nature of our selling approaches, our lack of imagination in envisioning an interactive online dialog with buyers, or our inability to go the extra mile in providing our service and support teams with access to critical information collected during the sales process.
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