Winning hearts and minds in the Sales Team to support the adoption of CRM
As the adoption of Workbooks’ applications continues to grow, we get to meet leaders of a lot of UK companies, who are keen to improve the performance of their businesses.
It’s still really exciting for us to hear about just how big a difference the adoption of a broader CRM solution makes to our customers, not only in sales and marketing, but in order admin and fulfilment – removing the reliance on Word and Excel for quotations, sales orders and invoices – and giving the rest of the company visibility of the status of order fulfilment and payment.
But few implementations of any new business system are without issues along the way.
In my experience, marketeers and sales operations staff tend to embrace new systems – it’s easy for them to see how their lives will be made easier, and how they will be more productive post implementation.
But sales people have often long since come to see the CRM system as a necessary evil; a system that must be updated in order for their management to be able to measure pipeline and productivity. CRM systems often provide little or no value to the sales person in return.
So when thinking about the implementation of a new CRM system, how open is the sales team to change? Unless you can convince your sales people that a new CRM system will help them be more productive or more successful, how fully can you expect them to adopt a new CRM system?
In other words, how do we ‘sell’ CRM to the sales team?
Let them vent
As with any other stakeholders in the implementation of a new system, we advocate engaging the sales team early, and getting from them a list of issues with regard to the systems they need to use to process business and report to management. And of course, sales people are typically not slow in coming forward.
Their challenges often include having to provide the same information to management multiple times in multiple formats (think sales forecasts) and having to demonstrate that they really have followed up any leads assigned to them. They may need to complete activity reports of the calls they made or the meetings they attended in a given period, and when they close business, processing it may seem like the biggest challenge of all.
Furthermore they may be frustrated that it’s not easy for them to keep their customers up to date on the fulfilment of their orders, because sales people often have no systems-based visibility of order status.
Nurture Champions
Since most businesses are dependent on their sales team for capturing the data they need to fulfil orders and to invoice, it makes an awful lot of sense to get them on board with any new CRM system. Working hard to demonstrate how the system will address their issues is key, but is not all you can do.
Identifying and cultivating ‘champions’ in your team for a new system is one of the most effective tactics. You know the most influential members of the sales team; by harnessing their influence you help to ensure the adoption of your new system. Appointing them as part of the project team or even setting MBO objectives should ensure their buy-in.
Make it fun
Sales people are by nature competitive. Why not put in place an incentive to reinforce adoption? It’s pretty easy to measure the completeness of data on key accounts, or the cleanliness of orders submitted under the new process. Cases of wine, commission kickers or tickets to the Rugby can go a long way.
Get feedback – (and act on it)
After a few weeks – or most definitely after the first sales period end – take the time to seek feedback. Invite your CRM application vendor or implementation partner to one of your team meetings; they should be keen to help you address outstanding niggles in your implementation, not least so that you can become a reference site for them
Don’t be afraid to use a little coercion
Once properly implemented, the on-going success (and return on investment) for any business application is determined by the quality of data entered into it (think accuracy and completeness for your process). A good CRM system, with appropriate monitoring and reporting, will quickly reveal data quality issues.
From experience, nothing focuses the attention of your sales team like the threat of sanctions for non-compliance. Paying reduced commission where the appropriate order information is not provided, or on deals that we’re not properly forecasted may seem heavy handed, but once you’ve invested in a new system and process, just might help to help to ensure that you reap the business benefits you seek.
And finally – Lead from the front!
A lot of sales and business leaders pay lip service to the importance of CRM but continue to request spreadsheets from their people and may never log in themselves. With few exceptions, the most successful CRM implementations are those embraced by the management team.
Get into the habit of pulling your key management information from the CRM system. Run sales team meetings and sales reviews from it. Yes they’ll be teething issues, but when your team gets to understand that their pipeline needs to be accurate for Monday morning sales meetings – or else – they’ll soon get on board.
Getting Started
Welcome to our new Workbooks blog!
The intention behind this blog is to keep everyone up to date with the progress of our business and our products. We might also use it to occasionally pass comment on our industry and the world in general.
Let’s start by giving you the background on the company and the people involved. We founded Workbooks back in October 2007 at Jenny’s kitchen table over coffee.
Four of us got together with a view to building a leading SaaS provider of business applications for the SME market. You might ask why would anyone create a business that completes with industry giants like Salesforce.com or Sage?
The answer is we were very frustrated!
The four of us had previously founded a company called BlackSpider Technologies. BlackSpider was an SaaS provider of email security solutions and when we sold the company in 2006 (to SurfControl PLC) we had approximately 2000 customers and 90 staff operating in 3 countries. Having grown the company from inception we were frustrated at the lack of good business applications for small and medium size businesses.
Like many companies we have purchased IT systems for specific departments, Sage for accounting, Salesforce.com for CRM. These standalone applications quickly became ‘islands of information’ which caused no end of problems for the business. For example all our transaction information (purchase order, invoices, credit limits, etc) were in Sage. This was great for the accountants, but meant that the sales, marketing and support folks didn’t have access to the information.
The accounts department rightly didn’t want sales and marketing people logging into Sage where they could create invoices and post journal entries! But in reality the sales team needs access to some key pieces of information, such as credit limits and previous transaction history.
So if a sales guy wanted to see which how much a customer had previously paid, or if a marketer wanted to run a campaign based on purchase history the only way was to export data from Sage and import it into our CRM system. Then we had to try and ‘dedupe’ the data and the whole process became a real can of worms.
We wanted some joined up business systems which were targeted for the SME market. When we looked round the only products which were close were Oracle and SAP, however they came with a seven figure price tag and required a small army of IT staff to make it work.
So having sold BlackSpider in 2006 and having completed the 18 month transition period at SurfControl, we decided we could build an integrated suite of business applications that would be delivered online, so you wouldn’t need your own army of IT folks.
So here we are in February 2010, over two years later and having built Workbooks CRM and Workbooks Business, which addresses the problems I described.
We made our first sale back in May 2009 and have been rapidly developing our product’s capabilities based on the feedback of our ever-growing customer base.
We have had lots of good ideas from people on how we can improve Workbooks, so we now have a feature list as long as your arm. We are continuing to roll-out new enhancements about every 8 weeks, so if you are a customer please don’t hesitate to drop us a note about what else you would like and we’ll do our best to include it in a future release.
We have a release of the product scheduled for early March and I’ll provide more details on what’s coming with the next few posts.
John Cheney