How to select the right CRM system in 3 easy lessons

Lesson one is: Bigger isn’t always best; Cheaper isn’t always better value; Best isn’t always most appropriate. It should go without saying that appropriate business choices benefit the business; it’s a shame when people don’t stop to consider what appropriate means.  In simple terms it means understanding yourself, your needs, your payback possibilities. Meet those and you’ve got a good business decision. But that’s not the way people approach business purchases today, so it’s little wonder that the CRM success rate of 25% of projects pleasing their owners with acceptable benefits has remained unchanged for 12 years.

Nancy Sinatra said it, ‘Right is right, but you ain’t been right yet.’  And CRM shoppers this is for you; …. the chances of you getting it right are slim. The industry hasn’t yet come up with a successful way of making good CRM decisions. For many, the ‘brand leader’ is the no-brainer choice. It used to be said that if you don’t understand what you are doing you won’t get fired for buying IBM. Anyway, why should you put extra effort/thought into understanding the CRM choice. Why is CRM so difficult? I believe that one reasons is that people think it should be easy. Delegating a software purchase to the staff sounds like good participative management. It’s democratic. Knowing the CRM business as I do, and with 20 years experience watching people fail and helping some to succeed it looks insane. Why? Well for a start, a staff committee can’t know what the business needs to do to transform customer relationships into business growth.

Today we have been educated to believe that business purchases can be managed using the same skills we learn when shopping at Tesco. And we are all aware how we demand immediate gratification. Go to the right aisle select the best you can afford, put it in the shopping basket; Job done! We also know that with so many excellent products to choose from we can quite rightly say ‘If it isn’t on the shelf, I can’t buy it’. If it was rubbish Tesco would not allow it on the shelf. Of course you could always try Sainsbury’s or some other similar outlet or web shopping, and the answer would only be slightly different. There is little risk of getting it wrong. I know this is not yet sounding like a lesson in how to buy CRM, but stick with me. If you go shopping for CRM in the belief that you can’t get it wrong you might just skimp on the diligence with which you ask how the benefit will materialize.

If you want coffee you want coffee, so go to the coffee aisle and make your choice. But do you really fancy tea, or both? Or what about a bottle of wine. Maybe you need some fizzy drink? Now your choices are not in the same aisle; maybe you are not in the right aisle. So here is the next lesson; there is no CRM aisle. There is not a ‘hot drink CRM’ and ‘cold drink CRM’ aisle separation. You are not prevented from looking at rubbish. In fact the market that calls itself CRM is a fiction. (CRM for SME, corporate, hosted, cloud, strong in sales support, marketing module or customer service?) Vendors proudly tell you that their system does everything that the others do (and they probably believe it). You don’t have time to taste every coffee in the shop or every wine so you revert to judging the packaging. With CRM you read the feature list, go for the longest, have 6 demonstrations 3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. The following week you meet (because people are too busy to meet the day after) and you discuss presentations that were unmemorable and virtually identical, so you buy from the nice man who presented at 10.30 just after coffee. ‘I think it was the one in the blue box’.

In all probability this process weeds out the rubbish. One customer recently told me they had filtered out 20 products before shortlisting. But when you are putting all the investigative effort into product assessments and ‘best choice’ you are scoring on their score card (features) and your attention is directed away from your score card (needs & benefits). In a year or 2 you’ll know if you’ve wasted your money and you can start again. I like working with people who are starting again.

Be Likeable… and Use your CRM System

Why are some sales people less successful than others? They create customer relationships that should lead to a sale, but it doesn’t. Does CRM make a difference? What can they learn from successful sales people?

In my youth, shortly after beginning my career in business (which was a long time ago), I got to talking with a salesman on a long train journey. He was making notes in a black book. (This was in the days before Blackberry and PDA’s and IT-supported CRM.)  He noticed my curiosity; didn’t seem to mind my rudeness. I asked what he was doing. “These are my customers”, he said. I said, “It doesn’t look much like an address book to me; you seem to be writing a lot about each one. He said, “I write in the names of spouses and kids and birthdays and anniversaries.” I said, “Why?” He said it helped when visiting a customer to ask how his wife was or to ask how the kids were or if one of his kids had some critical exam at school; how did he get on?

I don’t remember what he was selling, but he had to keep in touch with over 500 customers. “Remembering something personal establishes some common ground”, he said, “which helps a lot. It helps re-construct some relatedness from previous calls and visits before we talk about new products and getting an order. I might not have had an opportunity to visit for 1-2 years so I can’t remember things like I would with personal friends.”

I was a recently graduated engineer and was working in a team at Dupont, where remembering personal things about colleagues was an unconscious part of working together. I had difficulty feeling comfortable with this ‘black book’ kind of relationship-support way of relating to people.  I said, “This sounds a little bit phony to me;  don’t people find it offensive?”   He said not. “If you ask about someone’s son Arnold and how was their skiing holiday, they take it as a compliment. Get his son’s name wrong and it’s an insult.”  

“It takes a little while to learn how to do it sincerely; it’s a different kind of relatedness builder, but it’s not dishonest. It has to become part of who you are, seamless, you know? You just need to remember that there is a business purpose to your relationship, and you don’t have all day, and you need to close the deal; and that’s who you are.”  

This was my introduction to CRM systems (though the label and the TLA came much later). Looking back on this encounter with many years of sales force consultancy work and CRM projects behind me (JI Management Consultants), I see greater meaning than was evident on that train journey; and our modern business language and professional/consulting  constructs about the customer interface give new tools to understand the wisdom of his sales process. With all our new IT/CRM stuff, do we do any better than he did? There are lots of people who would say that we don’t.

I recall feeling an inclination to find him likeable but also feeling some unease about his highly competent approach to being likeable. As a ‘technical’ man I was also averse to being ‘sold’ to. I like to feel that as a buyer I am in control of buying what I want/need, rather than being ‘sold’ something I have been influenced to want. I have to accept however that for complex purchases I need the help of a sales person to become educated enough to buy what I really need. (Who else knows enough to answer my questions?) So thinking back to my first encounter with the sales process, I would have to admit that I do need to be comfortable with a sales person, but we don’t need to be ‘best of friends’.

As one learns the journeyman skills of selling; there will be someone who says, ‘People buy from people they like’. So the lesson appears to be: be likeable. In many sales team development assignments it has been instructive to note that the most friendly, likeable people are not the most successful. Nice.. Nice.. personalities seem to lack the elements needed to close. The lesson needs to be reworded. ‘People don’t buy from people they don’t like.’ There is a world of difference there. I believe that my traveling companion with his black ‘CRM system’ notebook was not trying to use his notes to become ‘best friends’; he was building necessary relatedness. He was doing this with a business purpose. It was adequate, appropriate, fit-for-purpose relatedness which in my mind of today gives an unashamed integrity to the way he managed his relationships with his customers, and the way he used his CRM system.

I conclude that every person who is successful working at the customer interface needs a CRM system, and if the truth be told they all have one (of a sort). Unfortunately it is often not the one carefully selected for their benefit by the organisation.

So if you want help implementing some simply successful CRM, contact JI Software and we’ll help you use the most comprehensive business growth solution on the market today.

Sales Stars don’t use CRM (or do they?)

Interesting question from Mike Muhney on Linkedin: What do you do when your top salesman refuses to use your CRM system? Here’s another: What do you do when the top sales person suggests that as the guy/girl who keeps the company alive, he/she should become Director/VP Sales? Should he/she be given a share in the business? I’ve seen that scenario played out a few times with interesting consequences.

The question which intrigues me is this: Has anyone taken the time to get an understanding of what is going on in the minds of top (I don’t mean ‘very good’) sales stars when they say they ‘can’t’ use a CRM system (and they don’t mean won’t)? Is there something in their behavioral make-up that is creating some poorly-understood (insurmountable) ‘CRM/system’ aversion problems? Maybe even your best stars don’t understand what makes them tick; after all sales is not a science; it’s an act.

There is a lot of ‘system believer’ logic in the judgment that a salesman who does not use the expensive CRM system that management have kindly purchased for him is doing so out of some kind of renegade behavior motivation. Does a sales force strategy based on ‘no stars’ lead to the kind of bottom line result we all want to see for our clients/customers? This may not be as daft as it sounds. So could this mean that the first step in your CRM rollout strategy is to fire all the sales stars and implement with only ‘journeyman’ sales professionals?

This contribution is but an observation from one who knows he does not know. By opbservation however I note that many sales stars I have met are particularly intuitive and human and instinctive folk. I have been surprised that they are seldom nice-guy ‘pleasers’ as you might expect, but often irascible and not good at relationships with office-based colleagues (and bosses); clearly not ‘team’ players. If stars have a role to play in the corporate formula for making the biggest possible pot of money; what is it?