Are You Gambling on a CRM Solving Your Sales Challenges?
Sales and marketing face the same challenges: Get more customers and increase how much they spend. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is sold as a silver bullet, the answer to every sales and marketing challenge.
But high failure rates 40–70% and usage ranging from 18% to 80% tell another story. On average, CRM failure is usually around 50%, with studies from Gartner, Forrester Research, the Economist Intelligence Unit and many others reflecting this average consistently over the last fifteen years.
Investors and entrepreneurs in this space are using these failure rates as on opportunity to capture market share from legacy players and incumbents. Many are attempting to fix usability issues. For most field sales teams, incumbent CRMs are difficult to use and take too long to input field sales data. Too many productive hours are lost filling in CRMs, only for managers to spend hours analysing only to find data missing and then trying to interpreting this data.
Instead of focusing on the user experience, let’s stop and reconsider why CRMs aren’t working for field sales teams.
Focusing on the Right Problems
#1: CRMs are Great: For Marketing Teams and Call Centers.
They provide a ‘single customer view.’ You can plug them into dozens of other systems, including email marketing and marketing automation. Usually, marketing team centres and even call centre staff are accessing the system via an internal Ethernet cable and are used to entering data 50–100 times a day, in contrast to field sales teams.
Does a sales manager or anyone on his team need to know every interaction with every customer? Not really. This is data overload, which is one of the reasons CRMs are difficult to use and often don’t always load in areas with anything less than 3G. Not ideal for field sales agents.
#2: Failure to Prove an ROI
Too often, a CRM is forced upon a sales team to reduce the unit cost of a system that marketing wants and like most IT projects ends up going over budget. Consequently, sales vendors struggle to quantify the potential ROI for field sales teams and managers.
Less than fifty percent of sales people use CRMs on a regular basis, even when they are asked to record customer and prospect interactions (calls, meetings, etc.) on a daily or weekly basis. To counteract this, many companies have reverted to giving them Friday afternoons ‘off’ to enter data into the CRM for the week. That means spending 10% of the selling time to recall and write down what happened four days ago!
Again, user-experience is partly to blame. But not entirely. Forcing a sales team to use a CRM is like trying to fit a square into a circular hole. It is not the most effective solution for managing the sales process and field agents.
#3: Sales are Time Sensitive
Here is a scenario we see time and again with our customers:
An agent fills in a record of sales calls and meetings for the week. Managers either ask for this every day or once a week. Usually, this is done on a Friday afternoon when meetings and calls rarely happen. Some managers review that straight away.
But not always because they know the data does not exist yet. Often, we get to the middle, or even the end of the following week before a manager reads the information from the team. (Most managers catch up with field sales staff during the week, or in monthly meetings at the office, but that isn’t the same as reviewing all of the pipeline data in the CRM).
Managers then instruct or advise an action they believe would help move a prospect forward. Get an agent closer to completing a sale. More often than not, an agent is busy with that week’s calls and meetings. The prospect is also busy. Another meeting or call doesn’t happen until the week after, or the week after that.
Sales data should also show how many meetings and calls agents are doing, which is difficult in a CRM as the data is stored at the contact level. When managers notice this isn’t enough, they ask them to take more calls and meetings. Unfortunately, in both scenarios, a week or more has already been lost. Opportunities have been missed. Leads lose interest or go elsewhere.
CRMs don’t work for sales teams. Field Sales people don’t like them. The information is already out-of-date once a manager reads the reports. Instead, sales professionals benefit from systems that supply managers with quick, real-time updates that they can use to inform actions. With the most relevant data, you could get a team back on track mid-week, instead of trying to course correct a week or two after opportunities and sales have flown past. Managers need a way to spotlight problems when they are occurring, to ensure sales stay on target.
Find out how you can get the data you need to manage your sales team: SalesVisits.com.
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