CRM - The Challege of sales engagement

If you’re struggling to get your sales organisation fully engaged and fluent with your CRM, be it Salesforce or otherwise, you are not alone!

One of the biggest challenges faced by any sales leader is exactly that - getting their reps to use the tools provided effectively. There’s good reason for this of course. You don’t hire a sales rep because they’re great at admin and always remember to dot the “i”s. They are where they are because of their talent for closing business - at least that’s why they SHOULD be there. Nonetheless, having a sales team that’s engaged with your CRM is business critical. Without proper tracking of customer touch points, your business loses vital visibility over its client base. More importantly, you miss out on some key information that will help you drive the business forward.

Think - conversion rates, sales cycle length, marketing campaign traction…
Understanding these allow you to make crucial resource decisions. Without that insight, you’re steering the ship blindly. And of course, there’s likely to be wider pressure from those in the organisation holding the purse strings. The subscription to and maintenance of your CRM will come at a massive cost, so there will be a justified expectation that it delivers value.

How then can we teach our sales reps to use this all important tool effectively and, more importantly, demonstrate engagement?

It’s all about the pipeline. Ultimately, by far the most valuable piece of data, and from which most other sales metrics will derive or be associated with, is the pipeline. This is not to be confused with the forecast! Many reps struggle with the distinction, failing then to either pipeline or forecast effectively. A sales forecast should only be a statement of the value of total business that’s expected to close in a given month. That differs from the pipeline, which should represent your entire sales process. In other words,  your pipeline is a representation of all the business opportunities you currently have open. In Salesforce terms, this should be all open Opportunities. It’s logical then, that your pipeline will be far greater, in value and volume, than your forecast.

Only once this distinction is clear can you begin asking reps to pipeline effectively in your CRM. Looking again at Salesforce as our example, your sales reps should be focused on how they manage their Opportunities. By doing so, they will become more efficient, have better insight into their book of business and allow access to that all important business data that would otherwise be lost.

3 Steps to achieving strong Opportunity management:

1. Establish a starting point
   
   

Clearly define with your sales reps at which point they are expected to create an opportunity i.e. what’s the minimum requirement for a prospect to form part of their pipeline. The definition may vary from business to business, but do ensure that you have a consistent method across your team. The easiest way for you to determine these criteria is to establish at which point your sales cycle begins. For most organisations it’s simple - the rep know that the client should be doing business with them and has identified a decision making contact (or at least an influencer). They therefore have an opportunity to make a sale, and as such it should be in the system. At this stage, it doesn’t matter whether there’s no accurate value or close date to the opportunity. In fact, a zero value opportunity is just fine until the point where the rep has engaged with and qualified the needs of the customer. The close date too is pure guess work at this stage, but encouraging the reps to keep the value and close date updated as the sales cycle progresses is critical to effectively understanding the pipeline. One push back you can expect from your reps is that by working on this basis, they will have a vast amount of open opportunities. Get them to see that this is exactly the point and that the opportunities they have will often be far less than the accounts sitting in their portfolio - the pond they’ve been given to play in. By defining their opportunities, they establish which are the fish in their pond.
2. Know your Sales Stages
Determine your sales stages and how you wish them to be tracked. This will vary according to the type of business and sale, so it’s hard to offer a clear formula. But with most sales cycles you’ll spend some time identifying the customer need, offering a solution and closing a contract. If the expectations relating to each sales stage are clearly laid out, your sales team will have a far greater chance of building a sales funnel that is accurate and can lead to some prediction data.
3. Use the Data!
Reps will only engage with strong opportunity management if they realise it’s not only expected, but also tracked - right up the chain of command to the top of the business. Once you begin tracking pipeline growth, sales cycle velocity, average deal sizes and conversion rates, you’ll begin to identify the indicators that separate a strong performing sales rep from the under-achievers. The business will be able to understand the pipeline required to achieve it’s goals. Forecasting will become more accurate and you’ll spend less time maintaining additional spreadsheets. Everything you need is in the system!

Some words of caution….
Do not rely on data in isolation. Make sure that you challenge the numbers, engaging the sales reps in dialogue about their pipeline and forecasting.

Moreover, do not try to bring about sweeping change without consultation. One for the first rules of change management is to involve those impacted from the outset. Get input from your sales teams - understand their challenges and endeavour to accommodate system changes where necessary. But don’t try to reinvent the wheel and DO insist on them using the tools to hand.
Get it right and you’ll have a happier, more efficient sales and management team - and more importantly, a greater chance at success.