How to Turn Tactical CRM into Strategic CRM

According to Russ Lombardo, president of PEAK Sales Consulting and author of the forthcoming book, CyberSelling: Using CRM Technology to Help You Sell, CRM implementations often fall short when they are used as tactical solutions rather than strategic ones.

The “tactical” approach treats CRM as a “point application” like email or calendaring – something that should just “work” out of the box. The reps don’t get trained, the system doesn’t get customized, and support is minimal. The result is that the reps who actually use the system (and their numbers will be few) end up with nothing more than expensive electronics.

Lombardo believes that it makes much more sense to see CRM as a strategic weapon. What’s needed, in his view, is a commitment to the success of CRM from top management all the way down through the ranks. A company should provide the resources and investment to address each requirement of the implementation process, including training, sales processes, planning, designing, and so forth. As he sees it, there are three key reasons that the strategic approach makes sense:

1. It better enables solution selling. When it’s seen as strategic, CRM becomes more widely used, better enabling sales managers to help reps navigate increasingly complex sales processes. For example, suppose a rep is consistently doing great in the earlier parts of the sales process, resulting in a lot of forecasted sales but somehow manages to close very few deals. A strategic CRM system can send up a warning flag to the sales manager that the rep needs help. The system might even be able to automatically recommend some additional training to help the rep move more sales toward closing. Now this doesn’t mean “Big Brother is Watching.” Any sales manager worth his salt can find out who’s having problems without a CRM system. However, CRM provides a quick and convenient way for the manager to figure out what’s going on and take remedial action.

2. It increases sales mobility. In today’s hypercompetitive environment, sales reps increasingly want access to customer data whenever and wherever. It’s no longer enough for a rep to have wireless access from the local coffee shop. Sales reps want access from their prospect’s parking lot, their customer’s shop floor, conference rooms, and so forth. The cellphone network is currently being upgraded throughout the country to support higher speed data transport, thus making true “real time CRM” possible. A strategic approach makes it far more likely that the CRM system will support a variety of mobile devices, such as smartphones, PDAs with broadband access, and PCs with Wi-Fi connections. This has enormous potential to increase sales productivity.

3. It encourages best practices. A strategic approach makes it easier to capture your company’s best practices and most effective selling processes and make them available to everyone in the sales organization. Furthermore, strategically integrating CRM into the overall sales support environment potentially allows sales reps to focus primarily on sales activities, while support personnel handle other details and logistics behind the scene. (Note that there are some products, like Landslide Technologies, that do an excellent job of delivering this type of service.)

In short, taking a strategic view of CRM, rather than creating a million-dollar Rolodex, actually has the potential to make the sales process (and the reps who use it) more effective.

For more information about Russ Lombardo, go to:
http://www.peaksalesconsulting.com/.