CRM Success Equation

As CRM becomes an increasingly important part of the corporate landscape in midsize firms, it may also become a battlefield for control of the sales process, a pitched camp between managers who desperately need to forecast sales and salespeople who just as desperately want to hold on to control of their account information. Such conflict can reduce the effectiveness of a CRM implementation to less than zero, transforming a pricey CRM system into the equivalent of a corporate paperweight.

The key to defusing the confusion and making CRM into a productive tool just may be high-quality sales training.

Battling for Control

It’s no secret that sales managers love CRM. The typical CRM system, with all its detailed reporting capabilities, gives managers the power to build all sorts of interesting reports. Few things are more comforting for a sales manager than being able to walk into a meeting with the bigwigs, holding a mind-boggling collection of facts and figures carefully collated into a massive PowerPoint file.

For the sales force, however, CRM seems a mixed blessing at best. Salespeople tend to grouse about the complexity of the software, not to mention the need to enter seemingly endless amounts of data. “It’s taking my time away from selling,” they complain. But there are darker reasons for this antagonism, reasons that the typical salesperson will only reveal after a couple of beers, and then only after glancing around the bar to make certain that the sales manager isn’t sitting nearby. The voice sinks to a whisper: “I don’t really want my manager to know what I’m doing.”

This is CRM’s dirty little secret: Salespeople hate CRM because they want to remain in control. Salespeople want their personal connection to the customer to remain something special, something that’s so important to the corporation that it commands a hefty commission. CRM, with all its detailed reporting, makes it easier for sales managers to replace the salespeople on any given account.

Salespeople aren’t dummies. They’ve seen what’s happened to workers in other areas of the corporation. They’ve seen how clerical and professional staffs have been de-skilled, symbolically chained to a computer screen and stripped of authority and flexibility.

This is not to say that salespeople are backward. Quite the contrary. Salespeople immediately glom onto any technology that helps them sell. It’s a rare sales force that isn’t peppered with cell phones, handheld computers and notebook computers, and email has become almost as important an element of the sales process as the closing handshake.

Salespeople aren’t objecting to technology per se – they’re objecting to technology that is imposed from above, without regard to whether the people actually doing the work believe that the technology will help them close more sales. “The first generations of CRM systems have been dismal failures,” says Erin Kinikin, vice president at Giga Information Group, a firm that consults for customers of high-tech products and services. “From the sales viewpoint they add very little value and a lot of extra work,” she explains. “Tracking the number of sales calls, for example, may make sales managers more effective in the board room, but it doesn’t do much for the sales rep.”

Ironically, there are many features built into to CRM systems that actually can help a sales rep book more business. For example, some CRM implementations allow a salesperson to check a customer complaint database prior to a sales call – thus warning the salesperson in advance that the meeting might be difficult. Unfortunately, many salespeople are never exposed to this kind of practical application – instead, they are simply trained on the electronic paperwork that the CRM system requires in order to produce the reports for the sales manager.

Diagnosing the Problem

Most companies skimp when it comes to CRM training. There is a general reluctance to spend time training the sales force, period. “Pulling salespeople out of the field for two or three days is deeply frightening for sales management,” says Eileen Fox, a consulting manager for SAP, a leading vendor of CRM software capabilities. “There’s such extraordinary pressure to make the numbers that few managers are willing to devote much time to something that’s going to benefit business only in the long term.”

The lost opportunity cost isn’t the only reason. CRM implementations, like all other IT projects, are often plagued with cost overruns. By the time it comes to the last step in the process – the training of the sales force – many companies have run out of money in their CRM budget. As a result, companies try to save money on training. “It’s as they say about home contractors – the painter never gets paid because the homeowner runs out of money,” quips Bill Noonan, CEO of xSellsys.

This reluctance to spend time and money on CRM training has resulted in a number of training “strategies” that are intended to save money, but which actually end up costing more in the long run. Typical strategies include:

* Pretending that the system is intuitive. While today’s CRM systems are more usable than those in the past, they are still sophisticated tools. While salespeople are certainly intelligent enough to understand the basic interface to a CRM system, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be able to translate its capabilities into a set of activities that can help them sell.

* Implementing a “train-the-trainer” program. The idea here is to get a few people trained on the CRM system and then have them train everybody else. However, such “trainers” are likely to emerge with only a novice’s understanding of the system, and certainly without the detailed knowledge necessary to answer questions from other novices.

* Making the IT group responsible for the training. The Information Technology (IT) group is full of computer experts, so they’re the right people to train the sales force, right? Wrong. The IT group may understand the internal workings of the CRM system, but they have absolutely no understanding of the sales process.

* Making the HR group responsible for the training. This is even worse than getting the IT group to do the training. HR professionals understand neither the technology nor the sales process. Worse, their department is often rife with bureaucracy and budget problems of its own.

* Combining CRM training into other sales events. In order to reduce travel expenses, many companies try to sandwich CRM training into the annual or quarterly sales meetings. “The danger here is that people will be inundated with information,” says SAP’s Eileen Fox, “and they’ll go away remembering virtually nothing.”

Managing the Costs

Skimping on CRM training may save a few dollars up front, but it dooms the CRM implementation to almost certain failure, according to Debbie Qaqish, VP of sales and marketing for Firstwave Technologies. “Training is an absolutely critical aspect of the CRM success,” she says. “Without high-quality training you can’t get a return on investment.”

How, then, can sales teams make certain that their CRM training is effective? There are several ways to ensure that CRM training is up to snuff, according to vendor experts:

* Focus on what the system does for the salesperson. Too many CRM training courses simply review how the system works. Instead, the training should focus on the role of the CRM system in the sales process. “I can train you all day long, and if you’re not seeing how you use the power of the pipeline to manage your business, it’s all been a waste of time,” says xSellsys CEO Bill Noonan.

* Use CRM training as a form of change management. The most effective form of CRM training dissects the sales process, building a new process that can close more business. Ideally, salespeople should come out of the training with the feeling that they’re now playing a new kind of sales game, not just being asked to do more clerical work. “The salespeople may be doing things that they did not have to do before,” says SAP’s Eileen Fox. “They need to understand the benefits of what they’re doing and how it fits into the bigger picture.”

* Train using the real system. Some companies try to give CRM training in a classroom without computer hookups and with no access to a system that’s loaded with real-world data. Under these circumstances the likelihood that attendees will retain enough to make the training effective is near zero. “The end users usually have to see for themselves how the system will make life easier,” says Natalie Burdock, vice president at FrontRange. “Salespeople have to be given the carrot up front.”

* Have top management attend the sales training. Salespeople need to feel that the CRM training is important if they’re going to take it seriously. An easy way to do this is to make certain that there’s some big brass in attendance. “We always try to get the CEO or the senior vice president of sales to kick off the project and attend the first training class,” says John DeGraffenreid, president of Southgate Systems. “It shows everyone that the company is really serious.”

* Schedule follow-up training. Even under the best conditions, people who undergo CRM training are likely to forget some of what they’ve learned. Follow-up training makes certain that the sales team acquires the skills that it will need to be successful. “CRM has to be a process of continuous learning,” says Jeff Multz, vice president of product sales at FirstWave. “Companies need to schedule a refresher course, even if it’s just a one-hour quick session.”

In short, the real cost of CRM can’t be counted in the dollars spent on training, but in the loss to the corporation if the CRM system never achieves its full potential. As an increasing number of midsize firms turn to CRM to make their sales teams more effective, the winners will be those who realize that even with fancy computer technology it’s not a good idea to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.