We are trying to wrap our arms around the challenge of how to help sales managers become more successful and effective at helping their sales team become more successful and effective. If that sounds like double-talk, now you know how it feels to be a sales manager.

Many sales managers started out as sales reps themselves. However, now they sit on the other side of the desk.  Suddenly, their measure of success is not based on how many deals they close yourself, but on how motivated, focused, skilled and successful at closing the entire team is.  This challenge introduces a wild card into the sales equation that many sales managers have never had to deal with before: the people factor.  Somehow, they have to quickly become adept at handling a diverse group of people with differing needs, skills, opinions, and experience levels, and they must inspire and equip them to go out and do for that sales manager what he used to do on his own.

It is precisely here that many sales managers begin to struggle. In their effort to get the team to perform better, they forget what it is like to be the sales rep. We mentioned last time that sales managers think too much about managing, which leads to continually coming up with new processes, new goals, new sales contests and other gimmicks, even new threats, all in attempt to squeeze more production out of the team. Some sales managers come up with new ways to measure and document so they can have more data to try to figure out ways to eliminate bottlenecks and make things work better. Yet, often all of these efforts meet with little or no success. Why?

Because sometimes sales managers forget what it is like to be a sales rep. For sales managers who came to their position from some other department and have never actually been a sales rep, the problem is even worse. The fact is selling is immersed in a very powerful and pervasive culture, and this culture will shred right through all the new plans and processes and strategies a sales manager can come up with. Most likely, the culture will just cause most new initiatives to be ignored. Let me explain.

Being a serious sales professional – not an order taker – is a challenging, exhilarating, overwhelming, heart-breaking, grinding, discouraging, frustrating, electrifying, energizing, brain frying, ego crushing, ego boosting thrill ride that makes the Tower of Terror at Disney World look like a kiddy carousel. Some people compare the life of a sales rep to waking up unemployed every day. The most effective sales professionals – the ones who work on full commission – are like daredevils taking to the high wire without a net. They thrive on the challenge. The only thing that matters is the next sale.

So don’t come to them with new processes or new goals or new accounting methods or new little sales games. Most top sales reps look at that stuff like it is just more deck chairs on the Titanic. When sales managers approach sales reps with new theories and new strategies, sales reps only have one question:

Is this going to help me make more money?

If the answer is maybe, hopefully, not sure, or – this is the worst – probably not but it is important because management needs you to do it so they can achieve some other goal – then sales reps will take those strategies and stuff them in a drawer or use them as liners for their birdcages at home. Sales managers, whatever you decide to do that you think will help your team increase production and drive revenue, always remember this: If it isn’t clearly and immediately obvious to your team that your next new thing is going to help them make money, you are wasting your breath. Sales reps will always stick with what works for them unless or until you can prove to them that your way works better.

What is your cultural vision for your organization?

This instinctual sales rep culture will always eat sales manager strategies for breakfast. It isn’t even a fair fight. So, one of the challenges a sales manager must come to grips with is how to begin to mold and grow this baseline sales rep culture into something that is a little broader in vision and scope.

According to Alex Shootman, Executive Vice President of Eloqua, a leading global marketing automation firm, anyone can sell, but not everyone can sell right.

“While we need and will have a sales strategy, we cannot staple that strategy to a culture that will not support it,” explained Shootman.  “If our culture is at odds with our strategy, culture will win.” 

At Eloqua, the sales culture has been reformed around the vision of Getting it Done and Doing it Right, where:”

• Getting it Done reflects the person’s ability to do the job assigned and has three fundamentals:
  • Skills - Does the person have the requisite knowledge and abilities?
  • Action - Do they perform the tasks or processes necessary in the job?
  • Results - What is their measurable performance against the key metrics for the job?  
• Doing it Right reflects how the person does their job and has three elements:
  • Teamwork - Do they place the team’s needs above their own?  Do they share expertise with others?  Do they respect, seek and embrace input from others?
  • Integrity and Accountability - Do they accept blame as well as glory? Are they ethical, trusted by customers, partners and their team? Do their actions match their words?  
  • Optimism and Enthusiasm - Are they a source of energy vs. a use of energy within the team? Do they see the truth, but not for worse than it is?

In addition to Getting it Done and Doing it Right, Shootman outlines three additional cultural imperatives that will help elevate the vision and scope of sales reps.

“There will be three personal characteristics we pursue, welcome and reward,” he says:

• “Merit vs. Entitlement – An Eloqua business card does not earn us anything.  We first owe results to our customers, our company and our teammates; then we can expect reward in return.
• Straight talk vs. Passive Aggressive – If you have input for someone, take it to them directly.   If you tell me something, I will have two questions; did you already tell them and can I quote you?
• Accountable vs. Paternal – If there is an issue, we take ownership of resolving it.  We should not wait for someone else to fix it for us.”

Action Items:

·         Assess sales rep workflow and eliminate or redesign activities/processes that don’t help to directly drive revenue.

·         Ask team to provide feedback regarding current activities/processes and identify anything that is hindering their ability to concentrate on driving revenue.

·         Ask team to identify steps you could take that would help them to more effectively drive revenue.

·         Identify areas where the sales rep vision and scope are not aligned with the culture you would like to undergird your sales organization.

·         Create messaging around your vision and scope and begin to push it out to the team, always being careful to help them see how this vision will feed into their ability to drive revenue by retaining the current install base as well as adding new customers and uncovering bigger opportunities.

There is probably no bigger disconnect in the sales manager’s life than bridging the gap between managing and leading. It has become axiomatic in performance improvement circles to talk about managing things versus leading people, but the pressure placed on sales managers these days to get things done relentlessly skews their focus towards the “managing things” side.

“Things” refers to anything that is measurable or deliverable or controllable; systems, processes, quotas, plans, deadlines, data, metrics – these are all things. These things involve the sales team and they are often affected by the performance of the sales team. Therefore, when the manager becomes aware that the “things” are not measuring up, there is often a tendency to treat the sales team members as “things,” too, as in one more set of buttons to be pushed to control the process. At that point the sales manager starts issuing directives: do more of this, do less of that, increase this by 20%, get this done by Friday, make more calls, enter more data in the CRM, and on and on. To the sales manager, it might just seem logical to get people to do “things” differently and performance will improve.

The problem, as many exceptional performance improvement specialists have observed over the years, is that people are not things, so, technically, they can’t be managed. You can’t just control them or order them around or redefine their process and their goals and expect them to perform better. People are, well, they are people, which means they have hopes and dreams and feelings and unique gifts and talents; people have different motivations, which are connected to their own unique emotional and behavioral styles. You can’t push them like buttons or move them around on a board like chess pieces. Instead, you must lead them.

Leadership involves building trust; actually it is more like creating a culture within the team where trust can take root and grow. Leadership involves communicating a vision that people will catch and buy into. Most of all, leadership with a sales team involves taking the time to get to know your team members well enough so that you have a clear understanding of what motivates them, what they are good at, what they struggle with, and where they need help, so you can come alongside of them and help them succeed. This is a much messier, more inexact process than simply pushing buttons and managing things, but it is the only way to create trust and earn the kind of respect that is necessary to build a highly successful, very productive sales team.

Most of the rest of topics in this series will address the skills and strategies a sales manager needs in order to focus less on managing people and more on leading them, so we won’t dig any deeper right now. However, maybe you have heard the saying, “The more you do what you always did, the more you will get what you always got?” If you are tired of getting what you always got, maybe it is time to stop doing what you always did. Maybe it is time to learn how to lead.

Without a doubt, there is relentless, almost unbearable, pressure wearing down on most sales organizations these days, as the ailing economy and shrinking margins make it harder and harder to retire quota and drive revenue. Sales reps – the front line first responders who carry the future profits of the company on their backs - are taking on bigger territories, facing higher quotas, and making more customer contacts than ever, and in many organizations they are still losing ground. Where does the sales rep turn to for support, revitalization, encouragement and direction in the middle of such challenging times?

The answer, of course, is the sales manager, who is charged with providing the insights, resources, accountability, and coaching the sales rep needs to succeed. Unfortunately, most sales managers have their own set of pressures to deal with. Executives want updated sales accounting data, and they want it yesterday. Meetings across departmental lines eat up huge amounts of the day without transferring any real value back into the sales process. Even meetings with the sales team seem counter-productive most of the time. And the underlying mantra that plays daily in the back of the sales manager’s mind is: produce more, produce faster, do it with less, do it now.

In the face of all this pressure, it is easy for the sales manager to become overwhelmed and distracted to such a degree that they have nothing left in the tank to deliver the kind of input to the sales team to help them succeed. Eventually, sales reps – especially those who haven’t achieved “super star” status (most of them) – start to flounder, feeling like they have been pushed into the deep end and left to sink or swim on their own. Ultimately, production – already underperforming –continues to gradually trend further down and the pressure on everyone keeps getting worse.

Evidence repeatedly shows that turning around a sales team starts with turning around the sales manager. Sales managers are uniquely positioned to influence and empower sales reps to greater levels of success, but sales managers sometimes become so busy and distracted that they neglect their own professional development as they get caught up trying to survive the latest fire drill. Often it only takes a little adjustment and new insight in one or two key areas to dramatically increase the positive impact the sales manager can make on the whole sales team.

As we continue to work with successful sales organizations all around the world, we have discovered that highly effective sales managers have a set of skills and characteristics in common that set them above all the rest, and which enable them to help their teams to achieve results that are also way above average. These characteristics are defined in the topics below:

1. Too many sales teams are over managed and under led, which is to say that many sales managers rely too much on metrics and deadlines to drive performance. Highly effective sales managers find numerous ways to come alongside team members to motivate and inspire them on a personal level and bring out the best in them.

2. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. This is just a way of saying that highly effective sales managers don’t rely on theoretical or arbitrary programs to drive sales team performance. Yes, every team should have a sales process and set goals and measure pipeline, but it has to be set against the sales culture we all struggle with today. The realities of current market conditions and the human limitations of individual team members will converge to shred theories into confetti. Highly effective sales managers know the importance of accounting for the real world conditions their team members face every day.

3. Building the team; finding and hiring talent.  Effective sales managers are committed to hiring the best talent available. If you want the best, hire the best, and save loads of time and money on training while protecting yourself from failure six months down the road. It costs more up front, but it definitely pays off over time.

4. Cadence and Consistency: Set and manage the heart beat of the team. In just the same way that children thrive and grow in a stable family where they don’t have to guess what the rules are from one day to the next, a sales team also thrives when all the components of the sales and management process follow regular standards and schedules. Sales reps can give more energy to selling when they don’t feel a need to watch their backs at the office.

5. Key Performance Indicators: The glue of your communication strategy. An integral part of cadence and consistency is the tone and the topics of your communications with your sales team. Nothing is more important to sales makers than knowing what is expected of them and when it is expected. Effective sales managers keep their communication clear and their expectations well defined, so that team members know what to aim for, and understand what will happen if they hit it (or not).

6. Manage the Forward Pipeline: The difference between pipeline and forecasting. Most sales managers understand the necessity of communicating regularly with team members about pipeline and forecasting. However, highly effective sales managers understand that there is a difference between the two. Forecasting is focused on late stage deals. It does little to help with future quarters. Pipeline is focused on the future development of sales, which ultimately impacts later forecasts. Most managers don’t differentiate or understand the difference between the two.

7. Process: Don’t over engineer it, but don’t ignore it.  Every sales team works within a standardized process which defines how to approach, qualify, work with and close the customer. This is a good thing. However, highly effective sales managers know it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Highly regimented, complex sales processes can confuse a sales rep and tie their hands, so an effective sales manager will enable and support the sales process without making it a “strait jacket”.

8. Coaching: In the day – in the moment. Coaching is the responsibility most neglected by sales managers, because it requires them to borrow time from their already busy day. Highly effective sales managers realize that placing a high priority on coaching will build confidence and drive production for their team better and faster than any other single practice. Therefore, they take advantage of every opportunity, scheduled or unscheduled, to provide feedback that will make their sales reps better.

9. Herding cats: Dealing with the mavericks and high performers. It takes a special kind of person to thrive as a sales professional. The highly competitive – some might say even slightly narcissistic – profile of a successful sales rep can make them a challenge to work with. Highly effective sales managers know how to work with this unique breed of cat, to maximize performance and minimize conflict that can take a good sales professional and help them become great.

10. Leading Indicators: Worrisome patterns of behavior. Effective sales managers are always thinking ahead; they can recognize what small trends indicate before they become big problems. By noticing small changes in sales rep performance in what otherwise might look like still “reasonably” good numbers, the sales manager can be proactive with coaching before it is too late.

11. Protect their time: You can’t sell if you aren’t spending time with customers. Highly effective sales managers practice good time management habits, and they enable their sales teams to make the most of their time by eliminating demands on their time that don’t directly help drive revenue.

12. Celebrate: Winning is fun. Celebrate it! This ought to be self-explanatory, but some sales managers wait too long and then don’t celebrate enough. Effective sales managers understand that the best way to dispel some of the pressure is to spotlight wins – even small ones – as often as possible and use it as an opportunity to give everyone a little boost. A little positive energy goes a long way.

As we arrive at the 30^th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice when the young, talented, and inexperienced US Olympic Men’s Hockey Team beat the vaunted team from the USSR and went on to win the gold medal against all odds, every member of that team will tell you that it wasn’t their talent that made them winners, it was the highly effective strategies of their coach, Herb Brooks. He knew how to help his team to ignore the odds and do the work that would accomplish the impossible. That is what good coaches do. Highly effective sales managers do it too, except they do it every day, 24/7/365.

Here is the bad news most sales organizations deal with every day:

• Less than 55% of reps are making quota
• Customers say “no” 6 times before they say “yes”
• 65% of sales professionals stop at the second “no”
• 75% of new leads never receive a sales call

Using these statistics, 75K of every 100K in marketing and training is currently being wasted.

Because sales reps already face this daunting struggle on a daily basis, they won’t invest precious time and energy learning a new CRM system unless they know it is going to help them win this battle, close quota, and drive revenue. This series on CRM adoption has focused on all the bases you need to cover within your organization so accomplish just that.

The bases you need to cover include:

Gain Executive Sponsorship: Demonstrate to decision makers that the CRM will give them faster, better, more actionable information and they will push adoption from the top down.

Focus on Sales Managers: Once sales managers discover how your CRM can make it much easier to do account planning and reviews, and conduct coaching sessions, they will find ways to encourage their sales makers to use it.

Involve Users Early in Development: If you consult CRM users early in the development and roll out phase of the CRM, they will have a chance to help you customize it to meet their needs and they will own the program from the very beginning.

Align with Sales Team Processes: Sales makers already have a system for working with customers. Unless you design the CRM functions to be aligned with that process, sales makers will drag their feet on adoption.

Build Trust with Sales Teams: Sales makers tend to assume the CRM is a sophisticated way to spy on them. If you emphasize the benefits to them and solicit their feedback so you can make the CRM more useful to them, they will push back less and accelerate their adoption.

Get Buy-in From Users: The key users of this system are the sales makers, so you want to do whatever it takes to help them feel comfortable. Solicit their feedback, try to understand their issues and needs, and customize the system according to the responses you get from them.

Include Non-Sales Facing Functions: The CRM should be the bridge that brings the whole organization together. Be sure to customize it so that all units can talk to each other, share information with each other, and collaborate with each other through the CRM.

Integrate Sales and Marketing Work Streams: The CRM is the perfect tool to change the conversation between sales and marketing. Using the CRM, these two units can collaborate instead of compete, and drive more real-time, coordinated sales plays that will generate revenue instead of only dead leads.

Solidify with Effective Training: Training on buttons and functions will not get the job done. Sales makers need training that will empower them to use the CRM strategically to streamline and speed up all sales activities to more effectively connect with and serve their customers. This is where the CRM pay-off is really created.

Reinforce Benefits and Revenue Generation at Every Step: This is the magic bullet of CRM adoption. It is not really a step or a base; it is more of an attitude or a conviction. People must grab the vision of CRM being the revenue engine for the organization.

We have experienced success after success as we have worked with top Fortune 500 clients to help them deploy their CRM in a way that significantly drives revenue. All the accounting features are important, but we are not in business to become better accountants; we are in business to drive revenue for everyone in the organization, from shareholders to the mail room. Sales organizations who implement the strategies we have been discussing in this series on CRM adoption report an average of 25% connect ratio, 65% conversion ratio, and 25 to 1 return on investment. All of this results in an immediate, measurable increase in the growth rate of revenue.

This is the kind of good news sales team members need to hear over and over again while you are going through the training and roll out process. Keep reminding them that the goal is to drive revenue and the engine for achieving that goal involves becoming experts on using the CRM for revenue generation. Make it your mantra or your slogan if necessary. Once the new CRM strategy is deployed, sales reps will begin to experience this success for themselves, and they will be the ones telling everyone else what an amazing tool the CRM has become for them.

Coming Next Week: Beginning a new series on best practices for sales managers.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.

We have all experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed by the daunting learning curve that comes with learning a new software program. That feeling only intensifies if the learning process involves deploying a CRM, which is among the most complex of all business computing software packages. The good news is that these programs usually come with lots of training hours and tutorials to help people learn what all the buttons do, so it won’t be long until you can navigate the system with a fair amount of confidence. The bad news is that this basic “burn in” training is almost exclusively about features and functions; users will not learn anything about the powerful strategies for leveraging the CRM to drive revenue. This brings even worse news: if sales reps don’t know how to use the CRM to make money, they probably won’t use it at all, except maybe to store their address book and record their sales.

For this reason, nothing about CRM deployment is more important that making sure sales makers receive comprehensive, ongoing training and coaching on the strategies for how to use the CRM to drive revenue, close quota faster, and accelerate sales growth. As we have been emphasizing from the very beginning, the CRM is a powerful sales enablement tool. With the right training, sales makers will learn how to smoothly and confidently navigate through all the functions of the system and use those functions to support sales activities in all of their accounts.

CRM strategy training has an entirely different purpose than functional training. Functional training is all about acquiring knowledge: it only helps sales makers understand what each button is for and how to access and manipulate data on each screen. CRM strategy is all about changing behavior; it employs the CRM as tool to achieve the much more valuable goal of helping sales reps to more effectively do their jobs. In other words, strategic CRM training will transform the way reps approach the sales process by:

·         Employing a team collaboration focus

·         Relying on measurement as an integral component

·         Using real world sales calls to reinforce learning and application

·         Incorporating ongoing pipeline coaching

·         Drawing out best practices

·         Developing and reinforcing sales management behaviors

·         Leveraging CRM analytics to gain opportunity intelligence

·         Implementing a cadence of weekly sales coaching, training, and best practices

·         Customizing CRM features and weekly metrics to support sales activities

·         Above all, building all activities around a generating revenue

As sales reps are exposed to this type of practical, results-driven training and coaching, their activities will begin to be more productive and profitable almost overnight. Experience reveals that this type of training delivers a minimum ROI of at least 20X1, while increasing forecast accuracy, growing pipeline and accelerating revenue. For these reasons, Strategic CRM training truly delivers a WIIFM for everyone in the organization.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/

There may be no bigger sales effectiveness obstacle in most sales organizations than the disconnect between Sales and Marketing. Even though both Sales and Marketing are ultimately responsible for driving revenue, they often report to different executives, pursuing slightly different goals, and using conflicting measurement objectives. This results in Sales and Marketing frequently being at odds with each other.

Marketing focuses on developing a variety of creative campaigns to generate interest in the company’s products and services. These campaigns can take months to prepare and roll out. The leads generated by these programs then must be captured, categorized and delivered to the sales team over a period of time. Consequently, the leads generated by marketing campaigns are usually slow to show up on the sales team’s radar screen, and it is not unusual for many of them to be poorly qualified. As a result, 75% of leads generated by Marketing for Sales are never followed up in a timely fashion, wasting the time and energy of both groups, and leaving both groups pointing fingers at each other for the poor results.

 So, how can an effective CRM deployment strategy help overcome this disconnect? First of all, a properly configured CRM makes it much easier for Marketing and Sales to communicate, share and transfer information, and carry out planning and strategy initiatives. When everyone has access to the same information and the same capabilities in real time, breakdowns in information flow can be eliminated, and critical benchmarks and deadlines can be more easily met.

However, the advantages go beyond enhanced communication effectiveness; a properly configured CRM is a tremendous boost to genuine collaboration so that Marketing and Sales can begin to work together seamlessly to launch and support highly targeted sales initiatives. By leveraging all the capabilities of the CRM, Sales and Marketing can efficiently collaborate to design a tightly coordinated effort that aligns messaging, product sets, pricing, margin, sales cadence, and sales goals into one seamless effort. It is even possible to roll it all with a defined beginning and ending, so that ROI can be easily captured and measured. This type of highly coordinated and unified strategy can eliminate cross-departmental competition and significantly enhance planning and execution of sales activities. Both Sales and Marketing processes should come alive inside integrated work streams enabled by the CRM, and finally deliver the result that the entire organization is looking for: closing more business at higher margins.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/

In previous articles in this series on CRM adoption, we have focused on ways to boost support and participation from sales makers because, arguably, they are the single most important constituency to bring on board in order to convert CRM from a sales accounting tool into a high-performing revenue engine. However, as important as it is to accomplish that mission, you must also connect a few more dots in order to fully realize the benefits that an outstanding CRM system can provide for your entire organization.

Begin by making sure that non sales facing functions are included in the planning, design and implementation process for the CRM. Remember, the CRM is supposed to be a turn-key customer relationship management system that makes it possible for your organization to deliver the most efficient and effective service possible for your customers. Finance, HR, Support, Operations and other functions all impact customer experience. Not connecting other functions into a CRM decreases the opportunity to eliminate redundant work processes and, ultimately, degrades the customer’s experience. If an organization is leveraging a CRM for a subset of its customer interactions but asking non-sales groups to use different tools that contain redundant or potentially conflicting information, then a disconnect on where, when and how to leverage a CRM to drive improved customer experiences will persist.

When the CRM is appropriately configured and deployed, this creates a central data-sharing platform that can be accessed and leveraged by all functions within the organization. The CRM becomes not just a sales accounting tool or even a sales enablement tool, it becomes the touch point for storing, collecting, analyzing, and sharing, data from any kind of data sets within the organization. Finance will have a mother lode of information at its fingertips to create budget projects and manage cash flow. Operations can get real time status updates on sales rep activities, projects, admin issues, etc. Customer support and Sales can be looking at the same information at the same time in order to address customer issues as they arise. In addition, many new CRMs – salesforce.com for instance – have embedded communication and social networking features to enable work groups to collaborate in real time, allow sales reps to poll SMEs about customer issues, and generally deliver a massive boost to the organization’s ability to work together more effectively and design workflow more efficiently, all of which drives productivity while reducing costs.

The net result is that, when you integrate even non sales facing functions into the CRM, adoption goes up, the organization becomes more focused on accomplishing high value tasks, and higher revenue will be the inevitable result.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.

In looking at the issue of CRM adoption – or the lack thereof – in many sales organizations, the highest priority must be to obtain buy in from users. This ought to be so simple to understand; yet, as we have seen in previous articles, companies often don’t take this priority seriously enough. Too often, the implementation of a CRM is viewed as being no different than any other type of software adoption process: get the best deal on the best package you can find, install and configure, train everyone on the buttons and apps, and get to work. Unfortunately, to the degree all of these decisions and processes take place without making a concentrated effort to gain the enthusiastic support of the main user group, there are very likely to be problems.

When implementing a CRM, the primary end-user is the sales rep. Certainly, other people will benefit from the powerful benefits of a well-deployed CRM, but it is the sales rep who puts in most of the hours on the tool, generates most of the data, and creates most of the value at the other end in the form of increased revenue generation. Therefore, the sales rep MUST perceive that the CRM creates value for them, or the process will collapse in a frustrating, expensive exercise in futility. After all, sales reps already have a system that they are comfortable with. Their initial reaction will always be, “If it is not broken, why should I waste my time and effort to try and fix it?” Therefore, you must carefully lay the groundwork for gaining their support long before you unpack and install the software.

If you want to create buy-in from the sales rep begin with these simple steps:

·         Ask the sales reps to identify the needs they have regarding account management, information flow, research, etc., and explain where the present system is costing them lost time and productivity. Take these concerns into account when designing and implementing the system. 

·         Ask sales reps to outline what they like and dislike about the present sales team process, to assure that the things they like about the present system are not degraded by the implementation of the new system. Also take these concerns into account when designing and implementing the system. 

·         Clearly and enthusiastically reinforce to sales reps the ways that the new CRM system will benefit the sales process, increase efficiency and productivity, and simplify the sales rep’s life so they can spend more time growing their business.

To whatever degree you can work closely with the users – so close in fact that they believe the new CRM is their idea and they helped create it – user buy in will be easy to achieve and CRM adoption will open at very high levels and only go higher once they see the amazing results they can achieve.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.

For all the advertised advantages and benefits, perhaps the biggest drawback to implementing any kind of CRM or Sales Force Automation system is the simple fact that the people who should be using them the most are initially resistant to get on board. One driver behind this resistance is a basic lack of trust on the part of sales makers, who are very often left in the dark about management’s goals for introducing the CRM in the first place.

The problem often initially arises because of the disconnect between sales accounting needs and sales team needs during the CRM design and implementation stage. Too often, the campaign for deploying a CRM is launched by executives, sales managers and  business analysts who are looking for better ways to measure performance and collect data for planning purposes. Most of the time, sales makers are not even in the loop while the initial CRM strategy is being developed, so they are left to draw their own conclusions. What they often conclude is that they are going to be asked to dedicate precious time and effort to log information into the CRM which not only offers no measurable benefit to them, but which will be used to track their performance and could be used “against” them during future performance reviews. Sales reps need all the encouragement they can get, so when confronted with a CRM about which they were not consulted and that is not sales rep friendly, they tend to feel mistrusted, disrespected, resentful and spied upon. They may even begin to distrust management as well. From that point on, conversations about CRM adoption can create conflict and stress for everyone.

The key to avoiding this conflict and creating trust is simple: keep the lines of communication between management and sales makers open at all times during the planning, design and implementation phases. Bring sales reps into the process right from the beginning and be very upfront about the purposes, the process, and the value behind the CRM initiative. Encourage sales reps to ask as many questions as they want, and shoot straight with your answers. Solicit suggestions from sales makers and take them seriously. Nothing builds trust like making promises and then keeping them. If you ask for input from sales reps, make certain that some version of that input is incorporated to the strategy going forward.

Also, don’t neglect to answer the WIIFM (what’s in it for me?) questions the sales reps may be asking. The only way to get past the perception that the CRM is being deployed to only serve the interests of one group is to clearly demonstrate how the CRM will meet the needs of sales makers as well. Of course, that presupposes that you take the time to gain a clear understanding of what their needs are, but if you do that, and if you follow through on the implied promises that come with that, sales reps will trust your motives, and they might even work with you to make the deployment a complete success.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.

Never forget that sales makers are really only interested in one thing: closing quota and driving revenue. That is how they are measured and that is how they measure themselves (not to mention that it is also how they support their families). Now, add to this the fact that markets are more competitive than ever, customers expect them to be more responsive than ever, and sales managers expect them to be more productive than ever. Add this all up and you have some vague understanding of how much pressure sales reps live under, and how precious to them is every minute of every day.

Because of this unique, pressure cooker existence, sales makers will resist with their last breath any extra drag on their schedule, including anything that requires that they change something about their process that they think is working just fine. They don’t have time to change and they don’t have time to learn something new unless it will clearly and quickly move them toward accomplishing their most important goals. Needless to say, devoting precious time to using a CRM is the last thing on their to do list.

So, one way to reduce the sales rep’s resistance to using CRM is to make sure it is configured to be aligned with their sales process. As we have pointed out before, CRM systems are too often designed to support accounting processes rather than sales processes. People who monitor and analyze raw sales data think very differently and have different needs than sales reps. This becomes evident very quickly when a sales rep sits down to try and make sense of most CRM systems. In almost all cases, sales teams already have a process they are comfortable with that defines how they address territory management, account planning, customer research, order management, pricing and approval systems, and document management. Unless the CRM system has been deployed using great care to assure that it will be aligned with the existing sales process, the CRM roll out will precipitate a massive change in workflow. This will be accompanied by an equally massive protest from sales reps who now find the tools and processes they have relied upon being usurped by a CRM that was not designed with sales reps in mind in the first place. This will make the CRM learning curve for sales reps long and painful, and many will simply avoid the process altogether.

There is a quick fix for this: interview sales reps about their sales process. How do they organize their process now? How do they collect information now? How do they organize and analyze it? How do they prefer to connect with customers? How do they prioritize accounts? How do they organize their day? How do they submit information on pipeline and closed sales? When you can configure the CRM so that it works with the rep’s existing process instead of adding extra (useless and time consuming) steps to their day, they won’t push back so hard.

Sometimes it may not be possible or reasonable to have the CRM mimic the existing sales process for the simple reason that the process itself can be improved. After all, a properly configured CRM can offer a lot of advantages that an existing sales process might not have. However, in such cases it is still important to start with the existing process as a reference point and partner with sales makers as you work on the design, in order to help them understand that wherever changes to the existing process are made, it will allow the reps to work faster and more efficiently than the old system. Once reps see the CRM as a tool instead of a task, you are home free.

Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.