So you run a small to midsize manufacturing operation, maybe you have a handful of salespeople, maybe even a larger outfit with a dedicated sales manager. You’ve found yourself wondering whether or not you need a CRM. However, you’ve heard or maybe even spoken the common objections for why you wouldn’t want to implement a CRM. Besides, you can clearly see your sales team’s results in the form of sales for your company. If you don’t like the results, maybe you simply find another sales rep.
Unfortunately, this is the situation for more companies than I’d like to admit. It’s a mentality that has allowed many organizations to get off the ground and become profitable but is most often an inhibitor of sustained sales or profit growth.
Instead of hitting you with the same bulleted list of benefits that a CRM can bring to your organization, let’s walk you through a “Tale of two furniture makers”. Both of these organizations manufacture high-end office furniture and let’s assume they have identical production processes and capabilities.
The first company, “Getting By, Inc” operates a four person sales team and has a sales manager. Each of the sales reps has their own book of business and manage their contact info in various places, such as their personal cell phone contact list, outlook contact list, or for the more advanced reps, their own homegrown spreadsheet where they keep basic contact info as well as perhaps some other information such as birthdays or notes on the last contact they had with the account.
They get together and meet every two weeks to review where they are with their accounts and opportunities, and to review their overall sales numbers. The sales manager has organized this meeting, and he’d like to do it more often, but it takes so long for them to pull together the information on their opportunities, get it to the sales manager’s admin assistant to enter into the master spreadsheet to prepare for the meeting, it really just isn’t that feasible to do so. This meeting typically takes a couple hours to conduct. The beginning of the meeting is spent looking at the current month’s actual numbers and making assumptions as to why the numbers are the way they are and guessing why certain deals didn’t close. Having this conversation makes the team feel insightful, but no REAL information is typically covered, or actions taken as a result. Most of the meeting is then spent going opportunity by opportunity answering arbitrary questions about how confident the sales rep is about the opportunity and when it will close with no supporting information besides some basic anecdotal statements from the last meeting the rep had with the prospect. Often there are new opportunities that sales reps bring up that aren’t even in the spreadsheet for one reason or another, so they go through the process of going ahead and getting these opportunities into the spreadsheet. When the reps at Getting By, Inc make their quotas, all is well there is a lot of pats on the back and everybody moves on with their day. When quotas are missed, the sales manager will ask the reps about their activity, what kind of outreach they’ve done to bring in new leads, and/or gives the rep a stern talking to about making sure they are meeting their marks, but there really isn’t much else the sales manager is able to impact. By all accounts, Getting By, Inc is in general doing ok and growing at a modest, yet somewhat steady rate.
Across town there is another office furniture company called “Transformed Office Spaces”. Transformed, like Getting By, Inc, has four sales reps and a sales manager as well. However, Transformed operates is Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing efforts in a much different way. Each of the reps at Transformed keep track of their prospects and customers via the company’s CRM system. They can access and update this information no matter where they are via their phone or tablet. Their meetings and emails to prospects are automatically captured in the system and they are able to annotate additional details to give context to the outcomes of these activities. In many cases, even phone calls to their prospects are automatically logged, or at the very minimum, only take a few seconds to log. They are presented with reports/notifications of accounts or prospects that they haven’t connected with in a while, which makes it easier for them to reach out and make sure they are top of mind with their customers to further drive opportunities forward and increase the strength of relationships with existing customers. When they are about to call on a customer, they can easily pull up the customer’s account and see if there are any recent or outstanding issues that the customer has reported into customer service that they may want to follow up on before calling the customer. They have an established sales process for their organization and can quickly pull up all existing opportunities to easily see which ones need more of their attention and what the next steps are.
Transformed also has a sales meeting, but their meeting is held weekly and only lasts an hour at most. There is no need for the Sales Manager’s admin to pull together various spreadsheets, emails, etc from the reps to prepare the reports for this meeting. All of their information on sales activity and opportunity progress is entered directly into their CRM system so reports are available to the Sales Manager and reps with a click of a button. To expedite the process, however, the Sales Manager does do some prep prior to the meeting to review the current sales forecast and how the reps are tracking to it. He’s able to quickly drill down into reps that are lagging to check some basic health metrics on their opportunities and documents his thoughts of potential resolution directly in the opportunity itself. The meeting is then conducted to run through these areas of concern, discussing with all the reps on their thoughts on how the situation can be improved, discussing how the rep has executed the opportunity vs the prescribed process to determine whether or not the process itself can be improved or whether better execution of the process is all that’s needed. With all of this in place, you can imagine that not only does the sales manager and other management have better insight into the health of Transformed’s sales pipeline, but due to being able to establish a consistent process, and track data related to execution of the process, the culture at Transformed is different. It’s not a gut-instinct based, reactive business, it is a proactive, data-driven business with a culture of continual improvement baked into its DNA.
As you can see with the fictional illustration above, you can absolutely operate a sales team without a CRM, and “just having” a CRM doesn’t necessarily change the situation by itself or instill a culture of continual improvement. However, a CRM essential for removing the silos of data between your individual sales reps and enabling your organization to centralize and ultimately monetize the valuable insight your sales team (or customer service, finance, etc) has on your prospects/customers. The benefits represented in this article are just the tip of the iceberg of the vast possibilities that capturing this information in a centralized location will offer your organization.