I think I’ve seen nearly all the many innovative and out of the box ways companies come up with to get around using a CRM – I could write an article on it.
It begs the question though. Why try and get by without a CRM?
That’s not a question I’ll even try to answer as I don’t have an answer. Maybe there just seems to be a lack of necessity, or another cost with no clear ROI, or another change to introduce when nobody likes to change? If sales keep rolling in, then perhaps there’s no obvious problem to solve.
Manufacturers in particular tend to be much more focussed on the production and planning side of the business and their ERP. Smaller to mid-sized manufacturers, can and do get by without a CRM platform while larger businesses can’t just wing it so easily.
Walking into a new manufacturing client, I usually have a fair idea of what I’m going to find. I’ll try and describe the scenario, and maybe it sounds familiar?
First, there will (nearly) always be some kind of spreadsheet gluing everything together. Around the edges, there’ll be a mix of managing customers through something like the contacts view in Outlook, notes scrawled on the back of envelopes or written over the top of sales orders.
Occasionally in the mix is some kind of CRM partly implemented and underutilised.
And overlaid over the top of all this, each rep has their own variation on the approach. Maybe once a month it’s the manager’s job to pull everything together manually into the spreadsheet, but it’s a process that seems more difficult and time consuming than it should be.
To be honest, I’m usually impressed with the level of innovation I see as sales teams cobble together their solutions to get the job done. Somehow it seems to work, albeit with a bit of effort.
What’s missing then by not having a CRM solution?
Depending on how disciplined your team is, how well mapped out and enforceable your processes are, how much time your team has on their hands to keep reports and spreadsheets up to date then maybe not much.
First thing to note is that despite what CRM salespeople tell you, the platform itself won’t be the silver bullet it promises. A CRM is a significant cog in a much larger wheel but you need to be getting the other cogs in place at the same time. When I talk about CRM I’m not talking just about a piece of software, but how it’s implemented, the surrounding processes, the change management that needs to happen to make sure it’s implemented properly and how the organization benefits as a whole.
The other thing to mention is some companies are not ready to implement a CRM for different reasons. Sometimes, there are simpler first steps to take. Often, they are easy wins, don’t cost anything but get your business into a position so later a CRM can deliver a lot of benefit.
Ok, so let’s assume your business is at a point where a CRM would be useful. When I talk about what benefits it can bring to an organisation, I prefer to focus on the outcomes. Like with any tool, you can achieve the outcome without the tool. But the tool makes it a whole lot easier and making things easier increases the likelihood it gets done.
These outcomes I tend to put into one of 3 piles.
- Sales team effectiveness.
- Company profitability and efficiency.
- Enhancing the customer experience.
I’ll tackle each one below.
Sales team effectiveness
Customer contact info, single source of truth, always up to date.
Reps need to get customer contact info out of their personal Outlook/email contact lists. It’s difficult for others to access and will create problems when the inevitable time comes for responsibility of that account to be transferred to another rep. You’ll have issues too as customer data will be duplicated across reps and throughout the company, making it difficult to build an accurate profile of each customer and their interaction with you.
Ensure an accurate and dependable trail of all history for every customer is recorded and accessible.
I can’t stress enough the importance and value of historical data to build better relationships with customers and to develop more accurate predictability about future sales pipelines.
If another rep can’t take over the account and pickup where the previous one left off, we have a serious problem.
Accurate recording of interactions needs to happen at the time of the interaction. Notes need to be taken as the rep is talking to the customer and follow-up tasks should be created as soon as they are identified. These things only get done, when there is a path of minimal resistance and a clear process to follow, something that a CRM can provide seamlessly.
Note, any CRM solution should allow you to customize the data collected to fit the customer information you need to collect. This includes quotes, sales agreements, emails and phone calls, but also things like their preferences.
Reliable task management.
Every promise, quote, opportunity should be followed up. No matter how great your memory, it’s impossible to not let some things slip off the radar. While there are numerous tools to help with automating tasks and reminders, creating tasks in a CRM ensures they are created at the time of the conversation or when the email was sent or quote created.
View and manage information from anywhere.
It shouldn’t make any difference if the rep is in the office, working from home, on the road or onsite with the customer. Information should always be accessible. But like I mentioned earlier, capturing data should always be entered as it happens. If the rep has to wait until they get back in the office to record a follow-up task, there’s a high chance it’ll be forgotten.
Sales rep productivity.
Reps being able to prioritize where their time is best allocated is critical, especially to weed out the tire kickers. Accurate record keeping, in a format that can be analyzed, reported and prioritized helps bring into focus the highest priority leads and activities that need to be taken.
Accurate and complete order history will help identify trends and provide more insight into how to grow accounts or address accounts that have begun to trend in a negative direction
Company profitability and efficiency
I’ve spoken on this in other articles, but the sales function is a wealth of intelligence for the business that it should infiltrate right through the operation. Here’s some examples:
Capture sales IP.
The customer relationship and the history behind it belongs to the company, not to the rep. It’s easy to just let the sales team do what they want, but how confident are you that the full history and relationship has been captured and documented in such a way that someone else can pick up where another left off?
A CRM can give you a much higher level of confidence this IP has been properly and accurately captured.
Sales process documentation / enablement.
Don’t underestimate the value that process can bring to deliver higher performance.
Once you start to capture this, you can measure it. And when you measure it, you can improve it. A mature sales process pays back in dividends.
CRMs allow you to configure your lead and opportunity management processes as well as automating repetitive tasks around this process. Configure the platform the right way and it will establish key stages of your sales process and build guidance into the system to allow your reps to follow what is considered best practice for your business without it getting in the way.
Sales forecasting.
The more visibility you have to view future orders, the more control you have to manage capacity, schedules, inventory etc. to maximize utilization and profit.
While forecasting is an estimate of future work, the more you do it, the more accurate it becomes. Accurate forecasts use historical data (e.g. past order trends) and future planned work (e.g. opportunities). Forecasts can include projected possible future demand identified from gut feel, conversations etc. well before an opportunity is even created. You have to have somewhere to capture this information and in a usable format that can be easily analysed. Realistically the only way this can work with increasing accuracy is with a CRM and a well-defined sales process.
Production planning improvements.
With the ability to create sales forecasts, this information can also be used to inform production planners of orders likely coming in the door in the near future and can allow them to create more efficient procurement and production plans.
Forecasts can change regularly, so being able to capture and plug this data into planning systems and reports with minimal manual intervention can drive significantly improved planning capabilities.
Greater control over capacity and demand planning.
Forecasts help communicate demand back to the planners, in turn providing significant intel into the planning process.
Likewise, when planners communicate capacity back to the sales team, the sales team can react by potentially generating more demand to help fill the gaps. Strategies like offering customers incentives to bring forward orders, may help utilize capacity more efficiently for example.
A CRM doesn’t solve demand and capacity problems necessarily, but it can enable the pathways and workflows for those conversations to happen more naturally and for data to be exchanged.
Reporting that is just a click away.
Reporting is often a time consuming, manual and error prone process for most manufacturing businesses. Most of this can be automated but requires data to be consistently captured and published. While an ERP captures data on the production side, without a CRM, data from the sales side of the business is likely to be lost or not captured in a format suitable for reporting.
When it takes too much effort to create these operational and management reports, they’ll be created infrequently. Missing data means it gets fudged, leaving the benefit of these reports questionable.
As part of any CRM implementation, integrating sales data with operational data for reporting should be an important consideration that is planned into the system. Being able to automate the pulling of data between the ERP and CRM and providing unified datasets of performance metrics has clear benefits.
Build a stronger customer experience
You’ve no doubt heard of phrases like having a “360-degree view of the customer”. Perhaps it’s a bit of a buzz word that’s been overused but the idea is valid as the bar is raised on what customers expect from their suppliers.
Having this 360-degree view means, the customer’s journey from sales through to delivery and support including all their touch points into your business is visible and available to be leveraged to provide a stronger end to end customer experience, a stronger brand and in turn, more sales.
A CRM will be at the heart of this capability. Some areas this will impact are:
- Customer service and post-sales support.Support agents have a centralized place to document customer support cases and will be looking to have a more complete view of account activity including pending deals, recent orders, and previous support issues to drive a better customer service experience, leading to greater customer loyalty.
- Ready access to order and delivery information.Maintaining accurate and reportable information like order dates, expected vs actual ship dates, etc related to orders can give sales reps the ability to proactively handle order delivery issues with customers.
What’s next?
I’ve purposely stayed clear of CRM features and benefits. This is important once you decide that these problems and opportunities are worth tackling.
And while I’ve merely scratched the surface here, hopefully you’ll see that any CRM implementation should be considered as a much bigger question than the software platform itself. There is a strategic opportunity here to transform the way business is positioned now and into the future that can be underpinned by the right platform, and surrounding systems and processes that are equally important to a successful outcome.
And finally, see this as a journey over the long term. Having a roadmap that you can implement gradually allows the organization to take small, manageable steps is an important factor for success.
Remain laser focused on the outcomes and try not to “boil the ocean” with a massive initial project. Start small, get some initial wins, gain adoption with your user base, and iterate from there.
And if we can help at REV4, we’d love to be involved.