The Sales Process and CRM

For those of you who hadn't noticed, sales force automation disappeared from the business lexicon over 10 years ago. 10 YEARS AGO! So, there must have been a reason and I discuss that back in my sales force automation article. The critical point I would like to make here is that a sales process may seem strategic within your department, it's certainly not strategic in an overall business sense.

I talk about developing a customer focused strategy for your business. And this really doesn't have to be any more than recognizing that you need to see things from the customers point of view.  Everything area of your business then supports this strategy....and that includes the sales folks. Too many business puts the sales department at the center of the business.

The biggest mistake I've seen regarding CRM are the companies that start the hunt for CRM from the sales department; wrongly believing that CRM is sales force automation. So what do they typically look for?

• The ability to generate quotes
  
• The ability to log inbound and outbound emails, phone calls, letters, etc.
  
• The ability to aggregate opportunities and forecasts up the management chain
  
• The ability to enforce a sales process

So, which one of the above is focused on the customer and has a measurable bottom line impact on the business? Which should be used when building a business case for CRM? I'll let you think about that while I move on....

What I've outlined above are valid requirements in a CRM implementation. But, it's important to understand that they should certainly be more detailed, in that they need to clearly support a process that is designed to support a customer-centric, cross-functional workflow.  They shouldn't be designed to simply benefit from a few minor process efficiencies that don't clearly support a business strategy. That would be potentially a very costly mistake, and has been for many businesses that believe the sales process was strategic....and had bottom line impact on the business.  Yes, I said it. There's more to the bottom line than sales!

Strategic Selling

I've always loved that. Putting the word strategic in front of a process designed for a department doesn't make it strategic. It's a marketing thing, designed to stroke the egos of sales executives.

You're probably reading this thinking "this guy really hates sales people". But, you'd be wrong. Sales is part of the backbone of any business. But in a CRM context, it's only part of the backbone. The real backbone is not the sales process, but the cross-functional workflow you redesign to put the customer at the center of your business. This usually involves finding ways to empower your staff, regardless of department, to handle issues without the handoff nightmares we've all experienced in our daily consumer lives

I'm not a sales process expert. But, I do know that it's my job to encourage a business to design these processes by evaluating what the overall customer, or prospect, experience needs to be. CRM is about removing silos, those self-contained departments who do things a certain way for their own benefit, not the benefit of the business, let alone the benefit of the customer.

Is your sales guru suggesting practices designed to support the organization's CRM strategy? Or is it a product based approach to sales, where the needs of the sale manager to meet a product quota are more important than the needs of the customer or prospect?

Return to Sales Force Automation from Sales Process

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