How do successful sales people personally approach and consistently involve their prospects in a positive manner?  Why do your less-than-stellar sales people alienate the prospect before they even have a chance to present your company’s product or service? Are they being too aggressive?  Possibly they are tired of struggling, fruitlessly attempting to get people to buy.

Ongoing Training

Sales people are not born with sales success. It comes from sales training and effective ongoing coaching. Successful sales people continuously seek to expand their knowledge and strengthen their skills. They also possess the ability to present the company’s product or service in the best possible light. Star performers know how to forge a bond with the customer or prospect and thus gaining an edge over the competition.

Focus Makes a Difference

Star performers sell where they can create the most value.  Keeping focused on winning new, repeat and referral sales is a challenge for many sales people. The best sales person attains sales success through systematic qualification, planning, and managing progress to target their most valuable and profitable sales opportunities. They increase their efficiency and effectiveness by selecting and focusing on the most valuable prospects, quickly identifying and lowering the priority of less valuable situations.

Effective Coaching

Selling skills are trainable, but it is important to know what level of skills your sales teams have and how effective they are when in front of a customer or prospect.  The only way for you to assess these skills is to be out with them on sales calls.  Xerox found that 87% of sales skills taught in training are lost without coaching in the field.  Getting out with your sales teams and assessing their presentations will help reinforce the desired skill set. It will also identify areas where each individual needs to learn to become more skilled. If you want improvement, then ride with your sales teams.  However, have a clear and well thought out plan of what is to be accomplished on the call.  Remember you are there to coach, not sell.

Conclusion

Increase the ability of the sales organization to deliver results by highlighting sales opportunities by project and customer over time. Provide new product training and competitive edge information.  Spend as much time as you can with your sales people out on calls, assessing their skills and reinforcing what they do well.  Coaching is most effective in the early stages of the sales funnel where there is opportunity to improve sales effectiveness. Outrageously reward your high sales performers.  Finally, your sales force comes in 4 flavors:  Poor Performers, Under Achievers, Solid Performers and Star Performers.  Spend your valuable time with the Under Achievers and the Star Performers for maximum sales results.  You should provide support to the Solid Performers and explain and show what you want the Poor Performers to accomplish.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business discipline that many successful companies use to place customers at the center of business activities. The CRM goal is to form long-lasting profitable business relationships with customers by integrating company resources such as employees, processes and technology, and focus them all on one thing…the customer.

Unfortunately, this customer-centric goal is often missed as a result of the desire for a quick solution.  In order to attain this seamless coordination between all customer-facing functions, executives decide to purchase either off-the-shelf CRM solutions or custom IT designed CRM systems without doing the necessary upfront buying behavior analysis and segmentation of customers based on revenue or gross margin.  It has been reported that over 50% of CRM projects fail. The Gartner Group, Inc. estimated that well over 65% of all CRM projects fail.

I believe that that a successful CRM initiative is dependent on spending the upfront time investigating and understanding everything about your customers and building an ideal customer profile.  Once you thoroughly know who your customers are, and have segmented them by value, you can then begin to think about your CRM system need.  This basic strategic step is often sacrificed for the tactical CRM solution.

Potential causes of CRM initiative failure:

• Senior management is not involved – the scope of the CRM initiative is lost in a broadened and costly project with everyone adding in their requirements.
• Driven by IT – IT is not held responsible for revenue results.  You need your business leaders to drive the CRM process.
• Driven top down –  Executive’s need for reports, data and insight are sold on  CRM being the answer without bottom-up input to the CRM decision.
• Doing too much -  No prioritization for adoption in Sales, Marketing and Service.  Service processes have been found to have the best initial acceptance and result.
• Not getting employee buy-in – Failure to target the highest areas of adoption and getting the front line employee engaged in analysis and design of the CRM solution.
• Viewing CRM as a technical solution – Letting technology mandate customer relationships.

Eliminate the above CRM pitfalls by learning everything you can about your customers  before buying and implementing your CRM solution.

• Segment your customers by value contribution to your business either by revenue or gross margin

• Establish your ideal Customer profile target

• Identify Prospects who mirror your ideal Customer profile

• Apply Programmed Account Cycling of differentiated touch points to Customers and Prospects

• Establish a Sales, Marketing, CRM, and Product and Services collaborative effort

• Monitor your effectiveness, track and communicate results

JC Calhoun - President InfoRockers

The purpose of the InfoRockers Blog is to generate a community of interest and activity that will help Companies as they transform their business organization into a Customer-Centric driven entity.

Our mission is to educate, inform and share  experiences. We also want to hear what you like and dislike about the CRM trends for 2009.

Finally, give us your tips and share your success stories.  We’d love to hear from you and welcome your input and discussion.

If you have questions on Customer-Centricity or related topics, the following areas are open for comment and discussion:

Segmentation and valuation of  Customers
Determination of  the “ideal” Customer profile
Identification of Prospects that mirror the “ideal” Customer profile
Resource alignment according to Customer value contribution
Business planning based on Customer and Prospect intelligence
Customer survey development for business improvement
Increased sales productivity through programmed account cycling
Cost-Effective Sales and Marketing Campaign Development
Business Analysis
Methods and Procedures
CRM
Strategic Planning
Cross-Functional Management
Sales Training and Compensation
New Business Development

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