A few years ago, we suffered a horrible customer relationship management (CRM) failure.
The project involved an international distributor based in Pennsylvania with about 50 sales reps around the world. Every week the sales reps sent in their Activity Reports in all sorts of different formats – spreadsheets, word docs, scrap pieces of paper, telegrams, notes tied to carrier pigeons – to an administrator who then spent a day consolidating all the information into a single report for the VP of Sales to review. The VP of Sales, tired of the effort, decided to invest in a CRM system. He hired us to do this. And so we did.
We setup a great CRM system for the company. We configured screens and put in a process for entering data. We trained the sales group both in-person at their annual meeting and then online. We worked hard to put in place the best CRM system a company could buy. And it was awesome. Except for one thing. No one used it.
Well, not exactly no one. Let’s say about a third of the sales reps didn’t use it. There were lots of reasons given. “The forms are too cumbersome,” one said. “The process is too slow,” another complained. “I prefer my spreadsheet,” a few others said. So what happened? They went back to doing things the old way. And, worse, the VP of Sales let them. When a third of the people in a workgroup don’t use a workgroup system then the system fails. The company’s CRM system failed. We failed. So what did I learn? Three things.
Treat each sales rep individually.
I have met plenty of sales reps that can sell snow to an Eskimo in January but aren’t very good with software. Fair enough. But software and databases are necessary tools for salespeople today. I failed to come up with a compromise for each salesperson individually. At the international distributor, like most companies, a third of the sales people needed extra hand-holding. We should’ve known about these people in advance and had a plan to help them individually understand the system. An internal support person should have been assigned to these salespeople to monitor and answer any questions so they didn’t feel like they were alone in the woods (or in Germany or Japan, or wherever their office happened to be). Each person is different – some may prefer a mobile app, others to do data entry on a desktop. A few may want to just call in their appointments to an admin for updating over the phone. It’s all good as long as we get the data into the system. For a CRM system to be successful, each sales rep has to be treated as a customer. We never asked ourselves what could we do to minimize their data entry time so that management can get the data they need to run the business?
Keep it simple.
We had way too many fields and way too much information that we asked the sales reps to submit. Sure, it was all useful data. But it wasn’t critical. And much of it wasn’t used on the Activity Reports, which were the primary driver for the system in the first place. The salespeople became frustrated with all they were asked to do. And when they failed to do all the data entry there weren’t any repercussions because no one was really checking. We should have minimized the data required and only asked the salespeople to complete only what was needed for the VP of Sales to get his weekly Activity Report. Once that objective was realized it may have been time to consider more data. But not all at the beginning. It was too much to ask, particularly of a group of people who have never done this before.
Finally, man up.
We should’ve been tougher with the boss. Yeah, the VP of Sales. It was his system. And he knew how valuable it could be. We needed to make sure that he was committed and ready to weather whatever grumblings he received from the sales group. For a CRM system to work everyone must understand that the database is not about them. It’s about the company. Sure, we want it to help sales people be more productive and close more deals. But the data is what’s important and the executives who succeed with their CRM systems man up and hold firm. We should never have let our client cave in to his sales reps’ complaints and re-accept those Activity Reports the old way. He should’ve said “if it’s not in the CRM, then it doesn’t exist and you and I have a problem.” He should’ve offered whatever resources to address his sales reps’ questions so they could get with the program. But he didn’t. And we let him. And the system broke down.
We made mistakes. But we’ve learned. CRM systems don’t save time. At least, not at first. Activities, notes, conversations and emails need to be entered into the database. We now know that this is not something that many sales reps are used to. But over time, the data provides great insight into opportunities and the better management of resources. If we had understood this better our client would today have a great system for all their sales reps. Instead, it’s just a glorified rolodex, at best.
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About the Author: About the Author: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com
