Create Success for Salespeople
Distributor sales people are inherently skeptical about the promised benefits of CRM.
They worry that using CRM will waste time
better spent on productive sales activities,
particularly if they are required to enter data
in the form of call reports, market activity, or
updated sales pipelines.
Worse, salespeople believe that CRM is little
more than a tool for
allowing management
to monitor daily sales
activity or to second
guess their decisions.
“Our sales people
originally saw CRM as
extra work and big brother watching” said
one distributor president, “but after providing
customer data which improves sales calls, our
salespeople moved from managing accounts
to managing opportunities.”
This distributor, and many others, found
the path to success by mapping the sales
process, listing the key behaviors that lead to
desired outcomes, and identifying the lever-
age points where information, provided by
CRM, can make a difference. This work is not
theoretical. Companies can look to the sales
behaviors of top performers for guidance. To
gain acceptance of CRM, leadership’s task is
to demonstrate for skeptical salespeople that
following the practices of top performing
salespeople will create new successes which, in
turn, leads to happier customers and increased
incentive payouts. In the early stages of CRM
implementation, or when kick-starting a
stalled program, success comes from carefully
choreographing successes, letting salespeople
tell their stories, and building one triumph on
another until momentum is established.
Exhibit two provides three top behaviors for
salespeople, each enabled by CRM in the form
of customer data, planning tools, or commu-
nications. Additional best practices for each
behavior include:
• Analyze customer data: the internet is
empowering customers with easily available
information on product benefits and compar-
ative performance. Buyers can scan websites,
read blogs, or simply type a question in
Google and receive credible answers. In this
environment, salespeople that do not come
to a client meeting armed with data are out-
gunned. One industrial distributor offered this
advice: “We have identified the six most com-
mon reasons for a sales call and are training
all of our salespeople on how to use customer
data in each situation.
It’s like calling indi-
vidual plays within an
overall game plan.”
• Manage oppor-
tunities proactively:
virtually every distrib-
utor interviewed for
Getting the Most Out
of CRM wants to trans-
form their salespeople from reactive order
takers or lead followers, to actively identifying
opportunities for improving customer results.
The best results are achieved when sales train-
ing on a value selling process is integrated
with a CRM pipeline tool, and when progress
is clearly aligned with achieving each salesper-
son’s sales goals and incentive plan
• Collaborate within CRM: as CRM becomes
an essential tool for accessing customer infor-
mation and managing opportunities, leaving
CRM to coordinate support with marketing,
finance, or operations becomes a frustration
and, worse, leads to slow responses, poor
proposals, and bad pricing decisions. As a
particularly discouraged salesperson put it,
“Email is where opportunities go to die!” An-
other distributor made its proprietary pricing
models available only through CRM, forcing
salespeople to follow a value-selling process
and giving management real-time visibility to
deals, discounts, and concessions
Enable Managers to Drive Change
The know-how of experienced CRM users tell
the tale: front line sales managers are critical
for driving the behaviors that are mandatory
for achieving new results, and for integrating
CRM into each sales person’s daily activities for
driving sales and managing profits.
According to the president of an industrial
distributor, “Our sales managers drove the
success of our CRM efforts from beginning
to end. They were the first to hear about
