Failed CRM projects are a consistent theme over the years, with various thought leaders providing relevant perspectives. Fact is that “the unfulfilled promise of CRM” will only surface months after a CRM project has successfully crossed the finish line. How can you prevent this from happening, and if it already happened, how do you achieve a turnaround?
It starts with Account Manager adoption
Adoption leads to data quantity and quality, which are prerequisites to getting the performance insights you need to identify outliers:
- For underperformance: When and where does it happen? How can you improve or even prevent this from happening?
- For overperformance: Who is overperforming? And, how can you replicate what they do differently to others in your organization?
Upward spiral or downward spiral
Tapping into the value potential of the identified improvements will build momentum in the adoption flywheel. From the start, adoption momentum is very binary: it is either increasing or decreasing. Contribution to the CRM system increases when Account Managers experience the relevance of the data they entered into the system. Account Managers judge this relevance by answering one simple question: “what’s in it for me?”
The Account Manager perspective: What’s in it for me?
If your Account Managers can not positively answer this question, then you will be in a downward spiral with your adoption. Disciplinary actions might have an effect in the first weeks after a CRM go-live, but in the long run, your Account Managers will want you to ‘show them the money’.
Also, talk is cheap: you will need to prove the value. If, for example, can you not show your Account Managers that this enables them to close more deals in less time, then why should they bother? Their opinion on CRM will be as binary as the related adoption. CRM either enables them, or is merely more administration for ‘big brother’ watching them, and disciplining them.
Hope is “deferred disillusionment.”
Hoping that a CRM tool will automagically enable Sales to improve their performance is a good strategy for failure. Your objectives need to be specific. Your targets need to be set, cascaded to the individual level, and measurable. On top of that: everything you ask your Account Managers to do should be aligned with achieving these targets.
Coach & Support towards Targets
The performance insights enable you to coach your Account Managers into better performance: What have they missed, or where can they learn from others?
You can also use insights to support your Account Managers in getting the rest of the organization aligned with Sales priorities. For example: Is that big crucial deal getting the right support from Legal to accelerate the contracting phase?
Personal Reflection towards Targets
Well constructed insights will enable your Account Managers to reflect on their priorities and actions without your support or coaching. Which new perspective have you provided that enables them to calibrate themselves into better performance?
Artificial Intelligence: Value multiplier for Insights
Salesforce provides a great example with their Einstein product how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to turn CRM data into valuable insights for your Account Managers. Einstein can offer dynamically generated insights like recommendations for ‘next best action’ based on the available data and the ‘out of the box’ AI capabilities of Salesforce.
Get started: Enable your Sales Team with CRM
So, where do you start? With your objectives! and consequently scrutinizing every (planned) field or attribute in your CRM:
- To which objective does it contribute?
- Do you really need the field? (what happens if you don’t have this field? are alternatives available?)
- Does the AM need to enter the data for this field, or can we get it in another way?
- If not: can we simplify what we ask from the AM and still achieve our goal?
- “What’s in it for” your Account Managers?
- How will you prove the value of what you ask them to contribute? (see the relevant example with regards to the ‘loss reason’ field in my other post: Learning from Lost Opportunities)
We (Sales Engineers) have done this scrutinization in all the CRM implementations we did. Better yet, we have also done this for all the CRM implementations in which we got involved at a late stage. The result was always the same: a simplified CRM implementation focussed on enabling Sales to improve their performance and achieve their objectives.
Kill the unfocussed Wishlist
One of our clients pulled us in on a CRM selection. At that stage, they already had a 100+ page requirements document with the intent to send out an RFP to various CRM vendors. The requirements document was actually a very long and detailed ‘Wishlist’ from all departments in their organization. The responsible MT member recognized what was happening and pulled the handbrake. We were brought in, and reset the project towards clear sales objectives:
- Increase efficiency through one way of working
- Close more deals in less time
- Increase customer lifetime value through more cross- and up-selling.
Scrutinizing the 100+ page requirements list against these objectives reduced it to 10 pages. These 10 pages were co-created with the relevant business champions from the sales organization. These business champions eventually also became the front-runners in adoption. They were able to show and prove the value of the new way of working, processes, and systems to their peers.
CRM will always have stakeholders from various departments: Senior Management, Marketing, Finance, Technology, Sales. Ensure you know which ‘master’ you are trying to serve, and what the objectives are. Challenge every single requirement back to the contribution on the objective, and assure you design for simplicity and usability by your Account Managers
Now: get going!
What are the objectives you have with your CRM system? Are they still the same as the original objectives? Is your CRM aligned to support your Account Managers in achieving these objectives? How can you simplify? As Steve Jobs said:
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Need help to get started? Feel free to contact me by using the form on the right!