Why did that happen?  Explain that to me; I don’t understand!  What’s going on?

How do we get longer, paragraph length explanatory text into the CRM system efficiently and with the willing and positive contributions of the sales reps?

Explanatory data is sentences and paragraphs of information that tell the details and specifics of what is going on or what has happened.  Explanatory data is the kind we get when we stand at the water cooler or sit at the hotel bar in the evening talking about things, telling the stories, giving all of the details, telling what happened and why.  It is the information a sales rep speaks to his/her manager over the phone after a great sales meeting or winning event, telling all of the details of the people present, the discussions, the competition, the pricing and deal making, and, finally, the glory of the close and contract signing.

Explanatory data is talk, speech, telling, explaining – words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Some estimate that the 98% of the most valuable sales information from the field is explanatory or qualitative.  It is words, sentences, and paragraphs not numbers, statistics, or notes or jots.  These data are the background, context, and history of the situation or event.  These data are the insights, perceptions, feelings, and observations gained during a meeting that have tremendous significance in the long-term service to the customer.  These data display the intelligent imposition of meaning and purpose on the events and facts.

The big fish mounted on the wall and why it is there, what it means to the main decision maker, and what it tells you about his/her interests and passions.  The photos of the three girls in soccer uniforms on the shelf behind the key account manager, and the excited talk concerning games and teams and the success of this manager’s daughters.  The observation that the contact person’s mediocre office is in the basement of the 10-story building and the walk to meet with the decision makers takes you up the elevator to the 10th floor plush offices where the contact person is hardly even recognized by name by the secretaries.  The gut feeling, as you listen to the pre-meeting talk and priorities that there is money to send a corporate jet to Norway to pick up a needed part but, you realize, there seems to be no money for your product or service.

The onsite visit to check out a task failure on a high-cost project to determine the involvement of your company’s products, with all of the companies involved trying to avoid responsibility, with the analysis of the actual failure and the technical discussions of why it happened and the reasoning behind the decisions reached.

How does this explanatory information get into the CRM system?

Someone has to talk it, explain it, tell it.  The story has to be told, articulated, given form and structure and intelligent explanation.  You can’t thumb it or tweet it or jot it.

Only a voice-based CRM data entry system can handle explanatory data, where the person calls on the phone and dictates the long explanatory message, in all of its details, with the system open to the person doing the explanation as he/she chooses in a way that is comfortable and intuitive.  The voice-based system needs to be simple to operate, completely transparent to allow the entire story to be told, and then, when finished to allow the person to hang up and get on with the work.  The voice-based system then transcribes the information, converting it to digital, and syncs it into the CRM database fields.  Because this is a manual transcription system, with native English educated and trained persons, U.S. Citizens residing in the U.S., the transcription is 98% accurate and professionally prepared and secure, so the CRM databases are filling with clear, correct, and meaningful information for understanding, decision making, and confident action.