Henry Thoreau in Walden talks about a gnat’s wing on the rail of a railroad track that derails a train. He felt that sometimes nature, despite how fragile it seems, has power to thwart our most sophisticated technologies. Remember the story of David and Goliath – a little guy with a single stone brings down the heavily armed techno-giant. Remember the “Butterfly Effect” in chaos science, where butterfly wings moving in Asia mean terrible storms soon in New England. Little things and the individual person sometimes can have a powerful impact on much larger things.
Despite all of our CRM sophistication and computer/web complexity, all it takes to derail the CRM purpose and investment is one, little, individual human to exercise his/her free will and say, “I’m not going to tell you. I don’t want to. I’m not going to do it.”
Spoken or just felt, the powerful decision to not participate – “I’m not going to do it” – stops the most powerful information gathering software. “I don’t have time.” “What’s it to me if management knows or doesn’t know?” “Who cares anyway?” “CRM is just another ‘fad’ that will pass just like all of the other fads management has foisted off on us.”
In an organization, the positive benefits of a vigorous, continuous flow of accurate, complete, and timely information from the field into the CRM databases are realized when analysis of those data by managers reveals patterns that lead to clearer understanding, mature decision making, and proper action. That is why we buy and implement CRM systems; the purpose is good and positive and worthy of support by all sales reps.
Why is it that, somewhere along the CRM implementation timeline, individuals “opt out”?
TWO KEYS TO SUCCESS. As far as the sales reps “opting in” to participation in the CRM system, we have found two keys to making a CRM system run smoothly for those who will use the information from the CRM databases and those who will enter information into the system:
1. PARTNERSHIP. Upper management and the sales team need to partner in the work of gathering and using intelligence from the field – tie the upper management information needs to the sales reps information gathering capability.
For example, the relationship between a military General in a battlespace and his spies (intelligence gathering specialists) is critical for winning the battle. The General has to know what information he would like to obtain, and he has to communicate that need to the spies, so they can look for that intelligence and bring it back. It is the PARTNERSHIP between the General and the spies that wins the battle. Both sides know they are important and that what they are doing is valued and essential to the other and to the overall mission
In far too many business organizations, the sales people have no idea what management wants to know in the customer, competition, and industry marketplace, and the top managers give no instructions, no feedback, no collaboration to let the sales reps know that what they are doing is essential. A total disconnect exists between the two, a gap that separates whatever is going on at the top floors from whatever is going on with the reps or “scouts” on the street. Forming a strong, vigorous partnership between management and the sales team, so the information gathering function is respected, has dignity, and s
tature for all partners, eliminates the “I don’t want to” attitude quickly and decisively. TOGETHER they are working to develop business intelligence and insight to guide their striving together towards mutually-beneficial success.
2. SIMPLE. INTUITIVE VOICE-BASED DATA ENTRY TOOLS. The reporting function must be simple and intuitive – mouth and phone. Management must focus on tools that make the sales reporting function easy, fast, and natural. Ironically, the attempts to use IT (high tech) solutions thwart the partnership goal because they trivialize sales rep intelligence and motivation. They are a very quick “turn off” and “opt out.”
What is needed from the sales rep is his/her best insight and observation – very human capabilities. What is needed is explanatory, voice-based information going into the CRM databases, not merely activity numbers, jots, tweets, twits, and thumbs. Smart phones, tablets, speech recognition, and other “technological” solutions make the sales reps into “dummies.” They “dumb down” or seek to eliminate the complex (some would argue “messy”) human thinking, intelligence, and insight gathering capability of the sales reps, which causes them to lose interest quickly in the CRM system.
These “high tech” solutions trivialize the data gathering activity and, thereby, demean the sales rep function. “All they want is a number. They don’t care what is really going on out here. They wouldn’t understand what is going on with the competitors and the failure of our latest products if I explained it to them. They don’t care. It is too hard. Marketing just takes everything so personally; they don’t want to hear about it. Stay down under the radar!”
It is the obliteration of responsibility for insight and explanatory information that is so dispiriting and disheartening to a customer-centric, needs-based selling person. They want to talk. They have a story to tell. They see things and want to explain them and get management’s attention. They want to tell management the decisions the customer is making, but the tools they are being given to do so are either keyboarding based or gadget based, such that they are difficult, time-consuming, trivial, or dysfunctional. They need straightforward, intuitive, and respected voice-based CRM data entry tools.
So — (1) PARTNER UP top management and the sales team so they are working closely together to employ CRM to achieve shared and worthy objectives, and (2) GIVE VOICE-BASED TOOLS to the sales team to make reporting simple and intuitive.
Give the sales team a reporting tool like voice-based CRM data entry that uses the telephone for data entry, human transcriptionists for intelligent and accurate processing, and powerful software to sync the data automatically into the CRM system. All the sales rep has to do is dial the number, put in the ID number, speak in the words of the sales meeting, hang up, and then go on about the customer care and selling activity – 2-5 minutes rather than hours, 98% accuracy rather than 20% with speech recognition (requiring serious and time-consuming editing). The supporting voice-based system, then, processes the words into digital and enters them into the CRM databases.
Now, the PARTNERSHIP is working – Management is getting “good” data; Sales reps are HAPPY AND WILLING.
WIN-WIN!
The only thing valuable about a CRM system is the quality of its database. No data in the CRM database, bad data, missing data – then what good is the system? Little things can have big effects ONLY if the little things are accumulating, aggregating sufficient to form patterns.
10 They just don’t like administrative sorts of work, which takes them away from selling and making money. They consider reporting administrative work, so they don’t do it.
06 They have learned and practiced procrastination from the time of early high school and are very good at it (especially at procrastinating reports), so they can delay reporting for days, weeks, and even months. “Oh, I’ll get to it next month when I have some time.”
01 They perceive that the only thing management cares about is making money, so if they are meeting their goals or exceeding them, they think reporting will never be enforced. “They will never fire me for not entering my sales information into the CRM system!”
values of an active, organization-wide CRM/Voice2insight system is the continuous flow of current, accurate, and complete knowledge in the system and available through search/query to all authorized members. This organization-wide availability of good knowledge has been the “holy grail” for knowledge management systems for many years. The collaboration and sharing of lessons learned and key technical information can save many hours of searching (often with no results) and can give employees a critical competitive edge, wherever they are working in the organization. This open and collegial sharing of knowledge is a key to what is called a “learning organization,” an organization with a vibrant date entry system and with feedback loops and double loops, where good information is “powering vigorously” around in the organization.
materials? Can we raise our prices now or should we wait for the next quarter – what have our customers done in the past when we have raised prices – what have our competitors done in response? Who is this new company – why are they growing so rapidly – are they taking our customers? The greater the flow of information coming into the CRM system from the sales team, the greater the aggregation of good data and the greater the potential for good analysis, decision making, and proper action.
What is it about traditional CRM data input that is so off-putting to sales reps? Why is it so prone to avoidance, trivializing, and procrastination? One of the major constraints is keyboarding, the need to “write” by typing in the words of the report. For people who “hated to write” while in school and who consider any kind of “writing” (keyboarding) to be “administrative work” that takes away from productive selling work, the CRM data entry reality (if that is perceived to be the only way to get information into the system) is a major barrier and limited factor for CRM success. “I really don’t want to do it!” means it will not get done or it will be done at the absolute last minute at the absolute lowest level of interest. (Remember in school when a paper was due on Friday, how many were up all night on Thursday pounding something out?)
ata entry tool 
Because the knowledge we seek with CRM is that most directly related with customer needs and satisfaction, the group of people of most importance is the one most directly connected to this knowledge, and that is the sale team. The sales reps are the point of contact with customer decision makers, and, if the CRM system is to work, the information related to those contacts must be fed into the CRM system continuously for management understanding, decision making, and proper action.
t of not knowing that there is a pattern of activity developing in your industry that changes the way businesses manage their projects, such that the bidding and contracting processes are changing to privilege or benefit competitor companies? How long before your company finds itself “outside” of the flow of the competitive market?
We learn to trust people’s professionalism in a moment. At a glance, we can tell if the sales rep has taken any time with the communication, to think it through, to make sure the point is clear, and to make sure the details support the point being made. We can spot the misspellings, the poor grammar, the confusing arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs. At a glance we can see a huge block of print with no relief to the eye or mind that tells us the writer is working inside of his/her own head and not thinking about someone having to read the stuff. At a glance, we can see how much the writer respects the reader.