“Voice 2 CRM”: Why CRM is going RETRO!

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“Apple Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Siri.  New York City iPhone 4S customer sues Apple, claiming Siri advertisements are misleading and that the service doesn’t work as depicted in commercials. [Writer says,] From my perspective, it’s hard not to disagree with Fazio [man suing Apple]. I have an iPhone 4S, and I find that Siri works less than 50% of the time. I’ll ask Siri a question or issue a command, and more often than not Siri tells me that she didn’t understand what I was asking her to do or simply fails to do it correctly. I’ve had Siri dial the wrong phone number, inaccurately transcribe dictated messages (despite my perfect diction), as well as completely time out or crash.” (InformationWeek Mobility, Eric Zeman, March 13, 2012)

Oh, well.  That’s just a ‘beta’ version of Siri.  Right?  So, after a while Apple will get it right, and Siri will do the amazing things it is advertised to do.  Right?  Apple Siri is the ‘Holy Grail’ for sales reps.  Right? 

NOT!

For twits and tweets and notes and jots and thumbs in closed environments, Siri will develop over time into a very useful and practical tool.  However, for longer text-based and more complicated open environment reporting, Siri or any other speech recognition, voice-to-text application might never be a useful tool and these efforts are heading in the wrong direction.

Think about it (as in the movie ‘Back to the Future’) – maybe going FORWARD into glamorous and expensive technology is not the path to a solution for simple and fast sales reporting.  Maybe going BACKWARDs in time is where we will find a critical ingredient for a great CRM application for the FUTURE.

Consider this – a sales rep out on the road after a customer meeting sits on a bench or in his car, with a good phone cell connection, and speaks his long and complex sales report into his cell phone (4-5 minutes and several paragraphs) and hangs up.  Within hours, the voice-based system processes and syncs the report automatically into the correct fields of the CRM database, with 98% accuracy and with professional formatting and appearance.  Sweet!

THAT’S THE HOLY GRAIL!  VOICE 2 CRM! 

Millions of dollars are being spent to find a practical solution that is already operating effectively among us and has been for years.  Voice and phone, the ultimate mobility and efficiency tool!  RETRO!  Who would have thought!  As much as we try to develop “modern” improvements, sometimes something from the past is brought forward, added to the brilliance of the new computer tools, forming a new blended tool that is far more powerful than anything the new tools can create by themselves.  The older RETRO capability of simple voice is given new vitality and viability in business work.

Put the words “VOICE-BASED CRM” into your browser and be surprised – a vibrant new industry is developing to provide an effective sales reporting tool that is simple, fast, and intuitive.  Your CRM system or implementation will gain significantly if you add a voice-based CRM data entry capability.

CHECK IT OUT!

 

 

Testimonial for Voice-based CRM Data Entry System

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3/12/2012

Perhaps a recent testimonial will help you see the value in a voice-based CRM data entry tool.

If you are looking to adopt a CRM solution or if you are looking for ways to improve the productivity of your existing CRM application, take a few minutes to go looking for information on a voice-based CRM data entry tool.

Put “VOICE-BASED CRM” into your browser and enjoy a few minutes of some informative reading.

Here is the text of an email to the vendor from a Senior Vice President in a large healthcare organization, giving his observations after implementing a voice-based CRM data entry system.  It is broken down according to his thoughts:

1.  “My thought is that – finally, a service is available that can enter information into SFDC for an entire organization based on a phone call!

2.  This is an easy to use, cost effective, well supported service that eliminates manual record entry into Salesforce.

3.  It drives adoption through the roof!

4.  According to our Sales Manager, this service allowed the reps to enter more than 2,000 Account, Contact, Activity, and Patient Referral records with associated comments into their new SFDC in 5 days!  Manually, that would have taken a month or more.

5.  When a rep leaves an appointment, the call they make to V2I allows fresh information to be entered immediately.

6.  Our Sales Manager estimates that this service is saving the reps 3-6 hours a week in manual record keeping and activity reporting and assures our company that appointment information is timely and current.

7.  No longer do our sales reps have to wait until the end of the day (or worse, the end of the week or never) to enter results into Salesforce.

8.  They calculated that each rep pays for the cost of this service in about 3-4 hours a month of saved data entry time.”

Now, that’s interesting!

Perhaps a voice-based CRM data entry tool that really works is an interesting idea for you.  Put “VOICE-BASED CRM” in your browser.  Check it out!

TALK CRM! 10 Easy Steps to Voice-Based CRM Data Entry

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“What I want is to be able to just speak into my phone and have my information go directly into my CRM.  I’ve tried speech recognition, and it doesn’t handle longer and complex messages and the error rate is just too high and requiring too much revision.  I just want to talk my CRM?”

Voice-based CRM data entry services are available to you.  You can just speak into your phone, hang up, and have your information processed and synced automatically into your CRM.

These services are available to you now.

Voice-based CRM is an alternative to keyboarding/writing and speech recognition.  It is for longer, open text dictation of sentences and paragraphs (as opposed to speech recognition that works on shorter, more controlled jots, tweet, twits, and thumbs).

To show you how a Voice-Based CRM data entry tool might work, here are the 10 simple steps required of a sales rep to use voice and phone to send information directly into CRM.  Notice how intuitive this is, how simple and straightforward, how immediate is competent performance.

Here is how voice-based CRM data entry works:

1.  Attend the sales meeting at your customer location.

2.  Take good notes.

3.  Leave the meeting, find a safe place (not driving), and take out your cell phone.

4.  Speed dial the Voice-Based CRM date entry service.

5.  Enter your security ID number.

6.  Referring to your notes and to your company’s key category prompt card, speak into the open dictation system your sales meeting information, including all explanatory information related to background and context.  Speak in sentences and paragraphs, just as you would speak in regular voice mail dictation.  Explain it all.  Get everything in your notes dictated into the system.

7.  When you are finished, hang up.

8.  Get on with serving customers, moving products and services, and generating revenue – all of the fun stuff in sales!

9. [The system produces and syncs automatically a CRM report that is 98% ACCURATE at high PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS, prepared by a seasoned human transcriptionist (native English language speaker, U.S. Citizen) using proprietary CRM integration software.]

10.  Within 24 hours your report shows up automatically in your organization’s CRM system, sync’d precisely into your CRM database fields.

That’s it!  It works!  It is available to you now!  Costs are far lower than you would imagine for a service with such potential to save time, increase CRM user adoption, and significantly increase the richness and, therefore, the value of the CRM databases for organizational use.

Interested?  Enter “VOICE-BASED CRM” into your web browser and enjoy a few minutes of information reading and searching.

Who would have thought such services could be available now?  This is the Voice-based CRM Data Entry industry – and it is growing!

Five Advantages of Voice-Based CRM Data Entry

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What can you do as an organization leader to provide the Sales Team with the most effective tools for CRM data entry? Tools to make sales reporting so appealing to them that they will adopt them easily and use them willingly, so the best data available flows continually into your CRM databases?

The traditional data input choices are keyboard or voice, whether the means is a computer, smart phone, or tablet or whether it is voice mail, a voice conversation, or dictation into a machine or to a live person. That’s about all we have to accomplish the task of CRM data entry. (We don’t have technologies yet that read our minds or filter information through the skin.)

If we focus on the sales rep as the principal information entry person into the CRM system, reporting immediately after a sales experience with customers, competitors, and industry forces, then here are five reasons a voice-based CRM data entry tool is by far the best solution. Focusing attention to this tool makes CRM data entry  attractive to the sales reps so that they use it easily, willingly, and with increasing competence over time.

1. They like to speak on the phone – voice is intuitive; writing is learned. From infancy we have been speaking and, almost as long, we have been speaking into the telephone. Unlike writing and keyboarding, which are learned and practiced skills that some master and many do not, speaking on the telephone is intuitive and natural. We all can do it!  We do not have to be taught to speak, and we do not have to be encouraged or motivated to speak on the phone. Sales reps using their phone to report sales information can do it easily because they perform this activity over and over during any given day. They are good at it, naturals, highly competent. So, when asked to report their CRM information this way, they do it easily and with no cause for delay.

2. They like to do it immediately – Quick and easy are compelling; hard and problematic are repelling. User adoption, procrastination, avoidance behavior – these are all manifestations that the sales reps to not enjoy or look forward to their CRM data entry tools. Keyboarding/writing is too hard, takes too long, requires unnatural thinking and skills, and is not pleasant to anticipate.  It is hard and unpleasant work and is, therefore, avoided and procrastinated!  Speech recognition software has major editing limitations (as discussed in the next point).

3. They appreciate efficiencies – Just once is good; several times is bad. Any system that requires the speaker to return to the text to edit after putting it in will fail. Speech recognition for the kind of textual information we are talking about here leaves the speaker with text that is often 80% – 90% inaccurate (catastrophically difficult to correct when nouns become verbs, adverbs become nouns, etc.), requiring hours of editing time to make it professionally acceptable. Despite their dislike of it, when considering the alternative of speech recognition, sales reps laborously keyboard in their information to avoid speech to text inefficiencies and having to edit what comes back – it is faster and easier to just keyboard it in.  Clear and accurate meaning, coupled with professional presentation, are essential in reports that are circulating throughout the organization.  Sales reps want to speak it in the information and hang up, having a the system process the information and delivery a professional report into the database.  That quality of work is only possible with native-English speaking, U.S. Citizen based human transcriptionists, working in partnership with the sales reps.

4. They want to tell their story – Explanation is satisfying; just numbers is frustrating. For customer-centric and needs-based selling, background and contextual information is critical for an understanding of what is going on with the customer, the competition, and the industry.  Thus, explanatory information requires talk, text, sentences, and paragraphs.  When management reduces CRM reporting to just numbers, jots, twits, tweets, or thumbs, just 5% or so of the pertinent information is being required or accessed.  This is “activity”-based management attention, which places no value on the information of most importance to the sales reps. They see that nothing much is being asked for, so they stop giving anything beyond the number required. 98% of what they care about in their customer-centric sales work is being ignored by management.  “Who cares about reporting?” is the cynical reply to such un- or mis-management of the sales reporting activity. Many, thus, choose not to participate or to participate at the bare minimum.

5. They want to know someone higher up cares – High feedback is invigorating; low feedback or none is debilitating. “Does anyone read these reports?” “I just put anything in because no one reads them anyway.” “I do them about once a quarter – if I am forced to, because everything important is being taken care of over the phone all of the time. The sales report is meaningless.”  When upper management communicates to the sales team the kinds of information that are important to them, and when the sales reps see and report those kinds of information back, and then upper managers respond to those reports, then we have the kind of “virtuous cycles” of understanding that make the CRM databases rich and fertile and CRM a winner application for the organization.

When senior managers provide a voice-based CRM data entry tool for the sales team, there are at least these five reasons a voice-based CRM data entry tool will make the CRM database a winner and CRM a success.

CRM Meets Its Worst Enemy: “I don’t want to”

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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 stature 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!

CRM and Pattern: Why the CRM Database IS THE POINT!

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“… the fact that little causes can have big effects….” (Gladwell, The Tipping Point, 9)

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.

If knowledge from the customer environment is flowing continuously into the database, if those data are accurate, current, and complete, then those who use the database can find in it patterns of meaning for correct understanding, good decision making, and proper action.  Tipping points become possible.

Patterns can only form when data are aggregating and accumulating in one place, from the best possible sources, and are available to searches and queries that “see” or “discover” them.  All management thinking is a matter of “seeing” patterns, gaining a correct understanding of them, making good decisions, and then taking proper action.

Consider this supporting statement from a leader in the study of “pattern” in thought:

“In any stream of ideas, some kind of pattern will be evident.  The trick is to look for patterns.”  (Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution, 2000)

IN THE PATTERNS IS THE MEANING!  The search for pattern in CRM databases is the key to CRM system value to an organization.  We can have a tipping point ONLY if we have the accumulated and aggregated information sufficient for patterns to form.  We have to have a rich “stream of ideas” before patterns can emerge.

At the end, the CRM system has only one purpose – to provide the means for accurate, current, and complete information from the customer environment to flow continuously into the database; and then, for those who lead the organization to search and query those databases to find the meaningful patterns that bring correct understanding, good decision making, and proper action.  These elements of the CRM system are the essential, foundational processes through which the promise of the CRM investment and vision is accomplished.

We must get GOOD data into the CRM databases!

The essential tool to ensure a continuous flow of quality data into the CRM system is a data entry tool -  for sales reps, executives, technical support, trainers, and others who travel to meet with customers – that is easy to use, quick to apply, and powerful in its capture of information.  One essential tool is a voice-based CRM data entry system because (1) sales reps and others are willing to use it and make it their own, and (2) the spoken explanatory information of words, sentences, and paragraphs is the lifeblood of CRM database vitality and quality.

Every CRM system application should have at its front end for data entry (as one of the options) a voice-based data entry tool!  Whatever the mix of tools available, leaders must insist on routine reporting into the CRM system by every person involved in customer, competition, or industry marketplace activity.  Every one; without exception!

Accumulation and aggregation of quality information into CRM databases, with search/query routines, is essential for pattern formation and pattern recognition and ultimately for correct understanding, good decision making, and proper action.

10 Reasons Sales Reps Won’t Use the CRM System

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In the spirit of Dave Letterman’s “Top 10″ lists, here are the Top 10 reasons sales reps do not use the CRM system or why CRM systems have such poor user adoption statistics (*for a possible remedy to these 10 reasons, see note at bottom):

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.

09  They just get busy doing their selling, making money, and caring for customers, so they forget to report; it isn’t part of their important work, not ‘top of mind’.  “I just can’t get around to it.”

08  They report by talking about their meetings around the water cooler or in the break room or at the bar in the evening or in the car with a passenger when traveling, or anywhere they can talk about it (and not have to write it).

07  They just call the boss and tell him/her about it all (or, hopefully, get the boss’ email and leave the report as a message), so there is perceived to be no need to do a formal report.

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.”

05  They think that nobody in management reads their reports, so they think the reporting is a meaningless waste of time.  “Hello, anybody out there reading this report?  Hello?  Respond to me, so I know someone is reading this.”

04  What they do and how they go about it is their personal “competitive edge,” their own “special style,” and they are highly competitive and not about to reveal it, share it, or comment on it through reports to management.  “If I don’t sell, I don’t eat!”

03  They hate to write, they hated English classes, and they hate “writing” reports.  “Give me enough alcohol and tobacco,” said one sales rep, “and I can write anything.  Dope me up!”

02  They know that by not reporting they can “own” the information and by hoarding it ensure their long-time employment.  “No one is going to be happy to see me “walk out the door knowing what I (and only I) know!”

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!”

*Note:  Here is a possible remedy to these reasons sales reps won’t report into their CRM system.  Attention Management literature suggests that sales reps pay attention to the things their managers pay attention to.  The sales team must know that managers up and down the organization are (1) committed as a team to the value of the knowledge in the CRM system for analysis, decision making, and proper action, and (2) insistent on the fundamental requirement that aggregating in the CRM databases is a continuous flow of accurate, current, and complete explanatory knowledge from the field.  This continuous flow of information is easiest attained with a voice-based CRM data entry system that is easy and quick for reporting and one that sales reps will use naturally.

Maybe sales reps – when shown a better way – can set aside these 10 reasons for not reporting and follow the example and attention of their managers in building CRM databases of good information that make a practical difference in the success of their organization and themselves.

“Getting it Out There”: When CRM Information Makes the Difference

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“I received a note from a sales rep in an entirely different territory, thanking me for information on a competitor in a sales report I had entered into our CRM system a month or so ago.  The person said he was bidding against this competitor and my information on several key discriminators for our products really helped him write a winning proposal.” (a Voice2insight/CRM system user report, February 2012).

One of the most important 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.

Sales reps will use a voice-based data entry system.  A key to “getting it out there” is a voice-based CRM data entry tool that sales reps find natural, intuitive, easy, and fast.  If they know they can get their sales reporting task done immediately following a sales meeting, in just a few minutes, without all of the hassle associated with keyboarding and writing, they take to it willingly and with positive business intent and purpose.  They know that the organization needs the knowledge, so they give it clearly and completely, with thoughtful explanation and sufficient detail.  With voice and the phone, the words, sentences, and paragraphs come out naturally and fluently because these are tools the sales reps use continuously and with excellence.  They are very good at speaking their minds and explaining their experiences.

The need is for explanatory knowledge not jots and tweets.  Organizational use of its expensive CRM system cannot be limited to just activity reporting, a number or statistic to be entered via a smart phone or tablet computer.  These notes, jots, and tweets are not sufficient to sharing the explanatory and experiential knowledge of background and context that makes information useful for understanding, decision making, and proper action.  We need full and open voice-based CRM data entry to capture the full experiences the sales reps are having out with the customers on the ground.  Words, sentences, and paragraphs of explanation are the life blood of a “learning organization” environment.

The power of knowledge is in data aggregation.  We need all to aggregate all of the information possible, amass it in one place, so the great power of computer searching can be brought to bear for an understanding of trends, patterns, and behaviors that are operating with customers and competitors and in the industry marketplace.  That is why organizations buy CRM solutions.  What is going on our there?  How do these purchasing decisions compare or contrast with those of last quarter or last year?  Why are they asking these kinds of questions now?  Are we seeing a new product development life cycle because of the availability of these new 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.

CRM has to connect top management and the sales team.  The more vibrant, the more energetic the data input from the sales team that is flowing consistently into the CRM databases, the more good information is aggregating and accumulating, and the better the searches and queries and yield of strategically useful information.  When the top managers of the organization know what they want as information from the field, from the sales organization, when they communicate this openly and positively to the sales team, then the sales people can gather this information and return with it for management use.  The connection between the management team needs and the sales team capabilities for gathering information is a connection made in heaven when organization leaders see it and foster it.

A voice-based CRM data entry system, willingly and thoughtfully used, brings an incredibly powerful force of knowledge for good that is available no other way and is the heart of a successful “learning” organization.

‘Easifying’ Data Entry for Your CRM System

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“Secret:  Overloaded people want simplicity, ease, and fun.  In the Age of Overload, the simplifier is king…. Secret: Word of mouth is, first and foremost, an experience-delivery system.” (“George Silverman, The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, “Dominating Your Market by ‘Easifying’ the Customer Decision Cycle, Customer Relationship Management, January 2012, 24-29.)

‘Easifying’ is making things easier.  Making the data entry CRM experience easier for sales reps required to report their sales activities in meeting with customers – ‘easifying’ it – can have a significant impact on both user adoption and the kind and quality of the information reported and entered into the CRM databases.

The important objective of sales reps using the CRM system willingly and with business intent to feed current, accurate, and complete (explanatory and experiential) information on the customer, competition, and the industry marketplace, on the understanding, decision making, and action of organizational leadership, is precisely the reason senior managers bought and paid for CRM in the first place.  “Customer Relationship Management” – being able to know and react to the real-time customer environment – is the driving vision or purpose that justifies a company spending its treasure to implement CRM.

If sales reps do not adopt or use the CRM system willingly and with business intent, if they just do the very minimum required sloppily and reluctantly (like angry school children denied recess), then the entire CRM system – top to
bottom – is at risk.  Bad and missing data from the field doom the value of the CRM databases, and these systems become very expensive but empty filing cabinets.

Incomplete, inaccurate, deliberately biased, ambiguous, purposely sabotaged for spite, or confused data certainly and severely limit the value of the entire CRM investment.

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?)

So, how do we ‘easify’ CRM data entry to change the CRM data entry scenario?  Organizations do it by observing the second “Secret” stated in the opening quote – go to “Word of Mouth.”  Go to a voice-based data entry system.

Sales reps love to talk.  Talk is their live and their livelihood – talking.  Talking is natural to them, intuitive, and developed from infancy.  They are high verbal.  People in sales have excelled from a young age at verbal expression and the powers of persuasion through talking.  Writing, on the other hand, is not natural and not intuitive.  Writing is a learned skill.  Writing is filled with rigid yet inconsistently taught rules and requirements, expectations and artificial constructs taught by English and writing teachers in many, many classes over the many years of schooling.  Over and over in adult writing seminars, you hear the expression and confession, “I hate to write.  I don’t know how to do it.  I am not good at it.”  And, truth be told, many of them, however fluent they are at speech, however successful they are at selling and persuading and closing by voice, are not very good at writing.  Spelling, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation – the whole thing is a mass of confusion in their minds.  They could not tell you, after 10 years of schooling and at least 10 English classes over that time, the correct use of “principal/principle” or the meaning of the words “independent clause.”

They love to talk, and they love to talk on their phones.  They are phone technology freaks, many of them, sporting the latest smart phone or tablet, with all of the latest supporting gadgets. 

SECRET:  Why not let sales reps enter their CRM data by just speaking it into their phones – simple, quick, intuitive, natural, done. 

Speak in the sales meeting notes for 3-4 minutes (replacing 60 minutes or more of the hated drudgery of keyboarding/writing) and when finished hang up.  Let the Voice-Based CRM Data Entry system transcribe the audio (ensuring 98% accuracy) to convert it to digital and sync it automatically into SAP, Salesforce, Oracle/Siebel, or MicrosoftDynamics?

Why not ‘easify’ the data entry for sales reps with a voice-based data entry tool and give a tremendous “shot in the arm” to your CRM system’s viability?  If they find it simple and fast and will use it willingly and with business intent, watch the user adoption numbers and the value and the kind and value of the data flowing into the CRM system SKYROCKET!

CRM and the ‘Cost of Not Knowing’ (“CONK”)

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The promise of CRM is knowing what is going on with the customer, competition, and industry marketplace for proper understanding, decision making, and action.

We buy CRM software and pay the heavy expense of implementing it because we believe that the management of knowledge is critical to organization success.  We believe that the organization is more capable of competing when our decisions and actions are based on good knowledge from the customer environment.

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.

We buy CRM because we need to know what is going on out there!  We spend the money to train and equip the ‘point of contact’ sales team to find and deliver that knowledge back into the organization.  Thus, that knowledge is expensive to gather and make available, certainly, with the cost of the CRM software, the training, the organizational changes, the monitoring, and the motivation.  Certainly, proper CRM implementation is a significant cost in the treasure of the organization.

However, what is the ‘CONK’ or the cost of not knowing?  What if we are NOT getting the information we planned and worked for?  What if the sales reps won’t use it or won’t use it to deliver explanatory information?

What is the cost of not knowing that your competitor reps are into your major account and doing audits and offering information for their products or services as opposed to yours?  How long will that ignorance go on before you find yourself shown to the door?

What is the cost of not knowing that your pricing is too high in the competitive marketplace, and that it is causing your customers to “shop around” for alternative sources?  How long before your ignorance allows a significant loss?

What is the cost of not knowing that your product has features that the customers find limiting or constraining, such that bad feelings are developing towards your company that are going to be easy for the competition to capitalize on and move you out of the business?  How long before you are way behind the curve and cannot catch up?

What is the cost 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?

What is the cost of not knowing that one of the senior people in your major customer organization finds your product or service defective and poorly designed and is angrily going about in the company and among his golfing and tennis associates bad mouthing your company and your products?  How long can you survive this going on?

What is the cost of not knowing….?  What is the cost when the expensive CRM system isn’t producing the critical information from the field that you need?

Interestingly enough, CRM with voice-based data entry, that makes it easy and intuitive for sales reps to report their sales meeting information quickly and easily, is the least expensive element in the CRM cost.   This is because it involves only the mouth and the phone.  CRM based on voice-based data entry has the potential to gather ALL of the critical explanatory information from the customer environment and feed it immediately into the CRM databases.  What is the cost of current, complete, and accurate information flowing into the CRM system from the customer environment?  What are you already paying for your sales team?  They already know how to make your CRM investment pay off with the information you need.  They speak on the phone constantly. 

The cost of the most important piece of your CRM investment, sales rep usage through a voice-based data entry tool, surprisingly, is the lowest of all, yet it provides the most valuable ingredient for CRM success for the organization.