Tag Archives: sales reps

Using Spies”: CRM Systems Success Depends on Sales Reporting

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“In Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’, competitive success comes from competitive intelligence.  You can only understand your competitive situation if you know how to gather the right intelligence….The title of Sun Tzu’s original chapter on competitive intelligence was ‘Using Spies’…. Sun Tzu wants you to remember that the ultimate source of all information is people.  The closer you are to them and the better your contacts, the better your information” (Gagliardo. The Amazing Secrets of Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’).

Sales reps, out on the road, visiting customers, watching the competition, observing the marketplace and the industry – these are the eyes and ears of the organization, the “spies” who are in a position to see and hear what is going on “out there” and then reporting it back to the leaders.  Enabling the sales team to perform at its peak capability should be one of the highest priorities senior management. 

The only value of the CRM database comes from a continuous flow of current, accurate, and complete information into the databases from the sales team.  Missing, bad, incomplete, or biased information, strictly numerical information with no sense of context or background filling CRM databases is a tremendous threat to management effectiveness.

One marker of a dysfunctional CRM implementation in an organization is given the name “User Adoption Problems.” This is the CRM industry terminology for “sales reps who won’t use the system for reporting their sales meeting information.  They won’t use it!”  Many leaders seem to assume that just because “they build it, the sales reps will come.”  Just because they pay out all of the money and disrupt and stress the organization to implement a CRM system they assume the sales team will jump on board happily and willingly and keyboard in their sales information.

Interestingly enough, attention to how the sales reps enter their information can bring tremendous benefits to leaders trying to improve or to implement a CRM system.  They need to realize or remember two truths concerning sales – (1) sales reps hate to type or write because it is administrative work that takes away from selling and they don’t like keyboarding and (2) sales reps like to talk, to explain, and CRM user interfaces are too complex, too hard, too much, and take too long. 

Thus, by its very nature, the CRM system repels those it should most attract.  Rather than the sales reps willingly and happily entering their sales information into the CRM system, they are being frustrated because the system is forcing them to keyboard and is restricting their ability to explain, to discourse.  All the CRM systems want is a box checked or a number or a word or two.  For a sales rep, what the system is saying is “We really don’t care about what you want to say, what you think is going on.  Just give us the numbers and facts as fast and as simply as possible.”

So, unfortunately, the result of this failure of CRM to consider its primary source of information, is “user adoption problems.”  Procrastinating, delay, short cutting, simplifying and understating, ignoring – we begin to get the behaviors associated with distrust, alienation, cynicism, and chronic negativism regarding the sales system.

BUT THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE SO!

Sales reps love to talk on the phone.  It is natural, intuitive, and necessary for them.  Voice-based CRM data entry tools, therefore, come naturally to them, easily, with no learning curve or difficult adjustments or hurdles.  The organization identifies the kinds of information it desires reported, the sales rep takes good notes in the meetings, and then when the meeting is over, he/she finds a quiet place with a good cell, dials into the Voice-based CRM data entry system, enters a PIN or security ID number, and then, in an open dictation system, speaks in all of the information from the meeting.  All of the facts, observations, decisions, commitments, insights, problems, competitor discoveries – everything.  This talk might take three to four minutes (the equivalent of 60 minutes keyboarding under stress), and the communication is complete with context, background, and all of the associated information of the interaction with the customer.  When finished, the sales rep just hangs up and gets on with working with customers, selling, and making money.  The voice-based CRM data entry system, based on a human transcriptionist model, processes the information into the desired CRM database fields and syncs it automatically into those fields.

Thus, all the sales rep experiences is a phone call.  Nothing hard, no difficulty, no keyboarding, no hassle.  Just a phone call and hangs up.  All of the complexity happens through the voice-based, human transcription system.  Because such systems use native English language human transcriptionists, the transcription is highly accurate (near 100% accurate), meaning the sales rep does not spend any time editing the document and it is appearing in the database as a professional communication.  This accuracy and professionalism are what discriminates a voice-based, human transcriptionist model from speech recognition or voice-to-text software options.

Leaders trying to avoid “USER ADOPTION PROBLEMS” either in an existing CRM application or with a new implementation, should put “VOICE-BASED CRM” into their web browser and read about the benefits of a voice-based CRM data entry system based on a human transcription model.  Based on the cost of CRM failure, the cost of CRM User Adoption problems, the cost of a voice-based CRM data entry tool – specifically to help the sales team participate happily and willingness and fully – has astounding ROI calculation results.

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.

How to Make Data Entry into Microsoft Dynamics Faster and Easier

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We love the promise of CRM systems!

As we learn at the Microsoft Dynamics Internet site, CRM can increase sales performance, boost customer satisfaction, improve marketing effectiveness. It can drive customer retention and increase sales by anticipating and meet customer needs. It can establish a 360-degree view of customer interaction and sales opportunities and deliver value with integrated interaction and knowledge management. It can help us plan, implement, and measure more effective marketing campaigns, slash customer response times, and gain new insights into service trends. Through increased user adoption, it can put business intelligence at each user’s fingertips, increasing productivity and reducing backlog on waiting for reports to be run. It is the road to operational efficiency. It works seamlessly with Outlook and automates workflows across sales, marketing, and operations.

Love it! But… Of course there is a “but….”

The “but…” is a human problem. If humans do not use the CRM system, if they do not enter complete, accurate, and timely information into the system, then what is there in the CRM system to process? User adoption is a serious constraint in the CRM environment and, historically, has been a major limiting factor on the success of these systems. Sales reps feel that reporting is paperwork, to be done whenever and wherever, at night, on weekends, all at one time in a huge sacrificial effort once a month. Many sales reps hate to keyboard in-depth information into the CRM system, so they leave out detail or fail to report . Many companies have given up and are now going to smart phones or tablets like the iPAD (“push 1 for inventory, push 2 for…) to try to reduce the reporting function to a few clicks in a template app.

Getting accurate, timely, and complete information into the CRM system remains the No. 1 constraint of these wonderful software systems. Without good information, decision making based on these systems is at high risk of being wrong! So, what is to be done to make the data entry so simple and fast that sales reps will, in fact, use the system to report their sales meeting information?

Voice and cell phone. Sales reps love to talk and they have cell phones embedded in their ears. Intuitive, natural, enjoyable, simple. The sales rep leaves a meeting, dials a secure number, enters a secure PIN or ID number, and then just speaks in his/her information. When finished, he/she hangs up and gets on to serving customers and making money. Speaking for 3-4 minutes is the equivalent of 40-60 minutes keyboarding. And speech-to-text is too inaccurate to be useful in an open sales environment on the road (wind blowing, rep with a head cold, gate and boarding announcements, other people talking in the car, a thousand random distractions).

A voice-based system, with features like US-based manual transcription by native English language citizens, 98% accuracy, quick turnaround, automatic syncing into the Microsoft Dynamics database, and automatically generated reports back to the speaker and to the leaders of the organization.

A voice-based system that would be natural and easy for the sales reps to use, that would clear the reporting hurdle in minutes rather than hours, with their reporting up to date with current, accurate, and complete information. With a CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics kept up to date for organization leaders for correct understanding, competent decision making, and confident and forceful action (for more information, click here),

The Winning Skill for New Sales Reps

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As with many things, sales is a matter of getting started right. It is a matter of learning very early on what skills or competencies make the biggest difference in career growth and success.

Consider laying carpet, for instance. After learning all about the preparation, the most important thing to learn for implementation is how to set a “starting corner.” How to get the carpet straight to the room and tacked down, so all of the subsequent installation is correct. One person has said, “Improper carpet installation can bedevil facility managers for years. Getting a carpet installation project right from the very beginning is the foundation for long carpet life.” Sloppy, crooked, imprecise beginning work “bedevils” the entire operation. Likewise, sloppy, crooked, imprecise sales tool learning and acquisition results in a short sales career or a lifetime of fighting against bad information and skills.

Also, consider ship building and laying the keel. As Wikipedia tells us, “The importance and integrity of the keel was understood by the ancients….Nowadays, laying the keel is the first milestone in the history of a vessel….The keel is the structural beam around which the hull is built. The keel acts as the spine of the ship, keeping it upright by providing ballast to counteract the lateral forces on the sail from the wind, and generating lift to “convert the sideways motion of the wind when it is abeam into forward motion. A ship won’t sail upright or straightforwardly unless it has a proper keel.” Too many sales people lay no keel – they just start at random to grunge together a career. They don’t stop to lay a proper keel for their work.

And what is the very best “starting corner” or “keel” for a new sales person? Voice-based reporting skill and absolute commitment to good communication.– Voice-based reporting is simple and fast. It allows a person to be accurate and complete. And it enables a person to be timely and constant in reporting. A conscientious, voice-reporting professional keeps colleagues and leaders and customers informed. He or she keeps track of promises and commitments and documents the keeping of them. He or she learns the very best uses of CRM tools and new hardware advances and stays on top of what is most practical and useful.

Most of all, everyone around this person learns to trust and rely on him or her to know what is going on, to have the proper paper trail of events and discussions, decisions and commitments to keep everyone moving forward properly. This is the person who has the skill to be a great manager and executive because through simple voice-based reporting this person, and those around him or her who are also committed to communication, know what is going on and have trustworthy information upon which to base understandings, decisions, and actions.

Essential English Grammar & Spelling for Sales Professionals

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The accuracy and correctness of your grammar and spelling might not mean anything to you, but, to those who read your emails or reports, your presentation is very much who you are as a professional person.

If the sales rep in email continually confuses and misspells “their/there/they’re,” we wonder where they went to school and how much they learned there. Confusing “it’s/its,” “effect/affect,” or “site/sight/cite” shows the writer to be uneducated, which reflects on the person’s professionalism. To say, “The principle benefit of our product…,” (rather than the correct, “The principal (or main) benefit…”) is to say to the reader that the writer misses important details and may be missing details in other areas as well. Professional people learn these details and practice their correct usage as a fundamental part of demonstrating competence and attention to quality.

If a sales rep routinely misses with sentence construction and comma usage, the reader marks that as a sign of sloppiness or not caring. One doesn’t need to know what an “independent clause” is to know that you punctuate a sentence with a capital letter and a full stop. That is fundamental to a correct presentation of English language for professional business people. When two sentences are separated by only a comma, from grade school we were taught to call this a “comma splice” and to avoid such an error and the “red” pen that marks it on the paper. If two sentences run together with no punctuation between them, again, we are taught since grade school that this is a “run-on sentence” that should be avoided.

Yet, far too often, in the communication of sales professionals, who in every way are trying to impress the client and work toward the trust and confidence needed to make the sale, we find grammar and spelling errors that mark the person as slopping and unthinking or, perhaps, just not well educated or not competent. The fundamentals of grammar and spelling, in a sales person’s limited and focused line of work, are very few, leaving the person no excuse to be anything other than correct in language use in emails or reports.

Sales Reps, like UAVs, Return Valuable Reconnaissance Information

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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are drone airplanes flown remotely by operators directing the plane and watching the action via computer screens. UAVs are called the “EYE IN THE SKY” in military operations because they fly over the battle space far ahead of the battle, communicating back to the Generals the movements of the enemy. It is said that “He who owns the reconnaissance, owns the war.” And delivering vital reconnaissance is why the UAVs have proven so valuable in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like the UAVs, the sales team is out on the front edge of the business competitive action, and sales reports with accurate, complete, and current information are the vital reconnaissance needed by leaders at the office to make good decision and take proper action.

Continuous Reporting and Feedback System

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Organization leadership should consider the sales organization as a partner in strategic data collection, with the organization leaders being the specific generators of strategic interest. This means that the Executive Council (all division or unit VPs and Sr. VPs), responsible for the operation of the organization should decide what they need to know from the customer base and the marketplace and then communicate those needs to the Sales team. Then, when a sales person is traveling to meet with customers, he or she will “look around” with the needs of the organization leaders in mind. The sales rep is now a partner with the organization leaders, gathering the specific information that leaders need to run their organizations and feeding it back into the organization through the sales meeting reporting system.

This teaming creates a tremendous learning environment for both the organization leaders and the sales team. The organization leaders have “eyes” out there in the marketplace, looking out for their needs, and the sales reps have “needs” in the organization that are asking for answers and information. Both are seeing, listening, learning, sharing, and collaborating. If the organization leaders communicate regularly with the sales team, and if the sales team members report accurate, complete, and current information immediately after the sales calls, we have a synergistic system of strategic knowledge sharing that has tremendous power to make an organization and individuals successful.

Thus, the Product Development VP might ask the sales team to look for customer or competitor product features that are positive or negative. This VP might ask the team to look around the property or ask around the offices about competitors and competitor programs, services, or products now being purchased. The Customer Service VP might ask the sales people to look specifically for any indications that current service is not serving the customers well, or to look for competitors who are serving the customers in new or improved ways, and then to report that information back to the VP through the sales reporting system. The Marketing VP might ask the sales team to promote a certain product or to sell according to a new promotion and then report back how the packaging, the names, the prices, and the products are received. The Finance VP might ask the sales reps to introduce a price increase or to change the pricing structure and to see how these changes are received. This VP might ask the sales team to inquire about competitors and if they are raising prices and by how much. All of this information is then reported back to the VP through the sales reporting system.

If the organization leaders “PULL” the information they need from their partners on the sales team, then give continuous and helpful feedback to the sales members when the information comes streaming back, then the sales people will feel a sense of belonging, a sense of importance and value, and a desire to work hard to meet the needs and expectations of their partners on the organization leadership team. Thus, the organization creates what is called a “double loop” feedback system, driven mostly by the organization leaders but maintained by continuous reporting and feedback among the leaders and the sales team members.

The Strategic Value of Sales Report Intelligence

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Nobody reads it! Nobody cares! Why am I doing this? We recently saw a sales report from a field rep who had been traveling on the road for several days. At the end of his sales report near the end of his trip, clearly discouraged, he puts these words in the report: “Is anyone reading this? Who are you? If you are reading this, please call me at [number]. I want to know who reads these reports. Does anyone care?” To be alone out on the road for several days is bad enough, but to think that no one cares is really de-motivating and discouraging. We hear often from the sales reps that reporting is all a waste of time because no one reads sales reports anyway. Stop to think for a moment – we try to motivate people in a thousand ways, but there is no greater motivator than a sales manager who reads the sales reports and gives immediate, honest, and helpful feedback, and then who moves the strategic information forward and upward in the organization, all the while giving the sales rep (by name, with cc: to sales rep) credit and praise for the information. The organization must “pull” for the information from the sales reps, want it badly, and earnestly seek it and reward it with attention and recognition and dignified and honest praise. After all, accurate, timely, and complete reconnaissance from the field is the dominating force that gives the Generals what they need to win the battle.”

Who’s Got The Monkey?

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Don’t let the monkey jump! A Harvard Business Review article titled “Who’s Got The Monkey?” talks about how weak managers let their employees push their responsibilities off on them rather than insist that they shoulder the responsibility. Weak sales managers who do not require their sales reps to report regularly on customer sales meetings have “let the monkey jump” onto their backs for gathering strategic information and disseminating it throughout the organization. To shift to another metaphor, these weak managers are letting the “tail wag the dog,” with the sales reps in control of the flow of strategic information from the field into the company. “Would you fire your top sales rep if he/she does not report regularly?” – Who has the monkey? Is the tail wagging the dog?

Why do the VP Customer Service and the Sales Reps Need to Talk?

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What does the VP of Customer Service want from the Sales rep when that person is out meeting with a customer? Do these two people communicate regularly? Does the Sales Rep know the issues and needs driving the VP CS? Does the VP CS know the issues and needs driving the Sales Rep? What if the two of them talked regularly and shared current and practical needs? Would the Sales Rep, with new eyes, look for Customer Service issues and needs in the meeting with the customer and then report them as a partner back to the VP CS? Would the VP CS encourage his/her people to watch out for the Sales Rep’s needs and to make sure those customers are being served with excellence so as to enhance the Sales Rep’s earning potential? Upstream and downstream, key people need each other to be successful. These relationships are a significant and valuable ASSET and competitive advantage to the organization and should be encouraged in every way possible. Consistent and thoughtful sales reporting, among partners in the organization, is the engine for powerful exchange, understanding, and action up and down the organization.