Leveraging CRM
With the prevalence of costly CRM and sales management or navigation systems in use by most big organisations today, it is clear that businesses generally are keen to automate and integrate their approach to selling and customer relationships with their IT systems.
Many are saying that the money they have spent has not yet returned the investment – or even come close to it.
Nonetheless, many people today are saddled with a relatively intelligent, Windows-based system that, at the click of a mouse, tells them what to do next in their sales process. It presents, for example, the sequence of events required to manage their sales pipeline, analyse who the competition are and plot the key decision-makers and influencers within target accounts. For sales management too, it can provide such valuable data as performance versus quarter-end or annual targets.
In other words, it offers a range of valuable insights as to how the world looks within the sales environment in which they operate. But other than knowing which buttons to click, do most people really have any skills to use these CRM systems. By which we mean: when the dashboard tells them which competitor is a threat, which individuals they need to see next, or which product of service fits their profile, do they know HOW to hold the next persuasive conversation that will move the sale out of the CRM server and onto the customer's shopping list?
