‘Why invest so much in a CRM tool’ and run the risk of a suboptimal ROI when not tackling everything what is needed for a successful adaptation and usage by teams and leaders?

If one of the objectives of buying and implementing a CRM tool is to make your teams more effective and efficient then it’s good to drill down further on what it means to have clear and uniform commercial processes and commercial roles in place?

What happens when there are no clear and uniform Commercial processes and Commercial roles in place?

• • It is not 100% clear what is expected from teams and leaders, it will not be clear ‘what excellence looks like’. No tool will solve this for you.
  • You can monitor success of your sales teams via quantitative KPIs. These however will not improve the quality of their sales activities. And it will not improve how your leaders develop and coach their teams. No tool will do this for you.
  • If commercial roles are not clearly defined then there can be a lack of ownership or worse, some of your people are not doing what you want them to do. For example:
    Sales versus Service role. First, there are different ‘what excellence looks like’ and different capabilities/different profiles linked to these roles (which can still be in one person if he/she has all the capabilities needed for both roles). Some important questions here to ask:
    • Are your Sales reps too much focused on solving problems with Customers? (Servicing), too much focused on transactional selling and not on value selling?
    • Are they well prepared, with clear objectives, do they identify how to grow the business with the customer based on the right interpretation of all kinds of data and information?
    • Are they focused on informing customers on new product and service features or are they asking all kinds of relevant questions linked to customer needs, business Opportunities?

The outcome of implementing clear commercial processes and who does what in that process (roles/tasks) will be more opportunity, action and customer centric driven commercial teams. Teams which are motivated to perform better and better.
And consequently, you will get more sales in and better bottom-line results.
It will make excellent performance transparent and easier to monitor and measure. A CRM tool and other tools (content, management information tools) will strongly support you with that, as long as you make sure the tool follows the process and not the other way around.

What are some key elements of Commercial processes?

1. The customer contact sales process (visits, (online) meetings, calls, events, etc)
   If you look at the Sales side, all what is needed to get optimal preparations, optimal contact moments with the customer and follow ups afterwards.
   An example of an item when preparing a customer contact moment/meeting is whether account managers and sales reps draw the right conclusions from all available data and info.
   This is closely linked to identifying opportunities to grow business with the customer (pipeline management).
   Part of the customer contact process can also be contract (re-) negotiations, follow up on objectives defined in the account plan, a stakeholder analysis (buying centre analysis), a customer SWOT, competitive and market analysis.
   Concepts like value selling versus transactional selling, resulting in desired behaviour of account managers and sales reps during the meeting with the customer play a crucial role here.
   And does the workflow and dashboards in the CRM tool support your managers to coach and develop their teams to improve the quality of their sales activities?
   Does your management know actually how to effectively coach and develop their teams?
   For example, improve the way all kinds of data and info is analysed and interpreted by the teams before the contact with the customer? Do they lead by example?

2. Cooperation Marketing and Sales

• Are the content needs of account managers and sales reps during the customer contact sales process clearly defined and clearly catered for by Marketing? Based on customer needs, business opportunities and competitor and market info?
  In the market, there are some very good examples of companies who can offer you the most excellent content platforms. They will support you with this but will not determine whether the content is used in the right way…..(same as with CRM tools)
• Lead Management: Does Marketing get qualified leads in with Campaign Management efforts which Sales can turn into new customers?
• New Product and Service launches: is this done based on customer needs and defined in cross-functional teams?

Next time, I will share my experience on commercial processes linked to Key/Global Account Management and the establishment of data driven and cross- functional Commercial Performance Processes.