Sales execs and their managers must change to meet customer needs in the e-commerce age, says Cambashi managing director and senior partner Mike Evans. But, so far, he told those attending Cambashi's 12th annual seminar, CRM hasn't helped them.

Tomorrow's sales force will rely less on the 20 per cent of stars who bring in 80 per cent of the revenue. Their skill is acting as trusted advisors who can adapt their product offer to the customer's problem.

But industrial users now seek productivity across the enterprise, beyond one individual's ability to solve a problem: "It's difficult now to knock on all the doors that need to be knocked on," says Evans. "So sales people have to be team players."

Winning business in this climate is a marathon. Team members touch different parts of the customer's business and coordinate different parts of the bid, passing the baton as it advances. This calls for less assertiveness and more listening.

Sales staff do need more IT support. Sales Force Automation (SFA) should help teams decide how to deal with this or that customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) vendors say CRM can help but, based on current functionality and deployment, says Evans, they're wrong. CRM has worked well in call centres but, so far, encounters for face to face sales forces "have been awful experiences". CRM systems are generic and uninformative, built round a B2C model inappropriate for B2B.

They rely on the salesman repeatedly entering data about product, opportunity, target industry and so on for each prospect. This stops the best reps from meeting targets. No sales staff are tempted to spend a day on the road then another two hours entering what happened into the CRM system. CRM will become a 'dirty acronym', says Evans, and predicts CRM disaster stories will proliferate before the year end.

Also read what Cambashi had to say about the enterprise applications market at the Cambashi Seminar 2002