Feature article: CRM - customise and conquer

Cambashi believes that CRM can help when IT budgets are tight, but only if you customise it to pack a bigger punch. Many sales staff are struggling, and recent reports show that current deployments of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems aren't much help to direct sales organisations (see press articles). Sales and marketing need to work in step to use the customised CRM as part of a carefully planned team effort.

New thinking habits

First: Understand that the rules have changed. IT is now just part of your customer's company budget. Being accepted as the trusted advisor to a single internal champion, the IT director or CIO, is no longer enough. You have to knock on a lot more doors. Line of business managers in production, sales and distribution set their own investment budgets. They can choose to swap IT spending with budgets for recruitment or machines.

Second: Think of sales as providing information rather than advice. Show how your offer solves the user's problem by explaining to line of business managers how you solved similar problems for others, and how much payback was achieved.

Third: Rethink CRM. Customise it to focus effort on your organisation's strengths. This means the business processes where you can prove success - for example, asset management, or supply chain management - not just industry sectors.

Working together, marketing and sales must identify these successes, develop them into scenarios, and use these scenarios to create more success.

How to change

Step one: Plan
Analyse how business was won, and identify half a dozen scenarios where you regard yourself as particularly competitive. Get buy-in from sales by making sure the sales coverage model fits these scenarios. Together, draw up lists of companies to whom each scenario applies.

Step two: Content generation
Identify the following for each company in each scenario: Industry sector, size, organisation and competitor profiles Case studies showing your solution being deployed in that type of company Key line of business (LOB) managers Likely concerns for the LOB managers Who you'll compete with Give the sales representatives examples of leading questions, which identify each LOB manager's particular problems, and how your products and services can solve them. Forearm the sales team with information on what competitors can offer, sales objections the manager is likely to raise, and how to counter them.

Step three: Sales calls
Call systematically on each of the companies - include line of business managers, as well as normal contacts. Qualify them for opportunities.

Step four: Customise your CRM
Customise the CRM 's Opportunity Management System (OMS) so that it is easy for the sales representatives to enter data. Input scenario specific information ahead of time, and minimise number of fields to be completed by the sales team. For example, if the scenario is Transportation Management, ensure that the organisation structure and typical business concerns for each key player are already in the system. All the sales representative has to do is input the names and tick which issues apply.

Step five: Support the sales team with newsflow
Create a digital library - like Cambashi's e-Xpert for desk research - which provides insights on business issues and digests of up to the minute news relating to the firms sales representatives are targeting. Creating the library is easier than you think. Spiders scan the Internet and build databases of useful pages. Intelligent agents act as filters to deliver headlines of articles relevant only to the particular company the sales person is about to visit.

Remember, CRM can work. But only if you work on CRM.

Mike Evans
mike.evans@cambashi.com

Also in this issue:

Hot topic: Web Positioning
You may have a great website but are you getting the traffic you would like? Melanie Bradley gives some valuable hints on how to improve the number of hits on your website.

Conference Review :Teknik and Data, Odense
As a change from our normal book review we have substituted a conference review. Teknik and Data took place in Odense in February and was attended by Bob Brown and Jens Kudsk Jensen.

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