A big supplier I work with just spit out a mandate to gather a little more detail regarding the activity of the sales team. “We just need a little more visibility,” they say. “Just a little more. That’s all. Just a teeny tiny little, tiny little bit.”
They asked for a couple of sentences describing the interaction their team members had with clients during visits. That is all. No big deal. Just a couple of sentences about what happened during the visit, call, seance, ho-down, teams-drinking-video-poker-chat. Just a quick note. “We just need visibility.”
Here is a note to those of you in charge of CRM or those of you who manage a sales team. When asked for this, everyone knows you will not read these little bits of sales haiku. You will not read them until it’s discipline time or worse, time to thin the heard. Everyone knows that you are asking to sow the seeds of their buddies’ ultimate demise. These “just a couple of sentences” become a true struggle for survival. A threat to one’s very existence. Like the wildebeests swimming across the river to perceived safety of the other side of your CRM alligator pit.
“It’s just a quick little note about what happened. We need to know.”
So if you truly want to know what’s going on, words are not going to tell you ANYTHING except what your people think you want to hear. Period. And you can’t generate a report that is useful from a pile of words… WAIT…that’s not true. You can run a report of how many times your sales people say “wildebeest”.
Numbers are going to tell you something. Numbers and Dates. Put those in a report. Ask for numbers. And if your CRM is too complicated to have a place to select the stuff they spoke about, and add a percentage NUMBER to score the meaningfulness of the presentation, then YOU need a new CRM. Not a new policy and most certainly, not a new sales team.
Please don’t let your CRM run your company. Your company needs to run your CRM. If your CRM will not bend to your will, call us at RepDonkey. Aside from our custom CRM product for independent sales agencies, we can customize and beat your current CRM into submission. Our team of developers get sales. They get data. They get your team.