Sales at the center:  make your team your business’s life force

Take a moment to reflect:  what does your sales team mean to your organization?  Is your team the current that keeps the lights on, the critical component that brings in customers and keeps you in business?  If so, you view your sales team as a profit center.  But do your actions match that?

Under close examination, organizations may discover they treat their sales teams as cost centers.  Once a client comes on board, sales efforts become reactive.  This usually happens because the sales team has limited access to customer information and because it dedicates much of its energy to account management activities, rather than to proactive efforts to discover additional customer needs for new products or services.

Align corporate processes

Many organizations already have a wealth of information housed in multiple—sometimes disparate or unconnected—systems.  If your company is like most, the communication flow between sales and operations requires improvement, particularly as it relates to the management and distribution of customer information.

In all likelihood, for example, your sales team collects extremely pertinent customer information in the course of a sale.  The collected data will probably be both quantified and anecdotal; it will probably provide insight into the customer’s business and strategy, as well as significant detail surrounding customer needs and preferences.  This information provides a multidimensional platform for building a lasting customer relationship.

At some companies, however, responsibility for the transaction passes from sales to operations immediately following the sale.  And much of the highly relevant customer information sales has collected throughout the selling process may or may not be transferred to operations.  It may be held—and sometimes lost—in a data storage system to which others across the organization have limited or no access.

Valuable information about the customer may not be passed on to the person charged with managing the ongoing customer relationship.  As a result, the relationship manager may be unaware of issues, sources of customer dissatisfaction or opportunities to develop subsequent business until a major problem arises or until the client requests information about a specific product or service.  By then, the selling opportunity has probably been lost.

Within your organization’s communications stream, obstacles to the effective flow of relationship management information may be less operational than behavioral.  Data captured during the sales process is not always available to the people in your organization who promote long-term customer ties.

Instead, it may be “housed” in the salesperson’s mind or in a separate data storage system, where it may remain hidden from the operations side of the house.  Often, this obstacle forces operations to collect identical data all over again, an obvious example of unnecessary work for the organization and a source of irritation to your customer.

Many organizations neglect to proactively push information out to the sales team and then to integrate that information across the company.  A system that routinely shares, organizes and integrates customer information across the organization will maximize sales opportunities.  It does so by supporting a knowledge-based strategy designed to acquire and retain clients, build business with them and market to them.  This type of strategy is likely to give your company a competitive advantage.

Gather role-based information

Processes are often dictated by the organizational environment in which they develop.  For example, the information needed to generate leads, e.g., name, company, contact data, often differs from the information needed to manage accounts, e.g., credit limits, payment terms, profitability metrics.  Yet the availability of all relevant customer information on an as-needed basis is critical to ensure effective account penetration. Assess your sales processes, integrate sales and operations and make the information you already have in your systems readily available to those who need it.  Then build a strategy for collecting and entering data into your system, how and to whom it will be distributed and how it can best be used to pursue new sales.

Strategically, housing all of your customer data in one location promotes a holistic approach to relationship building.  Although your top salespeople may disagree, the customer relationships they create and build belong to the enterprise, not to them.  These invaluable relationships must not leave your organization if individual salespeople depart.  Managing the information surrounding your customer relationships will do much to ensure that customers are retained, and it will help successors make a smooth transition as they continue service to those customers.

Integrate data into your CRM system

Let’s say you are making full use of your customer relationship management (CRM) system for the first time.  You have integrated the program with all legacy and operational systems.  Collected data is transferred across operations, sales and marketing groups.  Information is passed back to your salespeople, notifying them of opportunities to capture new business.

In effect, you have designed a CRM system that gives your salespeople high-quality selling opportunities and the information and tools needed to close deals.  The system is focused on solution-based selling.  It provides maximum visibility to your enterprise’s customer; its use is not strategically integrated for optimal process and operating effectiveness.  It is imperative to recognize that only by aligning all your processes, including sales, with your system’s solution can you maximize your opportunity to achieve significant competitive advantage.

Your goal in implementing technology solutions is to develop a strategy that enables key processes to act as profit centers for the organization.  Your sales team heads the list of enterprise processes that will benefit from effective technology use.  A well-thought-out plan will show your sales team how it can become a profit center; how its people can generate increased revenues; the tools they can use to achieve that goal; the data that must be collected; and, most importantly, the benefits—in terms of enhanced sales and organizational performance—of integrating technology into the sales process.

Leverage your CRM implementation

Clearly, there is a direct and compelling case to be made for integrating a CRM system through your processes and across your organization.  But consider the ancillary benefits as well.  For example, you could build a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis around specific competitors.  Data from this analysis will enable you to determine why you win or lose sales against particular competitors.  Conclusions resulting from an analysis of this scope will help you develop best sales practices and identify critical process changes designed to win new business.

Your integrated CRM system will also enhance your organization’s internal management processes by providing an effective basis for building individual performance.  In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey observes, “If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.”  When you view your sales team as a profit center and provide the integrated systems and processes needed to support long-term relationship management, you are laying the groundwork for a bountiful harvest for your enterprise.  Water the flowers in your sales team through a fully integrated CRM system.

For help establishing these practices in your company, contact a member of the BKD Technologies team.

For more information on making the most of customer relationship management, BKD offers a monthly webcast to demonstrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  Register for a webcast.

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