Are you getting value for money from your CRM solution?I have spoken to several Execs over the past few weeks about their CRM systems. I heard differing views when I asked the question "Are you getting the ROI that you expected from your CRM system?". The answers ranged from "Adoption has been difficult" to "I am not sure I trust the data" to "The repeatability brought to our Sales Process has shown significant improvements".
I have decided to write a blog entry to further the discussion and would appreciate your thoughts about the value you get from your CRM system. What aspects of your implementation add value to your business? What would you change? What are your biggest pain points?
Sometimes when you ask a question on LinkedIn responses are quick, and numerous. For example, previously, I asked which is more demoralising, losing a sale to a competitor that you know can't deliver or winning the deal to then have the project cancelled before you got started. Within a couple of days I had a large number of responses with varying views and a plethora of advice on how to avoid both issues.
My CRM question did solicit a few responses but not as many as I had hoped. Curiously, a number of the responses were sent directly to me, the authors preferring not to publicise their views. What conclusions can I draw from this?
My initial thought was that perhaps I could have worded the question differently. However, a more detailed review shows that, aside from one response from a friend that co-owns a CRM software company; most people didn't want to publicly admit that their CRM system provides little real value to the company. Senior management tended to not believe the data because it rarely proved a good indicator of actual performance and sales execs tended to avoid using the CRM system as much as possible because it was cumbersome and was seen as simply a management reporting tool.
It is clear to me that the adoption issue can be resolved. We have turned around a number of companies that were failing in their use of Salesforce through the application of our LEAN and BPM experience. Our starting point is always "How can we engineer the process to reduce waste and add value?" For some customers this has meant integrating with external databases like OneSource for company background and financial data or LinkedIn to help make connections to the potential client. For others it has meant integrating with internal systems like their ERP and document management systems to provide a 360 degree view of the client. Either way, it has been the Sales Execs that have driven the requirements and have therefore bought-in to the concept. As a natural consequence of better adoption we have achieved cleaner more accurate data within the system. Management dashboards and reporting have necessarily been more accurate and more believable.
Perhaps I should have reworded my question and aimed it at the Sales Execs and Business Development Teams? Perhaps I should have asked two questions?
1) "What additional information would significantly improve the quality of a lead in your CRM system?
2) "How would you simplify your CRM system to improve usability?"
In the last 30 years I’ve seen a plethora of trends in the software market. The two that currently dominate both A&M activity and end user buying behaviour are BPM and Cloud computing.
I have searched in vain to find an organisation that is truely process focused and has used BPM to derive Activity Based Costings across their business. This led me to thinking about what are the barriers and why aren’t companies achieving value from their BPM initiatives.
BPM is bought by many IT departments as panacea to the problem they have of trying to bridge the gap between user demands and their capacity to deliver. The slick vendor “Proof of Concepts” convince them that time to market and RoI are at their fingertips. Yet the first deployment in my experience is always a classic application that is owned by IT and not the business process owner. People are making the same mistakes with BPM as they did before with BI and CRM.
In my view this is because the process owner fails to establish the measures of success for the project upfront and IT let this happen. When requirements creep sets in, hey presto it’s an application delivered in 6 man months that has no reuseable components and is a nightmare to maintain.
The labour model for BPM projects is the single most important decision in the project – get this right and you have a team capable of building a cross discipline centre of excellence that can transform your business processes into value based processes that give automation, control, visibility and measurement.
Which leads me to the Cloud wave if you pardon the mixed metaphors! SaaS as an opex model was championed by frustrated users (those bullish sales types) that flocked to Salesforce et al. For todays graduates that are lucky to get a job, they land in a strange environment – the tools they use personally like Facebook, Twitter, I-Tunes and all the other social media tools are locked out behind the firewall of the enterprise they work in – they can’t even watch a YouTube video if they work for a government department. The usual tools they use to learn, communicate and get things done are taken away and they get indoctrinated in the “one size fits all” corporate computing domain that is suffocated by IT budget restrictions and complexity.
It strikes me that in the next 5 years it will be this user community that accelerates cloud / paas / saas solutions as a means of breaking down the firewall in order to do their jobs effectively as knowledge workers – IT will still own security / data / WAN but will anyone spend a fortune on in-house systems and networks as productivity tools or will people build their own virtual communications groups in the cloud that are permission based and have preference based disclosure? Chatter from salesforce is an early example of where I believe collaboration / convergence and content will collapse into one platform.
I guess there’s along way to go with BPM and Cloud but I can’t stop thinking that if all each organisation did effectively was one end to end process in 2010 and they experimented using the cloud to deliver it and MEASURE the results how many more they’d plan to do in 2011.
My company, Axispoint Solutions (http://www.axispoint.co.uk/) is a leading implementation partner for Salesforce.com and I am often called upon to be the Exec Sponsor for our larger deals.
It never ceases to amaze me that people believe that implementing a CRM system (Salesforce or otherwise) is the answer to their problems. Why is it so difficult to understand that a repository of data without a sales process will not yield competitive advantage? In order to be successful, your sales team need to have a greater understanding of your clients business than ever before. Your CRM system must provide rich data as part of the initial lead AND it must guide your sales team through the qualification and bid process.
We have shown (http://www.axispoint.co.uk/lead2cash/) a number of prospects how easy it is to link Salesforce with external systems like OneSource, Hoovers and Google News to provide the background information that give them an edge when calling or meeting their prospects and they are excited. However, too often, they fail to see the wisdom in ruthless qualification supported by a properly implemented sales process.
At Axispoint, our sales process (for complex sales) has a "Bid Review" step where the Sales Exec must:
- Show a full 360 degree understanding of the clients business,
- Be able to articulate the problem our solution will address,
- Monetize the As-Is and To-Be to demonstrate the RoI for the client,
- Describe their relationship with the problem owner, the budget holder, the IT Director and the Business Owner
- Demonstrate the clients desire to solve the problem and their ability to pay.
Unless all of the above can be demonstrated our sales process will not let us move on to the next step. It may be that the Sales Exec needs to do a little more work and re-review or we simply "No Bid". The key metric for us is that we are currently winning 90% of the opportunities that we decide to bid on. You might argue that we might win some of opportunities that we decide to "No Bid". However, with a 90% win/loss ratio and a better than 40% improvement on revenue year on year I don't mind one or two slipping through the cracks. I would mind if my sales team were wasting their time bidding on deals that we clearly aren't going to win.
Thoughts?
