There’s an old rule-of-thumb in the sales business, and it goes like this: A-Time is what you get paid to do; B-Time is preparing for A-Time, and C-Time is everything else. In Sales, the A-Time is what you want more of – being in front of customers, and the C-Time, typically administrative tasks, is what you want to decrease. Easy, right?
Except it isn’t easy at all. We want salespeople to keep good notes about their sales calls, manage opportunities through every sales stage, participate in a proposal or quote process, and report their forecast accurately and completely, but what they get paid to do is to be in front of customers, selling the products or services that fuel the company to which they belong.
Salespeople are inherently resistant to anything else. It just seems to be part of the wiring. Because their company needs them to do certain administrative tasks, and they don’t, the company spends more money to document that which salespeople will not. In fact, I know of one company that actually paid a sales assistant to go through every salesperson’s calendar and catalog their customer appointments so that the sales manager could have a report – which he would then use to berate them.
What?
No wonder salespeople hate CRM. It’s nothing but a big ol’ stick used by managers to beat salespeople into submission.
I bet if you polled one hundred random salespeople at companies which have implemented a CRM solution of some kind, you would find that ninety of those salespeople do the barest minimum in CRM that they can get away with and still keep their jobs.
There’s only one way to change that, and it ties in to my earlier post in which I said something along the lines of “until we start thinking of CRM as a sales tool, and not as a management tool, salespeople will continue to hate it.” In that post, I also promised that we’d delve into this a bit more.
Here it is: As long as CRM usage is C-Time, it’s not going to work as well as you’d like. The trick here is to turn CRM into B-Time – which is preparing for A-Time, which is being in front of customers, selling. In point of fact, CRM can play a big role in A-Time, too.
What if your sales team could easily research companies, view social profiles, find social connections, view insights, and even create quotes and proposals from within the CRM platform – and from any device, from any location? What if they could take notes while in a customer meeting and have those notes become part of the CRM record? What if they could query inventory, lock down pricing, and close a deal without ever leaving the customer’s office?
It’s not only possible; in today’s fast-paced, increasingly competitive world, it’s needed.
Imagine that world. You could live there. Your salespeople could decrease their C-Time, increase their A-Time, and your sales numbers will be the envy of your industry.
Sounds like a great place to be, to me. Easy as ABC.
Covenant Insights 