In a recent study by the Alexander Group, Inc, more than half of the companies surveyed had a major re-launch of their CRM in the past four years. Why? Most companies in the study only used their application for contact, activity and account and opportunity management. Only 42% were using the CRM application for pipeline management. Why? Do we need more best practices on driving usage? Measuring adoption? No, let’s try a fresh approach.
For this fresh approach let’s look at What Makes a Good Sales Person. In this 2006 HBR article, David Mayer and Herbert Greenberg embark on seven years of field research in this area to improve sales selection. They gained insights into the basic characteristics necessary for a salesman to be able to sell successfully. The findings: that a good salesman must have at least two basic qualities: empathy and ego drive.
Ability to feel
Empathy, the important central ability to feel as the other fellow does in order to be able to sell him a product or service, is a key characteristic. Having empathy does not necessarily mean being sympathetic. One can know what the other fellow feels without agreeing with that feeling. But a salesman simply cannot sell well without the invaluable and irreplaceable ability to get powerful feedback from the client through empathy.
Need to conquer
The second of the basic qualities absolutely needed to sell well is a particular kind of ego drive that makes the salesperson want and need to make the sale in a personal or ego way, not merely for the money to be gained. He needs to believe he has to make the sale: the customer is there to help him fulfill his personal need. In effect, to the top salesperson, the sale—the conquest—provides a powerful means of enhancing the ego. His or her self-picture improves dramatically by virtue of conquest and diminishes with failure.
While this is an older study and a lot has changed in business over the past four years, these synergistic qualities are an age-old success component in top performers. Consider how someone strong in these competencies feels about your CRM system. Your installation is likely the most clinical, sanitized view of sales activities. From a people perspective, you have places for contact info, but does you system really house any information that humanizes that buyer and makes it a place for a highly empathetic individual to enjoy interacting? Probably not.
Now, let’s think about how your system reinforces the ego drive, the competition of the sales process. Does it celebrate winning? Not many do.
You can fix both issues easily and make your instance of CRM a more human tool that reinforces winning. In this day of social media, you know a lot about all the contacts and companies you are working with. A simple tool like OneSource iSell or Inside View can harness all the personal and business information you need. Think about your CRM being the source to learn about the breaking news from a target prospect along with personal info from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Now your CRM has a human element that is appealing to the highly empathetic seller.
How about celebrating the wins and driving ego? This isn’t about clip art of champagne bottles dancing across the screen. You can leverage dashboards and metrics to show sales people how they are performing, how they stack up against others and when they are beating their goals. Linking your CRM to a portal like SAVO will allow you to promote your top performers’ stories and spread their ideas, encouraging the ego.
These are just a couple ideas to make your CRM better appeal to the seller with strong empathy skills and high ego drive. Adoption of CRM is always a carrot and stick quandary, these are two carrots I believe are rarely considered.
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photo by Christian Stock