 "<b>Book Extract</b>: Social CRM")
THE NEW RULES OF SALES & SERVICE: HOW TO USE AGILE SELLING, REAL-TIME CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT, BIG DATA, CONTENT, AND STORYTELLING TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS
Author: David Meerman Scott
Publisher: Wiley
Price: $28
ISBN: 9781118827857
As you consider real-time technology to help you with agile, social selling, you'll need to be very careful about the role of your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Many medium-size and large organisations have an enterprise CRM system in place that the entire sales force uses. Frequently the marketing and customer support staff use the system as well. CRM software is used by organisations to manage a company's interactions with current and future customers. It is used to manage the process of how people inside a company interact with existing and potential customers, and typically it includes an automated component that tracks a particular buyer's history of contacts by a salesperson. There are many specialised CRM systems for industry-specific applications such as the insurance industry, healthcare, and nonprofits, as well as general systems for B2B and consumer businesses.
The large providers of CRM software designed their products in the 1990s, and the category of enterprise CRM grew quickly with the widespread availability of networked computing during the 1990s, and then the shift to software as a service (SaaS) computing in the first decade of the 2000s. And that's the fundamental problem - these software systems were developed in the era of traditional selling, when salespeople made cold calls and followed up on sales leads. CRM as it exists today wasn't designed and built for a world in which the buyer is in charge. Contemporary CRM software still reflects the old paradigm in which the salesperson initiates the action, and, therefore, it is flawed.
Today, the buyers decide when they want to engage a salesperson. When the salesperson was in charge, the old CRM work flow model- charting a path from initial lead, to the first call, to a face-to-face meeting, to the negotiation phase, and ending with the close - made sense. No longer. Today, if I'm interested in buying something, I go to a dozen websites and do the research. And then at some point when I've built up my body of knowledge, I reach out, typically electronically, and tell the company that I'm ready to take the next step. The old CRM systems don't manage this process well.
The word relationship in customer relationship management isn't even that accurate, because the software isn't really about relationships at all. Instead, CRM systems are a transactional database for management reports. They're optimized for sales management reporting based on a hierarchical, top-down, command-and-control process where sales management doesn't trust salespeople. While there is certainly benefit for salespeople to use today's CRM platforms, most people in sales don't like them because the platforms require them to log in and record their every action with a potential customer. This takes valuable time away from their primary task - selling - and diverts it toward updating and maintaining the activity log so that sales management can see what they are doing. Salespeople are required to estimate the likelihood that the deal will close primarily so that sales management can run a forecast report for senior executives.
"Sales force automation is in trouble," says Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, a sales force effectiveness consulting firm. "This software was originally sold with the promise that it would increase the productivity of the individual sales representative. Vendors insisted that if you are a sales rep and use it, you would sell better. But in fact, that didn't happen. Why? People installed the technology prematurely. An automation tool is meant to automate a process, but if you don't have a process, you make chaos. And you end up performing chaotic activities more frequently. It actually hurts. It doesn't help."
CRM systems should do a better job of helping sales representatives understand buyer context, but CRM wasn't built to do that. Instead the systems were created to help sales reps organize how they're going to take a prospect through the sales process, and bubble it up to the sales VP. And now, in a world where there are so many signals coming in from potential or hungry buyers when they visit your website, interact with your email campaigns, or enter discussions on social media, modern and effective CRM technology should be aggregating all this data. For example, if someone posts a comment or a question to your company blog, there should be a mechanism that analyses the context of the post against all potential customers and alerts salespeople to exactly which buyer would be interested. Yet existing CRM systems don't do this. CRM should be much more focused on helping salespeople to deliver a better buying process.
CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara agrees that CRM systems as deployed today aren't up to the task. Ferrara founded GoldMine CRM in 1989 with a college friend and built a business that achieved two million customers. GoldMine ranked number 154 on the 1997 Inc. 500 and was sold to FrontRange in 1999. A decade later, Ferrara founded Nimble, a service for small businesses that unifies email, calendar activities, and popular social channels - including Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter - and links to business contacts. "The whole idea of CRM goes back to the command-and-control mentality of the old-school company," he says. "I believe enterprise CRM was invented because management was concerned that the salespeople had their contacts, but management didn't have access or control of the information, and they couldn't report on their sales activities properly. Management wanted to lock up the contacts and own them; they wanted to keep track of what the salespeople were doing and chart the process. They forced salespeople to put their contacts into the CRM. But most don't fill in their real contacts; they keep the keys to their golden contacts in places like Linkedln, and they only put enough into the CRM to get paid their commission."
The problem here is huge. Modern social selling just doesn't work on the CRM platforms that were built during an obsolete era when sellers controlled both information dissemination and the selling process. And it certainly doesn't work on burdensome systems that were designed as reporting tools for senior management.
"We now have an opportunity to break free of the traditional CRM approach to selling," says Greg Alexander. "For example, LinkedIn is getting into social selling with an app called Linkedln Context that salespeople populate with simple things like telephone numbers, email addresses, Twitter handles, notes about how you met this person, and how you are connected. 1 can tag somebody as an influencer in my connection taxonomy, for example. A client would be tagged as a client, and a prospect would be tagged as a prospect.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Author: David Meerman Scott
Publisher: Wiley
Price: $28
ISBN: 9781118827857
As you consider real-time technology to help you with agile, social selling, you'll need to be very careful about the role of your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Many medium-size and large organisations have an enterprise CRM system in place that the entire sales force uses. Frequently the marketing and customer support staff use the system as well. CRM software is used by organisations to manage a company's interactions with current and future customers. It is used to manage the process of how people inside a company interact with existing and potential customers, and typically it includes an automated component that tracks a particular buyer's history of contacts by a salesperson. There are many specialised CRM systems for industry-specific applications such as the insurance industry, healthcare, and nonprofits, as well as general systems for B2B and consumer businesses.
The large providers of CRM software designed their products in the 1990s, and the category of enterprise CRM grew quickly with the widespread availability of networked computing during the 1990s, and then the shift to software as a service (SaaS) computing in the first decade of the 2000s. And that's the fundamental problem - these software systems were developed in the era of traditional selling, when salespeople made cold calls and followed up on sales leads. CRM as it exists today wasn't designed and built for a world in which the buyer is in charge. Contemporary CRM software still reflects the old paradigm in which the salesperson initiates the action, and, therefore, it is flawed.
Today, the buyers decide when they want to engage a salesperson. When the salesperson was in charge, the old CRM work flow model- charting a path from initial lead, to the first call, to a face-to-face meeting, to the negotiation phase, and ending with the close - made sense. No longer. Today, if I'm interested in buying something, I go to a dozen websites and do the research. And then at some point when I've built up my body of knowledge, I reach out, typically electronically, and tell the company that I'm ready to take the next step. The old CRM systems don't manage this process well.
The word relationship in customer relationship management isn't even that accurate, because the software isn't really about relationships at all. Instead, CRM systems are a transactional database for management reports. They're optimized for sales management reporting based on a hierarchical, top-down, command-and-control process where sales management doesn't trust salespeople. While there is certainly benefit for salespeople to use today's CRM platforms, most people in sales don't like them because the platforms require them to log in and record their every action with a potential customer. This takes valuable time away from their primary task - selling - and diverts it toward updating and maintaining the activity log so that sales management can see what they are doing. Salespeople are required to estimate the likelihood that the deal will close primarily so that sales management can run a forecast report for senior executives.
"Sales force automation is in trouble," says Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, a sales force effectiveness consulting firm. "This software was originally sold with the promise that it would increase the productivity of the individual sales representative. Vendors insisted that if you are a sales rep and use it, you would sell better. But in fact, that didn't happen. Why? People installed the technology prematurely. An automation tool is meant to automate a process, but if you don't have a process, you make chaos. And you end up performing chaotic activities more frequently. It actually hurts. It doesn't help."
CRM systems should do a better job of helping sales representatives understand buyer context, but CRM wasn't built to do that. Instead the systems were created to help sales reps organize how they're going to take a prospect through the sales process, and bubble it up to the sales VP. And now, in a world where there are so many signals coming in from potential or hungry buyers when they visit your website, interact with your email campaigns, or enter discussions on social media, modern and effective CRM technology should be aggregating all this data. For example, if someone posts a comment or a question to your company blog, there should be a mechanism that analyses the context of the post against all potential customers and alerts salespeople to exactly which buyer would be interested. Yet existing CRM systems don't do this. CRM should be much more focused on helping salespeople to deliver a better buying process.
CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara agrees that CRM systems as deployed today aren't up to the task. Ferrara founded GoldMine CRM in 1989 with a college friend and built a business that achieved two million customers. GoldMine ranked number 154 on the 1997 Inc. 500 and was sold to FrontRange in 1999. A decade later, Ferrara founded Nimble, a service for small businesses that unifies email, calendar activities, and popular social channels - including Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter - and links to business contacts. "The whole idea of CRM goes back to the command-and-control mentality of the old-school company," he says. "I believe enterprise CRM was invented because management was concerned that the salespeople had their contacts, but management didn't have access or control of the information, and they couldn't report on their sales activities properly. Management wanted to lock up the contacts and own them; they wanted to keep track of what the salespeople were doing and chart the process. They forced salespeople to put their contacts into the CRM. But most don't fill in their real contacts; they keep the keys to their golden contacts in places like Linkedln, and they only put enough into the CRM to get paid their commission."
The problem here is huge. Modern social selling just doesn't work on the CRM platforms that were built during an obsolete era when sellers controlled both information dissemination and the selling process. And it certainly doesn't work on burdensome systems that were designed as reporting tools for senior management.
"We now have an opportunity to break free of the traditional CRM approach to selling," says Greg Alexander. "For example, LinkedIn is getting into social selling with an app called Linkedln Context that salespeople populate with simple things like telephone numbers, email addresses, Twitter handles, notes about how you met this person, and how you are connected. 1 can tag somebody as an influencer in my connection taxonomy, for example. A client would be tagged as a client, and a prospect would be tagged as a prospect.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2014 David Meerman scott. All rights reserved.
MEET THE AUTHOR
- Scott has authored 10 books, including bestsellers Real-Time Marketing and PR, Newsjacking and World Wide Rave
- He serves as an advisor to emerging companies that are working to transform their industries by delivering disruptive products and services. His advisory clients include HubSpot, VisibleGains, ExpertFile, Foxtrot Systems and GutCheck as well as non-profits including the Grateful Dead Archive at University of California Santa Cruz
- A graduate from Kenyon college, Scott has lived in New York, Tokyo, and Hongkong
David Meerman Scott
Marketing & Sales Strategist
Marketing & Sales Strategist