CRM, SFA, and Sales Enablement. Not The Same
Tony J. Hughes
Sales Leadership for a Better Business World - Keynote Speaker, Best-selling Author, Management Consultant and Sales Trainer
Customer churn is a cancer eating away at most businesses. To combat this and be truly customer-centric, you must have an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy supported by the right CRM technology. Yet placing customers at the heart of a business is all about people, culture and processes rather than technology. Beyond client retention, businesses also need to acquire new customers and this is best driven with Sales-Force Automation (SFA), usually also from within a CRM integrated with other best of breed marketing automation and social selling tools. SFA is about bringing sales and marketing together to align with the buyer’s journey and also support sales people’s early engagement for proactive demand generation.
But here is an important distinction: CRM and SFA are actually two different things. They may be enabled by similar technologies but real sales enablement is all about methodology, process, training, coaching, playbooks, planning, profiling, research tools, insight creation, and much more. CRM success or failure has little to do with the technology you use and everything to do with how it’s implemented. Although it's true that you cannot manage what you don't measure, CRM must be implemented to serve users and customers rather than as a database for management. CRM should be a strategy and a process, rather than a product and reporting tool. The best CRM implementations therefore incorporate sales methodology integrated within an organization's specific sales processes so that sales people can be coached to ensure that tactics and actions are linked to strategy. This approach delivers best practice and accountability in the sales team.
CRM software should be where sales methodology, process and coaching all come together. The system should obsessively put customers at the heart of the organization with account managers and sales people fully equipped through a single view of everything that can be managed. This means integration with social selling tools such as LinkedIn and marketing automation tools is essential. When implementing SFA or CRM, think about the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle… how can you support your sales people to deliver an integrated, high value experience for prospects and customers?
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Sales Leadership for a Better Business World - Keynote Speaker, Best-selling Author, Management Consultant and Sales Trainer
10 年Thanks Pascale. I used to me Managing Director of SugarCRM in ANZ and I'm actually a big fan of CRM... essential for all businesses. But few use it well.
Sales Performance consultant, facilitator and coach. Helping B2B leaders Accelerate Revenue Growth. I Design & implement sales transformations. Diagnostic | Sales Messaging | Sales Process | Sales Enablement & Coaching
10 年Great article Tony, I like the diagram with the coach in the centre using the CRM, methodologies and processes to understand what to coach.
B2B Consulting at SPT Group
10 年Hiring the right tools to do the right jobs. Without a sound process you can't look at the right metrics. Much easier to see what's going on when the right processes are visualised. Great article Tony.
Consulting
10 年Tony, Good Article. You made the comment to say "the CRM is where the, Sales Methodology, process and coaching comes together" and i agree. But this only works if the leadership of the company have done the training or understand the content to do the coaching and follow the playbook developed. All the investment will be lost if leaders don't walk the talk.
Developing Rainmakers. Helping Independent Consultants GAIN Clarity, Control, Confidence & Conversations. Running the Rainmaker community I started pre-pandemic. Interested in #AI for Consultants.
10 年Great post Tony, and to contribute to the discussion I suggest going back to basics, and work out what the RELATIONSHIP strategy is first. It's going to be different for Customers and for Prospects. And the concept of Managing the relationship is under scrutiny. A Communications Management Platform to handle trigger and response activity may be a more appropriate concept. Integrating Social and LinkedIn is essential in B2B (shame LinkedIn pulled the API). Marketing Automation can be applied to some triggers, to generate responses that are triggers for the next step. And when a sales person can add value to the buyer they are included in the sequence. Social is part of the disruption in sales and it's triggering some interesting new thinking.