CRM Resonance

What Is CRM Resonance and 5-Questions To Assess Your Own Situation

Paul Reed Smith builds some of the best electric guitars in the world, and his company PRS, does it on a global scale. Paul's take on guitar making is defined by one principle: the more stuff you can remove from a guitar without sacrificing function, the better it will be. PRS instruments all follow this architectural convention. Better materials, more clarity of voice, and less density...

And that does not mean PRS guitars are less than “feature rich.” They are some of the most functionally robust in the industry, widely used across musical genres.

So, why does this design quirk lay at the root of PRS’ success and why am I inspired by this fact?

Because Music is about resonance and... I think CRM is too.

CRM? Music? What?

Reframing for a second... what does CRM stand for?

Crush

Revenue

Majorly

That's it right?? Maybe in our dreams... but no, of course we all know it stands for Customer Relationship Management.

CRM is a lot more like guitars than one might think, and sometimes professional users of CRM do forget the meaning behind the acronym.

To be sure we're focusing on the meaning behind the words "Customer" and "Relationship"... we should honestly ask ourselves what sales philosophy our team is living by today? What type of operation and tech-stack will help us crush quotas and exceed targets in the long-term?

Is it technical trickery? Is it lots and lots of notes scattered across hundreds of records for every account? Is it personal info on your prospects you probably shouldn’t know (from proprietary sources)?

Perhaps it's the new A.I., flying around your CRM and raining down wisdom!

Maybe so... and maybe one day soon...

To me though, it is something more to do with the simple belief that sales are a by-product of helping people.

Don't get me wrong...

Helping People does not preclude the use of amazing technology... but density of CRM "tooling" and CRM data, can distract, disarm, and possibly preclude your team helping people.

So, if Revenue teams want to focus on helping customers achieve their goals and solve their problems because we are playing a people game... and the more data, tools, clicks and tabs between us and the customer, the less able we are to focus on that game, how can we change our technology to enable this type of operation?

Like guitars, CRM is about resonance.

Resonance implies clarity and empathy; communicating through the siloed walls between our teams, and offering our helping hands across the aisle from our customer (helping to solve the right problems...).

Resonate based on what people really care about, based on what keeps people up at night... what dreams people aspire to.

So, here are 5 questions I would ask to assess your team's level of resonance, and to identify if a shift in your tech-stack will help or hurt that 'metric' :

1. Can we currently identify key-people in our target accounts? 1.1 Do we have data-driven targeting of accounts to begin with?

2. Can we initiate multiple threads of communication with those people?

3. Is our diverse team all able to contribute by ensuring their notes are taken and kept in a clearly-structured and singular place?

4. Can managers find this info easily and are they able to make solid action-oriented decisions to guide their team cohesively?

5. Does our team have a cross-functional feedback loop in play?

To me, this is resonance. Revenue team operations drive data to an account manager who can see the forest for the trees...

Open communication and visibility between them and you've got something potentially magical.

So, is your CRM an instrument capable of resonance?

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