"If it's not in Salesforce it doesn't ...." (You fill in the blank)

“ If it’s not in Salesforce it doesn’t __________” (You fill in the blank)

Exist?!?,

That statement haunts me, so here is my Sales Manifesto

I have heard it countless times over the last two decades from sales leaders across many different industries. (If I’m being honest, I’ve said it too). 

The manager’s intent is to “inspire” their team to be more disciplined about using CRM by withholding commissions. The assumption is that the lack of rigor is a pure laziness; i.e. it’s the human’s fault that the data is flawed.

Since I joined at Collective[i], I have come to believe that this assumption is wrong. That revelation blew my mind driving me look at sales management in a whole new light. (The last time this happened to me was when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone).

Plot twist…. How about this?

“If it is in Salesforce, does it really exist?

For me, the answer is definitively no, which means we all need to find a better way. 

My career has presented me the privilege of leading amazing sales teams representing some of the greatest companies in the world; Pepsi, FedEx, LinkShare, Rakuten, eBay and now, Collective[i]. 

CRM has been used for most of my professional life. I was an early adopter of Salesforce because I believed it was the best way to help my teams succeed. I believed.

I joined Collective[i] because of the groundbreaking solution it offers to B2B sales leaders who want to bring Artificial Intelligence into their organizations to help their teams be more successful. (Apologies for the shameless plug—happy to explain more directly, just shoot me an InMail).

I have seen the looks on our clients’ faces when it’s clear that their data situation is far worse than they imagined. 

These are extraordinary sales leaders who have invested hours of time and millions of dollars implementing CRM. They have used every tool in their arsenal to encourage adoption. They have devoted countless nights and weekends combing the data for insights to improve their teams’ performance. The cost to them in productivity and missed revenue is staggering.

So at the risk of being Captain Obvious, I can state that. across the board, CRM sales data is horrendous. To be clear this is not just a big company issue or a small company problem. This issue exists because of technology and the need for self-reported sales inputs. It is a “Do It Yourself Database”.

I marveled when I heard leaders say that they had solved it. In my current role, I can now say that those people have chosen to believe and not inspect. Dig a little deeper and they change their tune. No one has solved how to capture accurately the activities of their sales team by asking them to enter it into CRM.

I have been mulling over why no one has good data. It’s not management skill. These folks are across the board exceptional and highly respected by their teams. It’s not a lack of will. They spared no expense in time or money. It’s not underinvestment. They invested. It wasn’t for lack of wanting to win. These people are athletes.

It finally hit me. (Captain Obvious Statement #2)

Sales professionals hate CRM because it doesn’t work.

One thing I have learned is that enough reps say the same thing, it’s worth listening. In this case, 28% of them admit to entering no data at all while 22% report they withhold information. That’s long been the explanation for why CRM hasn’t produced the results that made us all buy it. 

If it were just a lack of motivation, however, sales managers would have solved it by now. Turns out the issues are deeper… 

Sales professionals are paid on commission and judged quarterly. So much of what they report in CRM is impacted by how they want to be perceived by their manager. (The flip side of “If it’s not in Salesforce it doesn’t exist” is “If I don’t want it to exist, I don’t put it in Salesforce”.)

Salesforce does not keep a history. Each day’s input overrides the past days. Everyone has a chance to rewrite what happened. CRM is truly just a grainy snapshot of human perception.

But it’s more than just a technology or motivational issue. The frequency that employees change jobs in the modern world means that 18% of our contacts are outdated after one year. Sales rep churn at a rate of 25% means that opportunities are moved around and data is compromised.

Perhaps the most damning reality is that we humans (no matter what our profession) are horribly inept at recalling events. We see and remember things that fit our worldview. (If you doubt me, take this test and see if you miss something big). https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/silent-gorilla-study-concentration-deaf_n_1612843.html

Turns out that, after all this effort, time and investment, the data source CRM relies on, people’s recollection and recounting of their activities, has created a worthless database of data so infused with bias and inaccuracy that meaningful analysis is near impossible, CRM data is a mess.

For almost everyone I talk to, fixing this issue is a major initiative using everything from new policies, more rigor, apps to supplemental technologies—lead scoring, data visualization, predictive analytics, (the list is endless). More carrots and sticks to make their teams enter more flawed data.

It just seems crazy to me that we have as profession accepted this as a way to manage the revenue of an organization.

None of us would rely on this level of data integrity to manage our accounting or treasury systems. Could you imagine a Vice President of Accounting being asked how much cash is on hand and the process of providing a rough approximation took days, countless levels of inspection and ended up being wrong more than half the time? It laughable when it comes to finance but in our sales organizations it is accepted as norm.

Like the CFO, we are responsible for the revenue that fuels the business. We, however, accept a much lower standard of accountability leads to mistrust from other members of the C-suite. In fact, I would argue that we spend a ton of time to manage around the problem.

I don’t blame sales for this. Nobody in our profession signed up to be a data entry clerk or spend countless hours trying to make sense of raw data. I blame CRM! It’s the technology, not us. 

Somehow Salesforce administration has devolved into Salesforced administration. This evolution creates an adversarial relationship between sales managers and their teams distracting everyone from the shared goal of selling. It’s a shame when I see sales skills applied to defending data logged into CRM rather than selling to customers. 

Top tier sales professionals are exceptional storytellers, negotiators, relationship builders, and advocates for the companies and products they represent. The fact is that most chose this field because it played to these strengths. The sad reality is that they spend roughly 60% of their time doing administrative tasks (data input, research, manager briefings, etc.) that leverage none of these talents. 

Sales managers don’t want to be data clerks either. The best chose their role because they like to coach and mentor talent to win. Their legacy should be the number of times they led their teams to victory—not the cleanliness of their CRM data. 

The good news is that if machines can replace some of these tasks with more accuracy, sales professionals will be finally free to apply our team's talents to winning. 

In today’s modern sales organization, most of our communications between buyers and sellers is done electronically and stored in the cloud through applications like email, VOIP, video conferencing, document sharing, and contract management.

All of these applications and tools have log files that can easily be imported automatically into Collective[i]'s network to create a system of record. The benefit is that we can capture a much more accurate representation of your sales team's interaction with buyers without the need for manual data input. Automating the insights to be derived from that data is a win-win-win for managers, professionals and their customers. 

Accurate data and transparency gives managers insight without asking the sales team to take time away from selling. Sales professionals can focus their efforts on the outcomes, versus the logging of the activity.

It’s time for sales organizations to take a serious look at alternatives to managing people based on a hopeless data set. Instead of managers managing data, why not simply provide them intelligence? Rather than policing data and withholding commission, why not let a machine analyze the activities they are doing to sell (email, calendar, etc.) and automatically generate insights that lead to revenue?

My company, Collective[i] helps companies large and small solving these problems once and for all, allowing them to plug into an AI powered data network of sales activity to manage teams. We provide an application that combines a network of data with machine learning/artificial intelligence to focus teams on outcomes. We can even eliminate the need for manual data input. (Apologies for the second plug but a problem without a solution is only frustration).

For me, accepting that CRM is a fundamentally flawed data source opened my mind to the possibility of finding alternative ways to capture data that will help my team win.

After years of asking my teams to enter data into CRM, it appears that it may all have been a colossal waste of talent. I am mad at myself for all the years I forced my teams to enter this flawed data into CRM, but more angry for the lost time, money and hard work. Now that there is a better approach I have a feeling I won’t be the only one sharing those feelings.

I’d love to hear your perspective on it and the known flaws in the CRM data experience we all share. 

Here are a few to kick things off:

·   The End of Quarter Data Dump (a.k.a. All the deals I didn’t want to discuss in our weekly meeting but I want to get paid for now that they are closing).

·   The Pre-Weekly Meeting Surge (a.k.a. The sudden advancement of deals that all change stages on the day before my weekly status meeting with my manager).

·   The Perfect Pipeline (a.k.a. What’s reported by a rep just put on a plan).