You are Killing Sales Force!

Many including me have been critical of the CRM. But lets be honest its NOT the CRM. SFDC might be the best piece of automation invented in the history of sales productivity solutions. The product is easy to use, easy to learn and clearly automates a massive amount of work that used to be manual!

Therefore is it Sales Force or is it the way SFDC is being used? I promise it is the way it is being used!

Automation can and often does bring massive productivity gains. However, when misused it always brings faster decline and quite often disaster. There is no one that would argue that the car was one of the most important inventions of the last century. The amount of productivity gains is immeasurable. But what happens when you drive a car at breakneck speeds on busy roadways? Yup, generally and accident or worse! However, we have rules of the road that are followed by society that make the car a safe and productive alternative to walking or other non motorized forms of transportation.

However, with SFDC its the wild wild west! I would venture to say that there are probably not two SFDC implementations that look the same or follow rules or best practices that make the product successful. Even worse is the fact that most of the best practices I see make things worse and not better! People will argue that point. However the fact is that what the best practices do typically is streamline the already ineffective implementation of the product.

Why is this the case? What are we doing wrong? how can we improve so that sales increase and cost of sale decreases? These are not simple questions by any means and the solutions are dependent on answering these questions correctly.

The reasons for why this is the case are the same as with any game changing automation technology. The functionality it provides can be destructive if misused. Since SFDC really does not have PRINCIPLED and PROVEN best practices the results shall we say are sub optimal. Okay, so let's take a look at how we are misusing Sales Force.

1. We can now track activity in an automated way! Tremendous capability over doing it in spreadsheets! However, where are the metrics and rules that prove an activity has advanced a sale, or a pipeline? There are suppositions, opinions, and arguments for why but no definitive proof. The truth is that much of the activity we track likely has little impact on moving a sale. The truth is that much of the marketing activity we track likely is not the direct cause of pipeline being built or advanced. We are not only tracking activity with no proof of impact but we are encouraging non productive behavior with compensation and bonus. The definition of non productivity is activity that has no impact on outcome! Yikes!
2. When we look at Salesforce one of its wonderful features is the ability to enter and track all information about our prospects and customers. Wow! What a wonderful alternative to word, exel, file folders, and who knows what else! When we look at SFDC this way it is in fact a system of record. However, unlike your ERP system, your HR system and your financial applications there is a portion of Sales Force that is not and should not be considered a system of record. When salespeople enter data into an opportunity the data entered is many times an opinion or an educated guess. Yet, so many sales executives, managers and even salespeople think of the data as fact. After all every other application like SalesForce and SalesForce itself in other use cases are systems of record. But, thinking of the data in the Sales Opportunity section of SFDC is a huge mistake!The one change to SFDC design I would suggest to Mark Benioff would be to divorce the entire sales and opportunity module from the rest of SFDC. I would allow the sales module to pull data from the system of record portion of SFDC but it would be its own application. Salespeople and managers would love an application like this because it would be built just for them and far more impactful to their productivity if designed right! Ah but I digress!
3. Using and tracking a sales process with no real reference to a buyers process is just flat out wrong! This would be like tracking what you spend in dollars with no regard for what you spend it on! You could spend within your budget but if you spend all the money on entertainment you won't have a place to live or food to eat! When we track our sales activity and marketing campaigns without proof of impact on the buyer and the sale this is exactly what we are doing! Generating leads, doing discovery, needs analysis, demos, presentations, proposals, etc etc are all sales activities. Running campaigns, webinars, seminars, etc etc are all marketing activities. Were these activities the reason a sales advanced or a lead was generated? Maybe, but in the overwhelming majority of the cases probably not! Again lots of activity with little to minimum impact! Okay and what was the definition of non productivity again? lol!

All SFDC users should lobby SFDC to build a detached sales module from the core system of record! By the way if SFDC does not do it someone else will and it will be better designed and have ML and AI as a part of it!

But since that is not going to happen tomorrow here are the things you can do right now!

1. Stop tracking activity without proof of impact. This above all is killing your productivity. Why? As stated the definition of non productivity is activity without impact! Okay then how do we track activity that has impact. The way to do this is to start by tracking the buyers process and then map and track the activities that are known to advance that process. The buyers activities all vary within their process. However, the emotional stages of the process are exactly the same for all buyers. These stages are Attention or Awareness, Interest, Desire, Conviction, Risk Assessment, and Close. Buyers make buying decisions for emotional reasons, and then support those decisions with logic. The first base practice then would be to change your sales stages to the emotional stages of the buyer! We know that their are a number of activities that we perform with the prospects and buyers to move them through these stages. Marketing generates leads, and sales follows up with discovery in the Awareness phase. Then sales does needs analysis and attempts to create curiosity in the Interest phase. A motivation to move is generally created in the Desire Phase with things like presentations, demos, meetings etc. This is followed by a proof step of some sort in Conviction Stage. ROI, Business Cases TCO analysis might be some of the activities in the Risk Phase, and contract issuance, negotiation etc are likely activities in the Close Phase.When you measure the activities that are done within the buyers emotional buying process your chances of it having impact are far greater! What is the definition of productivity! Yup, activity that has impact! No you cannot prove with absolute certainty the activity had the impact but the odds are far greater the activity was productive. Also here is what else you can do! You can measure days in cycle. When you are measuring the buyers cycle days in cycle you know whether or not your activities are moving sales. When you have this data you know whether your activities are impactful. You also know where your problems exist. When the days in cycle are elongated across most all reps. the problem is systemic IE likely the approach or tools. When the problem exists with some reps. but not others the problem is likely the salesperson skill levels. You then know what to fix systemically or where to coach, mentor or train.
2. Please stop thinking of your opportunity section information as fact. Once you do this you stop basing resource allocation, strategy and forecasts on opinions. This of course is a much wiser approach to running your business!. The best practice here is to have a strong vetting process for how you decide what goes into the opportunity portion of your SFDC records. This vetting process means for most companies a change in how they approach deal review, resource allocation, strategy and forecasting. The first thing you must do is to undo the dumb things you do now like insisting certain information be in SFDC before a rep. can have a resource allocated, or being punitive when a salesperson does not know something in an account review. etc. You want to create a culture of collaboration and equality. You want them to know all of their opinions and input counts, there are no dumb questions and not knowing something is okay. However, making up data or stating opinion as fact is not tolerated! Secondly you must have review session that include the team and a structure upon which to discuss an opportunity. All deal reviews should include and org. chart and following MEDDIC with the right vetting process is a good practice.
3. Do not track marketing activities as a part of a sales record. You are creating the impression that some activity which was likely unrelated to the lead being generated created the lead! Marketing does have to perform many activities in order to generate leads. However, these days there is only one metric you really need to focus on. The metric is inbound leads! All of the potential buyers are in one place. This one place is called the Internet! Therefore inbound leads are by definition the metric that measures how well you are doing reaching those buyers and getting them to react. Spend you marketing dollars on figuring our the most effective ways of doing that. Measuring other things are just a way of saying that campaigns are creating the leads you have instead of measuring the effectiveness of how well you are creating leads and demand.
4. Once you have mapped your activities to each of the buyers emotional buying stages, map your resources to those activities. The results help ensure your sales people are using the correct resource to execute the correct activity. What do you suppose happens when a sales person does the next best activity they can with the right resource, at the right time in the cycle? Yup! Sales Increase and cost of sale decreases.

Honestly the industry has made a mess of SF. Like most of us no one is going to blame themselves but rather they will blame the technology. Yet the facts about the technology are that on the whole it is one of the best applications ever built!

The best practices I have outlined here work and they work amazingly well. We have ramped start up companies using these techniques on fractions of the cash in a quarter of the time then otherwise needed resulting in two IPO's and four successful exits. When bought to large technology companies we were able to grow revenues for our business units 10X the overall company growth rate initially and maintain 3X the growth rate over the long term. The resource utilization generated 10X the revenue per head as well.

I am happy to help anyone interested implement these best practices. They. really work! these days where raising capital is hard you and valuations are a challenge you need these best practices more than ever!