Salespeople’s problem with CRM
CRM is the central tool used by most sales & marketing organizations to manage their leads, opportunities, and customers. Problem is that many great salespeople don’t have a behavioral profile that is detail oriented. So it’s against their style to carefully load and track all their leads, calls, activities, and opportunities in the CRM. If you’ve ever managed a sales team you know exactly what I’m talking about. CRM is great for management but unless it offers a strong value proposition for salespeople they resist using it and then your CRM system can fail.
Enter Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation can add the strong value proposition that salespeople need to use CRM. What great salespeople want to do is make lots of money; they also want the shortest and most direct path to earning lots of money. If salespeople could spend all day working warm and hot opportunities that clearly have a need and are at the right time in their buying cycle they would be thrilled; Marketing Automation can help do this.
Marketing can now expand their role from generating leads into to real time/right time delivery of leads to sales. Marketing can nurture and “drip market” to the leads and when the leads start to show the right level of interest they can immediately be tagged for rapid follow up by sales.
Strong Sales Benefits
In this scenario Sales will want to have all of their leads loaded into the CRM so they can be nurtured on their behalf. In this scenario, Sales will work closely with marketing to agree on definitions of lead stages, lead scores, and what the follow up sequences to use for leads at different stages. And in this scenario opportunities that stall can easily be dropped back into a nurture sequence with little effort on the part of sales. In all these examples Sales will actively use CRM because it gives them a strong value proposition.
The Bottom Line
Marketing Automation has the potential to help salespeople fully adopt their use of CRM as well as having sales & marketing improve their collaboration. Is it time for you to start implementing a marketing automation system?
Great post – this is exactly what we tell potential customers evaluating our system. We stress that clients need to let their salespeople do what they do best… SELL. Let your demand generation and marketing automation system do the leg work of pinpointing the best prospects and nurturing them to the point of being “sales-ready”; then let your team take it from there.
So very true Garth. Often the very best salespeople I work with are the most resistant to logging their datapoints into a CRM. While there is a correlation I’m not convinced that it’s cause & effect. I think great salespeople are just very good at filtering out any activities from their to do lists which do not directly result in the progress of a deal. Including doing data entry. Anything that can automate this effort is a huge win.
-Quin’
Matthew Quinlan
VP, Field Operations
LoopFuse, Inc.