Technology can’t make up for what hit-and-run selling does to destroy trust. And if you want to be trusted, you have to have trustworthy people — people who can sell consultatively, who know their clients’ business as well as they do their own, and who are willing to work collaboratively to solve business problems.

Information is vital to the degree that it supports all these missing links and strategies. As Klaus Besier, who grew SAP America in its early days, says, “Knowledge of birthdays alone is not going to give you competitive advantage.”

If your objective is to reduce cost and you end up nickel-and-diming your clients by not giving them adequate service, then a bad CRM implementation can ultimately cost you.

Many CRM initiatives are ill fated when they get to the field sales force because they are implemented by IT and implemented backwards. Considering the system first — and then addressing the needs of marketing, legal, and customer service — before finally talking to your sales force about their sales process and what they need to improve, is the wrong approach.

The result is asking your primary revenue generators to do data entry for the rest of the firm. Think about the basic economics of this: If a salesperson has a yearly quota of $2 million and works 2,000 hours in a year, he or she must sell $1,000/hour to make quota. Yet the CRM implementation wants you to make that salesperson into a $1,000/hour data-entry clerk—for the benefit of everyone else (see Figure 7–2).

A better approach, seconded by Joe Galvin of Gartner, Inc., is to start with a sales process. First, identify your best practices sales process, all the way from demand creation through competition to contract and then to account control.

“Gartner Dataquest has recognized that enterprises have spent more than $3.6 billion on sales software alone, with growth projected through 2007,” says Galvin. “However, many of these investments have failed to deliver measurable results, characterized by extremely low adoption rates or total abandonment.”

Galvin further states that, “sales culture dictates, to a large degree, technology adoption,” and “technology alone will not change behavior.”[4]

Defining your best practice sales cycle with your management team is the starting point for almost all things in sales effectiveness. Out of this exercise, you can identify — in each phase — what questions should be asked, what actions should be taken, and who is responsible.

Take that sales process and combine it with a methodology that incorporates tactics, the impact of time, the hierarchy of pain, political navigation, and consultative selling, and out of this comes a strategy that will drive your sales activity. This becomes the “playbook” for your team.

Most information systems are used simply to provide access to your process, to document your chosen strategy to the rest of the sales team, and to give managers a tool from which to coach.

There are two purposes to creating a sales plan. The first is to stimulate thinking and make sure that you haven’t forgotten things. Pilots, whether they have been flying for 3 months or 30 years, still use a checklist.

The second purpose of a sales plan is to communicate your strategy to your manager, who may be able to help you with your strategy, and to your teammates, who need to know who is responsible for which actions, which messages, which stakeholders, and when each activity is due.

This is a major area in which salespeople must move from loners to leaders. Lots of salespeople like to keep this in their head, and as a result, the forecast suffers, the presentations suffer because teammates don’t know what is expected of them, and prospects suffer because they have to sit through endless presentations that don’t address their pains.

“Meeting demands for increased visibility does not help salespeople or organizations sell more,” Galvin says. “The reporting of pipeline and forecast values to meet requirements of CEOs and CFOs has little impact on individual or organizational productivity. To increase productivity, sales executives should focus the execution of the sales methodology and processes that accelerate selling, not the reporting requirement of finance.”

It’s about communication, your plan, and leading your team. Your process needs to drive your technology, not vice versa.

It is helpful to examine technology in light of how it empowers the four levels of sales strategy. At the bottom are tools that empower selling to individuals, or face-to-face selling. Obviously, these are the contact and activity managers, and there are many vendors in this area. This has been one of the most productive areas for information technology in assisting salespeople.

Not only has new technology given salespeople a tool for searching and finding contacts earlier and then generating e-mails and correspondence more quickly, but it also gets the information, which is a company asset, out of the salesperson’s head and into the corporate system.

A well-known fact among salespeople, however, is that almost every salesperson has two databases: one that is shared with the company and one that they keep in Outlook or ACT or some other database of contacts that doesn’t really belong to the company. This is only natural, but it still means that every time a salesperson has to enter a contact, it may have to be entered in two places.

Network Management Tools

Some of the more innovative technology tools in the area of contact management for selling at the individual level (as of the date of this book) are those offered by such companies as Spoke, LinkedIn, and Plaxo that allow you to electronically validate your contact information, keep up with changes, and find out where people in your network have moved.

Spoke and LinkedIn have an interesting approach in that they acknowledge that the key to political navigation is sponsorship. They allow you to link people into your network — and vice versa — so that you can find out who actually knows whom. In this way, if you can’t get access to someone, you can get sponsorship from someone else who has access to that person. This kind of political navigation is one of the most effective ways of gaining access to executives. You can borrow influence from someone you know to get to someone you don’t.

These companies have moved beyond contact management to linking networks and saving salespeople dozens and dozens of phone calls to find out who in their firm or industry knows someone who can help them get that precious first 30 minutes of access.