I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and sales. Technology often determines whether or not a sales process gets adopted by a sales team. If the sales team works without a process, even in small transaction sales, their chances of delivering at or above target are greatly reduced. That’s not good.
There are different technology applications to consider when it comes to supporting process-driven selling. Here are five technologies in order of the level of value they provide salespeople:
1. Microsoft Word or Excel. Taking an account planning or opportunity planning document or a qualification checklist and formatting it in Word or Excel is a small but useful step past writing it by hand. It is fair to mention that a lot of big deals have been won by smart sales executives that planned effectively and recorded their documentation in Word.
2. Contact Managers. We love Microsoft Outlook here at my company, ESR, for managing contacts, calendars and e-mail. It gets the job done, but it is not a selling tool. Keeping prospects' names in a contact manager so your salespeople can create an e-mail or track call-back dates in your calendar will not help them sell more.
3. SFA -- Traditional Sales Force Automation. Many of the functional capabilities of traditional sales force automation tools have been swallowed by CRM. Traditional SFA products, if used properly and regularly, could save a rep a little time, but will not directly contribute to the advancement of a sales campaign, especially a complex one. (By the way, Googling SFA gets you about 11 million hits.)
4. CRM -- Customer Relationship Management. 174 million hits on Google! It must be hot! If implemented the right way, CRM can offer a multitude of benefits to different constituencies within selling organizations. The problem is, out of the box CRM will likely not deliver value for the salesperson. CRM has been designed and written for the people who pay for it: MANAGEMENT. For the salesperson it is often a burden and they prove it’s a burden by not complying. They don’t log on and don’t fill out the forms.
5. PRM -- Prospect Relationship Management. Never heard of that before? You will. PRM is the next generation of Sales Force Automation, with sales process workflow support, analytics, and other critical elements of CRM. There is a tremendous need for a new breed of technology solutions that really help people sell. These new PRM solutions will be designed and written by sales training and sales methodology providers. Why? Because those companies are sales process-centric and know what it takes to win. So the PRM solutions will be designed for people who sell rather than how CRM is designed, where the sales methodology is layered on top of the technology, almost as an afterthought.
Do you agree with my assessment?
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