Sales Acceleration Summit - This session is now available on demand: http://www.insidesales.com/events/2014/sales-acceleration-summit/adam-honig
Session Overview
Implementing CRM can increase revenue, decrease costs to service customers and help a company achieve its strategic objectives.
Or it can be a costly exercise that alienates the sales team, disrupts operations and ultimately loses accounts.
Using attention grabbing illustrations to illuminate his point, Adam will draw upon his 18 years of CRM success to provide you with a bullet-proof approach to achieving success in this extremely important domain.
2. #SalesSummit | @adamhonig
The 5 Keys to CRM Success
CRM: It can drive sales, decrease
costs, increase customer satisfaction …
or ruin your career.
Here’s how to avoid that last bit.
Hello everyone, Adam Honig here, coming to you live on tape from in my office in Boston, MA. I run the US for a company called Cloud Sherpas – we’re a leading Cloud Solution provider – and I’ve been helping clients get the most out of CRM for the past 15 years or so.Let me take a moment to introduce myself -- if you look at my twitter feed, besides being very passionate about CRM and cloud, you might learn that I’m a suffering Knicks fan, have a background in Philosophy, I really enjoy photography and the only thing I hate more than an unsubstantiated assertion is a bulleted list of items on PowerPoint slide.
As a matter of fact, it’s sort of pet peeve of mine the way that some presenters show lists of bullets on slides and read them to the audience.In my view, this is the audience reaction to this type of approach.
So I developed a rule – I wanted to call it a law, but that sounded to grandiose – that would explain the relationship in a presentation between the number of bullet points and how engaged the audience is.And what do you know – they’re inversely related. So I promise – no bullets, and very little text at all in this presentation!
The style of that last illustration comes directly from a grear writer and artist, Jessica Hagy.In case you’re not familiar with her, she is a Forbes regular and writes a blog at thisisindexed.com which she recently converted into a wonderful book.I’m going to be using Jessica’s style of illustrations to talk about the keys to CRM Success.
Now as I mentioned in my introduction, I’ve been working in CRM for a long time… back from the days when CRM was on the whiteboard and we all used Wang terminals to track our customers.
Along the way, I’ve noticed that CRM can be quite dangerous for careers. As recently as 2009 Forrester reported that over half CRM projects fail.This presentation is all about how do we avoid these pitfalls.
Done properly, CRM can have a great or even transformational impact on a business. We’ve seen it help companies increase revenue, decrease operating costs and improve customer satisfaction levels – CRM nirvana if you will
Someone recently asked me: If I’m running a CRM program and the management team doesn’t enforce the new rules or make people live their lives in the new system, how do I make them do that? The answer is that you can’t. Accordingly, don’t launch CRM projects without executive buy-in. Change must come from within. If executives aren’t committed to the CRM project, don’t expect middle managers to buy in. Likewise if the head of sales or service won’t lead by example — and make employees work differently — don’t expect CRM project success.Example: Software company: millions of dollars spent, no-one using the system, our eval: leadership still working off spreadsheets and manual processes – complete wasteExample: Large Health Insurance company in NYC that had conflicting goals: reduce expenses or increase customer satisfactionWhat should you do if you don’t have executive buy-in?
Stop. Do not pass ‘go’. Do not collect $200. [Make joke: higher with inflation?]
Plan enough so you know what you’re doing, but not so much you never get anything done. Start by taking a step back and assessing your business’s goals and objectives. Next, chunk these objectives into smaller pieces. Employees need time to absorb changes. Additional functionality may also require non-trivial levels of systems integration. In short: crawl, walk, then run.National Grid story here;
Whenever possible, get your CRM project up and running quickly by first implementing only core CRM capabilities. Get users hooked. Show them what’s possible. See what they need next. Then add additional capabilities — and system integration — via short project phases and agile sprints. Master cloud CRM as you go.Example: Tell the Unum Story hereDRIP FEED
Beware executives who see CRM only as a system for building them better reports. Sales, service and marketing employees will demand: What’s in it for us? (As Daily Mail publisher A&N Media learned.) Accordingly, focus on making customer-facing employees more efficient. Start by automating as many tasks as possible and ensuring CRM is a “get your job done more easily” system that — owing to high levels of user buy-in — doubles as a great “here’s what’s going on across the business” tool for managers.Tell Daily Mail example: all singing all dancing – quoting, etc. caused chaos, resulted in 14% utilization of system
Consider your choices: cloud versus on-premise software, large vendor versus small. In general, all CRM projects should focus first on desired business outcomes, not technology. That said, when seeking the best tools for the job, beware little CRM vendors. Especially with cloud software, (vendor) success begets (customer) success.Example: Banking customer stuck on old on-premise technology holding them back
Most people stuck in the middle there; seeing the upside possibility, but also seeing the downside.In this presentation I tried to help you understand the risks and how to mitigate them with CRM, so you can move forward to your CRM nirvana.Got it? Good. (Hey, I only had 15 minutes anyhow.)