A particularly bombastic branch manager, new to the job, smugly walked around the sales floor asking “OK, who’s sold something today?”. The business was enterprise software, and proposals didn’t close every day. The floor was so quiet we could have heard the pin drop.
“Well, actually, I have” came across the room in a sort of embarrassed way.
“Which deal?” asked the branch manager in a sort of threatening manner.
“Commercial Ignition” replied the sales guy, quietly.
Instead of offering congratulations the branch manager asked “Why wasn’t that in the forecast?”
This sales guy had been here before. ” I didn’t think I was going to get it.”
The branch manager slunk away back to his office, and everybody in the office had a quiet grin. There would be pints in the pub at lunch time.
Nice little story, and true as it happens, but that isn’t the point of this post. The point we want to discuss is CRM systems fail more often than any other IT project, and they fail because they attempt to control the uncontrollable.
Sales guys understand they’re only as good as their next sale. Managers, administrators and support people all resent sales guys -they get more elbow room and earn more money. The only thing that keeps them in a job is numbers - feeding the rest of the organization. Sales is the ultimate “hero to zero” role in most corporations. Sales guys don’t play the same game as all the others.
This breeds a certain independence, and arrogance. We’re going to get fired if we don’t make the number so why should we play the game with all the paper pushers? Filling in all the forms in the world won’t save us if the numbers are bad.
When the bean counters (accountants and IT people) try to put in systems that control the sales guys they are doomed to fail. CRM systems are designed to measure activity and progress, and forecast revenue for the accountants. Not to help sales guys do their job. So these systems are a nuisance, and, at the best, only get lip service.
Every sale is a unique coming together of customer, requirements, vendor, capabilities, and the man in the middle’s ability to align them in a sort of optimum result for everybody involved. Ultimately, the whole organization lives off the sales guy’s ability to make this make sense to the customer.
Instead of CRM, the process and systems people need to give the sales guys stuff that helps, not stuff that gets in the way. That’s why we built our software, and why it works the way it does.
Comments (RSS 2.0)
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.