8 Ideas For Sweeter Sales.

Forest Gump said it best: ‘Life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.’ Sales results often share the same fate. Here are a few ideas that might help you chose the best chocolates!

• A big part of any sales function is continuous and rapid prospect qualification. The key measurement is whether or not they are going to buy. This differs from what they want to do, as compared to what they can do.
• Focus on what you have to offer, and not just what you are selling.
• Continually expand your product applications to new markets and/or customers. This minimizes your reliance on fragile markets or domineering customers.
• Focus your creative energies on strategies that promote consistent wins. By doing so, you will lessen your natural tendency to fall back on the blasé behaviors that just can’t produce the long-term consistency you need.
• If your pipeline seems to be managing you, then manage your prospects much earlier in the sales cycle. Two aspects of managing prospects are rating them as a company and the value of their opportunities. If either doesn’t fit your business, move on.
• Once you have your customer’s attention, keep it focused only on them.
• Simple selling techniques work. If nothing else, try something simple to improve, innovate and demonstrate your product.
• Promote customer satisfaction, but sell loyalty. Loyalty is the reason customers want to buy from you.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Nobody said CRM is sweet but here are a few ideas to keep your sales process on track:

• Qualification: Set out predefined Rating and Profile descriptions for your Account and Contacts. How well  each fits the ideal target can speed up this all important sales step.
• Customer Retention/Loyalty Process: Don’t leave retention and loyalty programs to chance. MosaicCRM offers ‘Marvel’ a unique system of multiple contact processes that keep your organization in front of customers.
• Daily Activity Manager: This eloquent system makes daily activities a breeze so sales staff can concentrate their energy and time on selling.
  
• Deal Nurturing: Nothing is dropped or forgotten with PipelinePro methodology and alerts systems.
  

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Written by
Bill Noonan, Founder & CEO, MosaicCRM

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Pre-CRM Planning Tips for SMB’s

I’ve put together this slide presentation that covers a number of key elements that can help in your CRM Plan or Re-Start program.  Some of the topics include Beware of ‘Quick and Easy’ CRM promotions, The Human Factors, Competition Applications, Abilities, Resources and Sales Process Design, Budgeting and more.
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In a recent conversation with a prospect, he lamented that Free Demos concentrated more on how fast you can copy over what you are using now e.g. an excel spreadsheet and declaring it done and a success. Identifying the objectives and processes he needed to drive results was far more valuable but missing. That begs the question: CRM changes everything: without changing your process and updating objectives is this the reason for the epidemic of such low CRM success rates?

1. Don’t limit your CRM vision.

A thirty minute ‘here it is show’ and how to master menu lists won’t exactly make you a CRM pro. I haven’t met an organization just starting out with CRM that knew their way around CRM better than I do. Its equivalent to reading a book on driving and letting you go with the keys. I wouldn’t give the car keys to anyone without extensive and professional instruction. Same for CRM: I care about our clients especially when their CRM is certain to benefit from our deep sales and programming experience.

• Make sure you get adequate time on the bench with the pros.

2. Check lists won’t get you there.

You’ve spent months, maybe years, musing CRM concepts around. During that time you have created a mighty list of wants and needs. Unfortunately most organizations ‘want lists’ are not clearly defined objectives or ways of measuring progress and results. Our expertise and the time we take to peel back the onion skin to find out exactly how things tick in your organization can make shorter sales cycles and identifying customer buying cycles a breeze. This, by most accord, is way more valuable and measurable than how it syncs with a Blackberry.

• Know where you want to end before you begin trial CRM programs.

3. How does it really perform?

Just like test driving a car, a CRM test drive you get the look and some of the feel but sadly zero data on exactly how it will fit your business, sales culture and processes on a long term basis. A month will get you even less concrete data on business process improvement measurements.

• To be fair to yourself, it often takes two or more months to get it right so you can actually see what your CRM really has to do and how it does it.

4. Part time learning is weak at best, and flawed throughout.

You need feedback so you set a couple of bright and eager bodies into the program, maybe even an office. They are busy, haven’t been guided through the real objectives and probably have an hour or two of generic training. So they take a stab at it here and there and trying this and that. Then declare it doesn’t work or doesn’t work how they need it to. That is not at all surprising.

• At MosaicCRM we first question and rationalize every single step of your processes. Then we get joined at the hip so to speak and help you set out the objectives, business processes, and measuring programs unique to your needs.

5. A month is generally not enough time to customize it to your true needs.

CRM always adds a whole new dimension to sales and marketing business processes. Simply copying over your spreadsheet doesn’t make for a better sales system… anymore than your excel spreadsheet did when you left yellow ruled pads or Outlook.

• The pros at MosaicCRM know how to move a field here, change a report there and modify an alert system…. small but knowledgeable things that can totally and dramatically change how you view CRM. This takes time and effort on both sides.  But it’s worth it.

Who Benefits?

There are some benefits to a free trial period. Frankly I feel the only guy who benefits from free demos is the CRM salesman. He gets to add you to his pipeline and with an active demo and moves ahead to an assumptive close position. You get a barrage of email and calls and pressure but not solutions.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

First and foremost, get a firm grasp of the results you want to achieve and know where you will gain the most. What you really need is a partner that adds to your knowledge and experience base. It does take more time but if that works, there is no need for a high pressure ‘close’ or a rushed implementation. Our expertise and the time we take will allow the both of us to evaluate and prioritize exactly what has to be done.  One thing that you will notice right off the bat: we won’t simply copy your spreadsheets into a CRM program. That is a prescription for disaster.

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Written by

Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Pre-CRM Planning Tips for SMB’s

I’ve put together this slide presentation that covers a number of key elements that can help in your CRM Plan or Re-Start program.  Some of the topics include Beware of ‘Quick and Easy’ CRM promotions, The Human Factors, Competition Applications, Abilities, Resources and Sales Process Design, Budgeting and more.

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CRM Adoption: What makes for long term CRM success?

CRM adoption is a topic that has been around from day one and has seen many iterations of the good, bad and ugly when it comes to what adoption factors work.

The reality is that people still sell to people so it goes that the human interaction with CRM can’t be ignored or swept under the rug. So rather than focusing on what the technology will do, let’s look at how to make CRM more in sync to how people sell,  and what they need to sell, to improve adoption success.

Sales Personnel:

The job of modern selling now demands a number of practical skills, CRM is one of them. If sales personnel are resistant to CRM, they are simply not a good fit for the organization.

• They must like to use and are comfortable with selling in a technology enabled environment and the efficiencies CRM brings
• They are wholly invested in the value of and the work needed to maintain the customer relationship, and not just a sale
• The CRM is designed so that they learn from the data, make a profit with it and not just input data

The Company:

From a company perspective, it has to wring out the inefficiencies and excuses with not using CRM.

• Insist that CRM is essential to meet their objectives, no exceptions
• Company must be focused top down on maximizing the customer relationship, not spreadsheets or historical transactional data
• Have a definitive plan and objective with each part of CRM and how it benefits the sales personnel
  
• Make CRM clear, concise and profitable e.g. what will be gained at every stage

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

We have learned that if the sales personnel and company are doing their part, it is essential that the CRM be designed to compliment that business process and structure.What this means is that each CRM program must exemplify usability and value:

• Apply only the tools that make the result more effective
  
• Ignore anything that doesn’t improve sales/profit
• Eliminate, table and squash any distractions
  
• Make pipeline design and management clear, concise, easy
• Design CRM to cultivate the customer relationship e.g. focus on the individual
• Automate everything that assists in customer buying cycle  and sales cycle management

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Babbage is known to some as the “Father of Computing.” The Analytical Engine was the first device that might be considered to be a computer in the modern sense of the word. It used loops of punched cards to control an automatic calculator, which could make decisions based on the results of previous computations. He sought financial support to continue its development from the British Parliament.

It’s the customer who “just doesn’t get it.”

The question posed in the 1830′s by the honorable member is not as dumb as it first appears. Let’s imagine a scenario where Babbage plays super salesman and presents his PowerPoint to show his customer just how much he knows about his product. He thinks that after they hear his great plans and what the machine can do, presto, he’s got the deal done.

Now, I can recall a few times where I did the same thing, just prattling on and on about how much I knew. I thought, mistakenly so, I could convince my customer to buy because I knew so much and that would surely sell them. In these situations of babbling brook syndrome, I, like Babbage, got equally dumb questions in response. I can remember too how I felt, walking out of a meeting and shaking my head all the while murmuring something to the effect “they just don’t get it.” The reality was I didn’t get it. A never-ending splurge of features and benefits and facts isn’t selling or convincing anyone.

Make matters worse: answer dumb questions.

I have to call upon Flip Wilson’s infamous line, “The devil made me do it.” It’s the only way I can explain why I said the things I did in response to really dumb customer questions. How many of us would be tempted to say “Yes, of course the right answers will come out” if we were standing in Babbage’s shoes? My instinct tells me quite a few would.

Instead, if the devil didn’t quite make me cross that line, modern thought is to reply to the question with a question such as “Do you want the right answers to some out?” For many a sales person this question answering a question only delays the inevitable, “Yes, of course it will.” And the customer says “Really?That’s great; we’ll have to think about it.” And the scene ends with you shaking your head and muttering, they just don’t get it.

Get you customer to stop tinkering and make a decision.

Babbage, who died in 1871, worked the rest of his life on the Analytical Engine but never completed it. It’s said he never stopped tinkering and no sooner did he send a drawing to the machine shop would he order everything stopped until he finished tinkering on a new design. Does this scenario remind you of more than a few customers?

I recognize that a lot of sales people make good money selling consulting gigs that allow customers to tinker themselves into oblivion. For those of us who don’t have that lap of luxury, our task is to motivate them to make a decision. The lesson is clear; if you fall into the latter group, don’t waste time on tinkerers, some customers will never get it!

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

CRM programs are great platforms for defining and monitoring the sales process.

• In this example, an ‘Account Rating’ system could be of huge value: Qualified & Committed or Suspect & Uncommitted? Too often account ratings simply define the size or location of an account. With CRM technology it is easy to go beyond that simple parameter and rate accounts by meaningful reference and measurable objectives e.g. financing approved, decision date identified, competitive advantages etc.

• Monitoring your Progress with an ‘Aging System’ is important in the sales opportunity phase. Use your CRM programs to check progress by length of time and date in each phase. After all, if the deal is not moving to the next sales stage in a timely manner, it isn’t going to because you wish it so. Using these ‘Aging’ techniques is also very telling on forecasting more accurate closing time periods.

• If the opportunity is not moving ahead and you’re not making to progress where you are, then the Fall Back System is needed. Beyond keeping your pipeline content clean, Fall Backs require a specific strategy and sales routine to follow.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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