Will your CRM adoption strategy keep Sales off the Naughty step?

If you asked a CPQ sales person for their elevator pitch, you’d probably come away from it saying 'that's basically quoting.' In essence it is, but there's a great deal more to it, and rather than focus on the features I think it's interesting to think about the effects.

How does CPQ influence the behaviour of those it touches?

Since the inception of CRM, Sales Managers and Sales Ops teams can be seen (or at least imagined) running around poking salespeople with the naughty stick. 'If it's not in CRM, it doesn't exist,' and 'if you didn't log it, you didn't do it.'

Take a step back and think about how that feels to our sales users. They work long hours, often under severe stress, and when they close that deal or knock that tricky meeting out the park, someone says 'you won't get credit, as you didn't log it correctly.' If they weren't already sick of the Sales Ops tyrant, they are now.

That's the stick approach, and it doesn't work. It doesn't make me, the sales guy, switch on my CRM first thing in the morning and keep it running all throughout the day.

When it comes to using CRM more efficiently, CPQ is the carrot–at least when it has been properly thought about, setup, and maintained. 

To the sales user, CPQ must be designed to make their life easier. Only then will we start to see the behavioural improvements that CPQ brings. It gives us salespeople a selfish reason to log the right address, update the contact, and to be in CRM in the first place.  We do it right once, and we don't need to do it again. 

In fact, we start thinking that we might as well have CRM running all the time as it now has the right contact details, so might as well start recording my conversations there instead of using notes on my iPad. I'll probably get into a technical or product talk here, so good to have my guided selling and qualification questions to hand. I just had a good call, and rather than spending the same time over again updating activity notes, creating opportunity, approvals, creating quotes, requesting technical support etc., I did it all while on the call... I think I'll go out for a spot of lunch instead. 

The more time Sales spends in CRM, the better the CRM becomes, the more valuable it is to them, and the more time they want to spend in CRM. Nice loop there.

Commercial management teams want to see pipelines, margins, snap shots of opportunities created, new revenue, bookings, etc., all within CRM dashboards and reports. Yet over 90% of companies have no tooling within CRM to assist the sales person with the actual selling. 

Take the least political CRM manager from one of these 90% of companies and imagine how a totally honest conversation might go.

Leads? 'Yeah, we got that covered.'

Campaign management? 'Yep, we can see the moment someone clicked through our mailer or invite.'

Selling? 'Errr, well yeah, after the lead is rated with the nice icons, and the biz dev team qualify it, the opportunity is created, and errr, the salesperson kind of guesses what the amount will be.'....

'And then?'

'Then they use their own undefined formula which normally brings it to a half of the actual amount'....

'Okay, and then...'

 'Then they log it, normally, 2 months later, once they're pretty sure it'll happen.'

Granted, it's not always that bad, but it is shocking how often I see this. The executives are making decisions and reporting forecasts based on the science of 'finger in the air.’  And salespeople are notoriously good at sandbagging. That is, until they're in trouble for a lack of pipeline, when we entirely lose the art for sandbagging. 

What I'm saying here is that you need sales to buy into using CPQ. It will provide better visibility and help you all to sell more, faster. Prove that to the sales user and they will use CRM and CPQ. I've seen great examples where this is working, and all too often the carrot that brings this shift is CPQ. 

CPQ isn’t just another marginal improvement project. It’s transformational. It sounds incredibly obvious but our main ask of sales teams is that they sell. I’ve worked in sales teams where they were happy to send us off on expensive SPIN or NLP courses, yet they totally lacked the investment, systems and processes to support and reinforce the behaviours we learned about. 

Ignore the CPQ acronym for a moment and instead think of it as the tool where you can influence the last mile of the sales journey. Selling is the job of persuading people to buy things. At that crucial point of selling, no other application can provide the guidance and best practices at every single step. In the heat of the sell, last years SPIN selling course is the last thing the seller is really thinking about. ‘How can I win this’ often becomes all that matters. This is the pivotal moment where you want to encourage best practices and influence how the sales person behaves.

Most companies know where our deals are at their most fragile state, but the lack of available tribal knowledge at that moment often leads to repetitive bad behaviour. A whopping 70% of Sales Managers feel that the biggest hurdle for their teams boils down to selling value. So no surprise that many of the best examples I’ve seen of live CPQ customers start by identifying these sales hurdles or blockers, and then design their CPQ to remind, poke and prod the user with all the right information to avoid these selling snags...at the exact moment in the sales process    

In short, CPQ really helps keep us sales people off the naughty step.