Selling: The problem with CRM is that it is…CRM
Today very few conventional CRM databases collect and display information that is useful to B2B sales people to win more work. To compound this they are often focused on simply capturing all sorts of data generated during a sales cycle, and making it available for others to access. In other words, they are management tools, be it for trend analysis, forecasting, or control. If this is your business model, you have plenty to choose from.
If however, you operate in a B2B environment with a limited number of customers, and therefore opportunities counted in tens or hundreds not thousands, and a level of complexity that goes beyond simple transactional sales, a CRM system is of limited tangible use to your sales team. Primarily because they tend to collect the wrong information.
It is said that it can take 2 nautical miles to turn a supertanker around and so it is with highly integrated CRM systems. Regardless of how many “bells and whistles” they add, the database is still filled with data that is of little or no value to a B2B sales rep, and they can’t change that. Instead, we are told that this IS the information we need!. If this was indeed the case, why do so many companies find themselves having to pressure their sales team to systematically entering data into CRM!.
It's easy to criticize, but what’s the alternative? Yes, we need a database, but we are not looking to improve customer relationships, but to better understand their buying motivation. Let’s call it a Customer Buying Motivation database (CBM) instead, that we will fill with insight into why and how our customers go about making commercial award decisions. As a salesperson this is what I need to know, not whether a contact has 3 kids and plays golf.
When we consistently ask the right questions to multiple people within the same organisation, we gain critical insight into what they actually need as an whole and therefore can adjust our products and services to address this need. No single person represents a whole company even if they are the boss, and any need will be influenced by others. Similarly, decisions are rarely taken by a single person, and therefore our ability to align our offering with as many interpretations of the need will enhance our chances of success. Combine this with a similarly balanced assessment of how this opportunity is aligned with your business targets, and you have the making of a balanced opportunity portfolio. This is but one example of the type of information a CBM would capture, and front-end tools* already exist to support the sales team in validating opportunities.
If the data is of direct use to me as a salesperson, I will make my best effort to keep it accurate and complete. Such information can then be “rolled up” to be critically useful for product development, and make my life as a sales-person easier in the future.
Hang on you may say, but how do I do my revenue forecasting with a CBM?, and indeed this opens another proverbial “can of worms” for B2B companies. The logic of “weighted probabilities” only works at scale, and invariably Sales Managers are obliged to “adjust” CRM generated pipelines for the simple reason that you may have 50% probability of winning a $100k contract (if there are 2 bidders), but you don’t have 100% probability of winning $50k for the same contract, so why do we report that we do? Simply because CRMs are not designed to handle this reality, and at scale it kind of works!
It may be better to establish thresholds below which you do not include an opportunity in your forecasts and when it does meet your criteria you put the full accessible contract value. Comparing the awarded revenue as a function of the value of all of the opportunities (won or lost) will provide a simple but realistic worst case scenario for forecasting. Adding contract values derived from opportunities that have met your threshold criteria can give you a best-case scenario. Staying within these two limits is generally good enough for most companies to plan future investments.
CRM and CBM databases can easily work side by side and no doubt could become more integrated over time, however if you are a B2B company now is the time to think beyond CRM systems to provide the support your sales team so badly needs.
* Mbrace suite of tools
