Aug 20

I like revenue.  You like Revenue.  Who doesn’t like revenue?

How do you improve revenue?  Increase sales…duh.  CRMs can increase sales so get one for the sales department, right?  Wrong.

The problem here is that sales people are generally not a process oriented group of people.  You see them out for dinner, on the phone talking with someone that might as well be a buddy they are going out for beers with later – they golf, email, and often don’t look like they are working very hard.  HOWEVER they are working hard.  Their job is to build relationships with the clients.  Doing this requires flexibility in their work schedule, which not only requires their appointments and lunch breaks to be flexible, but it requires that the tools they use to be quick side-notes in their day.  Phone and email follow you everywhere and so should the CRM; however the ability to push and pull information from the CRM needs to be as flexible as their schedule.  This tends to make sales people a much harder team to get to adopt a CRM.

The second group of people that are thought of when it comes to implementing a CRM is the marketing department.  Good marketing equals increased revenue.  Marketing is more of a process oriented job and tends to have routines and schedules that are much more orderly than sales.  While they still need to be flexible in their ability to put out a value proposition, they’re timelines and policies are more easily defined.  The marketing department tends to adapt to a CRM more easily than the sales department because often times a single workflow can accommodate many marketing campaigns and creating campaigns can become streamlined through the use of a CRM.  However, the marketing department already has routines and policies in place that allows them to do their job effectively and bringing in new tools will always have a bit of a learning curve.

Where a CRM is adopted the easiest and most effectively is with the service personnel.  They often have strict structures as to how to handle operations and management continually looks at how to improve policies to improve efficiencies so adoption rates tend to be highest with service personnel over the other departments.  Once a service team has converted to the new system there is an immediate improvement to customer service and operational efficiency.  The beauty of having the service team on-board quickly is that all the information that they enter into the system becomes available to the other departments – sales people can quickly and easily lookup customer inquiries and marketing can start to run reports on topics and trends.

By getting the service personell involved early on with the CRM implementation, the adoption rate for the sales and marketing departments is much higher.