To polarize a group of salespeople, you don’t have to mention religion or politics.
Just mentioned the acronym ‘CRM’.
Many salespeople see their customer relationship management system as a hindrance to their sales, and many sales leaders spend much of their time struggling to get salespeople to use their CRMs.
This push and pull leaves the most important person in the sale completely out of the picture: the customer.
To get salespeople excited about using their CRMs, we have to connect how that activity will allow them to serve more customers.
Otherwise, they shouldn’t be using their CRM.
To learn how to strip our CRM strategy back to its foundations, assess it, and rebuild it with a customer-focused vision, we sat down with Hunter Austin, co-founder at Kelly-Austin. He’s dedicated his career to helping salespeople get more out of their CRMs, and he showed us it’s possible to systemize how we use our CRMs to ensure we sell more – and serve more.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: Hunter said the place to start with your CRM is with the end in mind. Take the purpose your company exists for, which is to serve customers, and ask how your CRM can tell you if you and your salespeople doing that or not. This goes deeper than simply selling. Hunter encouraged us to ask, “Why?” Are we in business to ensure our customers grow their businesses? Is it to ensure they benefit from a product or service we sell? How will we know if they’re doing that?
One way to trigger this system is to start with satisfied customers. What about them makes them ‘satisfied’? Are they referring their friends? Are they coming back to buy from us again? Until you know what makes a ‘satisfied customer’, you won’t be able to replicate or scale it across your CRM, or your sales team.
R – Repeatable: Once you’ve discovered what makes a great customer, make your CRM assessment repeatable by starting with the last stage of the sale: when you prospect becomes a customer or declines to do business with you. Most CRMs can generate a win/loss ratio, which will be critical in determining how many leads you and your salespeople need to enter into the pipeline to reach your revenue goals.
Next, move to the pipeline stages before ‘won/lost business’ and determine your conversion ratio for those as well. This will not only provide you with solid conversion metrics but will also reveal the pipeline bottlenecks or pipeline leaks in your sales process.
Now that you’ve assesses your win/loss ratio and pipeline vertical conversion, you’re ready to put a dollar value on each prospect (and potentially, each meeting). This will be important when we assess what we can do to serve customers along each stage of their buying journey, because if your salespeople see that each meeting is worth $200, let’s say, then they’ll be much more motivated to drive them. Hunter even says to consider incentivizing the sales meetings your team runs to ensure they see the value too!
The final part of this process is where you take what you learn across all the data you’ve been gathering and coach salespeople. As a leader or self-led salesperson, this is where the rubber meets the road. Data can be fudged, but it’s a lot harder to misinterpret. If there’s a gap between where you/your salesperson is and where they need to be, your CRM’s data will reveal it.
Where this is where most sales leaders stop, Hunter says it’s where the real change can begin. To link our CRMs with converting sales, we can take the metrics we’re provided and look at how we change what we do to serve more prospects in more places throughout the sales process.
I – Improvable: Where most sales systems’ value lies in their repeatable steps, this one hits home in how we improve it. Whether we’re trying to improve on great results or get our results from good to great, this is where we take what we’ve learned from our CRM’s data and assess where we need the most improvement.
Maybe it’s in meeting conversion. Maybe it’s in generating follow-on business. With the data our CRMs provide, we’ll know exactly where we need to deliver more value. That will mean examining what questions your prospect has at that stage of the sales cycle and preparing resources, stories, and content that improves their lives and businesses before they move to the next stage in the sale.
M – Measurable: To measure the effectiveness of how well your CRM allows you to serve more customers, Hunter says to measure the adoption rate of your CRM. This is a measurement of how much your salespeople are engaging with the platform. Are they entering data as they learn it, are they updating deals when changes occur, and are they tracking prospects from entry to completion? If you see a problem with adoption, identify where the largest drop off is occurring and reverse-engineer your system to ask, ‘How can I provide more resources and value to my salespeople to encourage more use of their CRM?’
By focusing on how well we can serve our customers, we’ll ensure more use of the tech we’ve armed our salespeople with.