Posted Mar 17, 2009
The Art of Selling and CRM Systems
Our challenge: to bring the essence of consultative selling and the CRM system together
By Henry Okraglik, CEO, Austhink Software
Companies commit significant human and financial resources to choosing, implementing, customizing, and integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. These can range from relatively ‘simple’ and inexpensive applications such as Goldmine right through to the more complex and expensive options such as Siebel. Of course, no modern CRM is actually simple so I use this term in a relative sense only. There are also choices for deployment and payment methods – desktop, web-based, hosted, Software as a Service, annual or monthly subscriptions and one-off perpetual licenses.
Having used many different types and brands of CRMs over the years both as a salesperson and as a sales manager, it seems to me that they all focus on the gathering and reporting of sales-related data.
A salesperson typically enters account and opportunity details, hunts and farms these accounts, records progress through the sales lifecycles, scores probabilities, and ideally closes them with a substantial deal.
A sales manager typically interrogates the CRM system to run reports and check on the progress of salespeople and opportunities. Reports that focus on what’s going to close in the next 30 days, the next quarter and so on are their stock-in-trade, and are used to update the executive team and to forecast sales revenues for inclusion in Board papers. In public companies, these reports also provide market guidance.
I am yet to meet a salesperson who approaches the daily or weekly task of updating their CRM data with any enthusiasm. It’s typically seen as a mundane chore mandated from above, and treated as a ‘get it off my plate quickly’, ‘tick the box’ task. The sales manager typically spends some of every week or month chasing salespeople to update their sales data so they have accurate information for reporting. Sound familiar?
Now, the functions I have mentioned above are important and necessary, but they fail to deal with the hard part of sales – the art of selling. Aside from the problem of how to get in the door or to the ear of a target customer, the main challenges on the way to sales success revolve around discovering and understanding a customer’s needs (or ‘pains’, to use the jargon), analyzing them, and designing and pitching a solution that addresses these needs. Whether you are selling a product, a service or both, to me the ability to do these core things (the ‘Sales 101’) is what separates a good salesperson from an ordinary one and also what drives sales revenues. If you are a professional salesperson or sales manager, this should be of fundamental interest and concern to you.
However, CRM systems do little or nothing to deal with these softer, yet critical challenges. In parallel, we have the well-trodden path of Solution Selling and its variants, including Spin Selling, Miller Heiman, Targeted Account Selling, Consultative Selling. They all emphasize analytical techniques and an approach to the softer, more dynamic elements of sales. They exist largely as paper-based or stand-alone electronic files, sometimes loosely coupled to a CRM system via a document repository. And often, they are pitched as part of an expensive multi-day training course.
So the challenge we decided to take on at Austhink Software was to integrate the essence and capabilities of these selling methodologies with a CRM system, in order to make salespeople’s use of their CRM a whole lot more meaningful and effective. We set out to assist them in the art of selling, as well as making the CRM fun to use – a sort of ‘anti-chore’. We thought that by combining our skills and experience in game design and software development with our sales domain knowledge, we could accomplish something new and compelling.
The result is bSelling Opportunity Management, just launched on salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace. We picked salesforce.com because it had a mature marketplace, a large user base, and a means of deployment that is secure but relatively straightforward.
We are very keen to get user feedback, so please take a look. Visit bSelling’s page on AppExchange for more information, screenshots, a video demo and to install and try the free version.
We are thinking of tackling another one of the holy grails of sales – Account Management – and again taking on the strategic softer elements. More on this later; in the meantime, if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see I’d love to hear from you.
Henry Okraglik
CEO, Austhink Software
