Digital channel shift vs. digital paradigm shift

I had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Hutchison a couple of weeks ago. Bill is a pioneer in smart cities, working in Canada, Russia and Asia to evangelise the concept of the hyper-connected city and the potential for paradigm-shift thinking that hyper-connectivity presents. Bill chaired the Toronto Waterfront development, one of the largest urban regeneration and connected community projects in the world. One thing he said to me which resonated was that the last 20 years of digital innovation and disruption have simply set the foundation for even greater change to come. One of the opportunities of digital disruption is the potential it offers to think about paradigm shifts.

Many clients I have worked with over the years have approached digital as a channel-shift project - "if we could shift 10% of calls from our call centre to our smartphone app we would save x%", "if we could switch x% of loan applications to online we would save y% and acquire z% more clients". There's nothing necessarily wrong with that approach but the history of new technology adoption is littered with examples of people using a new technology to enable an old process or an old way of working. Putting a loan application online is not necessarily going to change the game or protect against a future industry disruptor.

10 years ago Nike has very little idea who purchased their trainers and how they used them. Consumers made anonymous purchases in sports shops and department stores and rarely bothered to fill in a registration card to tell Nike about themselves, let alone how they used their trainers. Nike could have adopted a channel shift mindset and approach to digital, creating an online portal for people to register their purchases and upload information about their training regimes. They could have done that but they chose a paradigm shift strategy. By embedding software into trainers via Nike+ and building a gamified community where users set their training goals or participate in virtual / physical games of "tag", Nike has transformed the information and insight that it has about it's consumers. At the point of writing a staggering 2,146,741,969 miles have been run by the community and automatically uploaded to Nike.

GiffGaff could have launched an MVNO with a channel shift strategy. Instead they chose a paradigm shift by creating a peer to peer business model where customer word of mouth drives acquisition and members fix over 90% of service requests for other members in the support forum with an average time to fix a problem of under 3 minutes.

Zopa could have followed a channel shift approach and launched an online only business selling loans, but they chose a paradigm shift model by creating a peer to peer lending forum.

Threadless, Zappos, Kickstarter, eBay, ZipCar, Nabbesh (client), Netflix, Salesforce.com, Amazon, NowTV (client), CDBaby, Spotify, Lastminute.com and many others all could have pursued channel shift strategies in their respective industries... but they didn't.

CRM for a digital age

Most companies invested in CRM software for the first time between 1996 and 2006. That decade saw the CRM boom and bust. Siebel went public in 1996, signed huge multi-million dollar software license deals, peaked at a 45% market share in 2002 and was acquired by Oracle in 2005. The big ERP vendors all entered the market with varying success, Nortel acquired Clarify for $2.1bn in 1999, (before selling for just $200m 2 years later) and Salesforce.com was founded in 1999, winning over 20,000 customers by 2006.

The CRM applications that most companies implemented during that decade of 1996-2006 were predominantly Sales Force Automation solutions and Customer Service /Contact Centre software. Solutions designed to support Industrial Age distribution models of large field sales forces and customer service agents. Many projects failed (analyst estimates range greatly from approximately one to two thirds of projects) and many companies experienced long, painful implementations that rarely achieved the anticipated benefits. As many of the CRM projects were so slow and painful to implement, many companies have retained the solutions that they implemented for far longer than intended and the relics of these systems still power a large part of the customer experience today.

Looking back at the wave of digital change we have seen over the last decade or so, I would pick out 2006 as a tipping point. In 2006 worldwide Internet penetration stood at 15.7% (see http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). Since 2006 it has more than doubled to over 30%. During the last 6 years we have seen enormous changes in technology and communications. We have seen the mass roll-out of broadband and mobile broadband, an explosion of connected, smart hardware devices like the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010) and the seemingly unstoppable rise of social networks like Facebook (founded in 2004 but hitting 500m users in 2010 and 1bn in 2012), Twitter (founded in 2006) and GooglePlus (founded in 2011).

There is a stark reality here. Most companies invested in CRM for an analogue age, designed to support a predominantly field sales force and contact centre-led distribution model. They invested before worldwide Internet penetration reached critical mass, before any of the digital disruption we see today became main stream and before digital became baked into the distribution model. Hence we now see IT departments in a spin, trying to keep up with increasingly frantic demands from the business and trying to bolt on new applications, services and channels to legacy systems that were simply never designed to be used in the way they are today.

CRM for a digital age has to look different. It cannot be the technology-centric, monolithic disaster that plagued some (but certainly not all) of the previous generation of projects. CRM for a digital age is not any particular software or technology and it will vary greatly from business to business but it is likely to display some of the following characteristics:

• Designed for Customers and front line customer-facing staff, not just for management
• Focussed on speed to value and positive internal momentum
• Designed with a core foundation (e.g. data, processes) but able to embrace change at the front-end of customer interaction (i.e. devices, apps, social networks etc)
• Delivered in an iterative fashion with constant business involvement
• Open and integratable in nature (often made up of a collection of services rather than a single package)
• Cross-functional in nature, busting through internal silos
• Paid for based on value delivered to the business

The challenge most companies face is one of transition. Shifting not only from legacy CRM technologies, but also from legacy mindsets, procurement models, IT delivery models and of course distribution models. Without question, all of those challenges are difficult, but is it really realistic to continue with a CRM solution designed for an analogue age?

The future of TV is not quite as rosy for consumers as it appears

I’ve been reading lately about the future of TV. There are no shortage of interesting material on the topic like these short quotes from industry leaders compiled by CNBC, the great post by Brian Solis “The future of TV is more than social it’s a multi-screen experience that needs design” and this must listen podcast by Mitch Joel “The future of TV is social”.

I don’t dispute any of the conclusions in the content  above. The lines of argument are that TV is the next big battle ground. One that has remained relatively unchanged for 25 years but one that looks set to see significant disruption over the next few years through the convergence of social media and digital technologies with television, through dual-screen media consumption and through a wave of technology innovations from motion control, voice control, ultrahigh definition, 3D, to greatly enhanced search and streaming etc. This post is not about the potential technology innovation in the future of TV, it’s about some of the practical barriers that consumers may face over the coming years as the TV industry goes through its transformation.

The first challenge I see is that in an industry dominated by mega-players content will be distributed amongst multiple providers via a rights bidding war. If I just take the UK market as an example, competition to define the future of TV is fierce. We have the traditional terrestrial TV providers like the BBC and ITV who are investing heavily in digital and streaming content. We have the dominant Satellite TV provider BSkyB, whose monopoly has been eroded somewhat over the last few years by BT, Virgin Media and others. In addition, we have Apple TV, Netflix, Google TV, Tesco (via their blinkbox acquisition), Amazon (via their LoveFilm acquisition) and a host of other players inclusing potentially some of the content providers streaming their content direct to consumers. In other words the TV industry has some of the largest companies on the planet with some of the deepest pockets, all competing for eyeballs. In order for any of those players to remain relevant in the market they have to have content rights. A potential scenario for the next few years is that we may see a battle of the giants for content rights which will not only push up prices but also ensure that content is scattered across multiple providers. Take for example the recent announcement that the 2013-14 to 2015-16 premier league football rights have been sold to BT and BSkyB for £3bn – this represents a staggering increase of £1.25bn on the current rights package and splits content between 2 competitors. As rights for other premium content follow suit the result for consumers may be that consumers will need to go to multiple providers for content and that these providers may change at every rights renewal.

A secondary impact of the rights war will be that providers, keen to claw back their investments, will hang on to their existing business models. Those with lucrative subscription models will cling on to them as long as they can and those with exclusive rights (e.g. premier League football, Heineken Cup Rugby etc), will maintain either high prices or increasingly sophisticated (or relentless!) forms of advertising – some of the terrestrial providers in the UK now seem to have more forced adverts on their streamed content than they do on free / live television! The result for consumers? We may well have to consider multiple subscriptions, multiple contracts, multiple hardware devices and more adverts forced into our content. In addition, it’s likely that we may see more providers heading the way of Setanta sports to bankruptcy as over-prices rights become a poisoned chalice for some providers.

A third challenge I see is viewing quality. Over the last few years picture quality within the DVD / Cinema and Cable TV segments has improved radically – we’ve seen a mass roll out of HD, some muted take up of 3D and the potential launch of ultra-high definition. In the streaming world, when picture quality increases so to does the strain on the broadband network. This phenomenon is of course exacerbated as more and more people start to stream more and more content. At the end of last year Netflix accounted for 33% of peak time internet traffic in the US. As more players enter the streaming video market, more consumers stream content and the resolution of that content increases, broadband networks will likely struggle to keep pace.  In reality this means one thing for consumers in the short to medium term – buffering!

A final challenge that consumers may have to contend with will be shortening product lifecycle times and continual hardware / software compatibility issues. To illustrate what I mean here, let me use a personal example. I bought a smart TV less than 18 months ago. The software is already out of date and cannot be upgraded – in effect my “smart” TV is now just a dumb monitor. Now, I understand that many hardware manufacturers moving into software have a pretty steep learning curve to produce brilliant, upgradable software (with the exception of Apple it’s simply not in their DNA). In addition, I understand that rapid technology innovation is resulting in shorter product lifecycles. But most consumers, used to purchasing a TV that lasts many years, may not be so accepting. In addition, TV manufacturers will likely battle against an array of players for dominance of the living room. If you’ve invested millions in developing “smart” TV’s, the last thing you want is for your device to be kept as a dumb monitor, while consumers plug in IP boxes and TiVos and “flick” content from their smart phones onto the TV. Whilst consumers will undoubtedly see huge innovation, it is highly unlikely that the various hardware / software providers will work in harmony, again leaving consumers facing potential frustration, confusion and expense.

Bill Gates once said: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”. There are some incredibly exciting innovations in the future of television, but mass adoption may be held back, unless some of the barriers above are addressed.

The 360 degree customer view is dead

I've never been entirely comfortable with the phrase "360 degree customer view". I remember hearing it for the first time in a Siebel sales pitch. The sales guy put up a slide with a customer on one side and a series of connectors - like spokes of an umbrella - connecting to all of the different silos of customer data - the call centre, the field sales force, the finance department and so on. The assertion that followed was the Siebel would connect all the silos of customer data allowing anyone who interacted with the customer to have a complete history of the customer. It was argued that greater customer insight, in turn, could be used to build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.

Thinking back to my early days as a CRM practitioner, I also remember the first CRM training course I attended, run by Francis Buttle. One module of the course described the inability of many organisations to understand their customers and think from their customer's perspective. The training course gave a case study of a Swiss bank who had launched a new savings product designed for pensioners. Now two caveats... firstly, I have no idea if the case study was a true story and secondly, I'll probably do it an injustice as I’m sure I don’t remember all the details. But if I remember correctly the jist of the story was that the Swiss bank had completed a market research exercise that suggested that pensioners in rural locations represented a large untapped market for savings products. They designed a new product, specifically designed for pensioners and they employed a marketing agency to come up with a tailored campaign to target pensioners. To ensure that bank staff would execute on the anticipated success of the campaign, the bank initiated a training program to teach their staff how to interact effectively with pensioners. They built booths in some of their branches and put on coffee and biscuits for their potential new clients. The new product launch was an unmitigated disaster. Despite the research that showed that Swiss pensioners had savings funds stashed under their mattresses and despite the large investments, the bank barely signed up any new customers. In desperation they undertook a research program to try and find out what went wrong. They travelled to villages in Switzerland and ran focus groups with pensioners. When they asked them why they were reluctant to take out the new savings products of the bank one theme emerged above all others - the pensioners were scared of getting mugged on the way to the city banks. With that insight the bank overhauled it's branch model and used large mobile banking vans to visit the local villages to interact with their potential clients on their terms. Knowing that security was an issue they also introduced an insurance policy to offer unlimited protection on savings funds stored with the bank. Again, I have no idea whether that story is true, I suspect some of it was embellished to make a key point of thinking outside-in from the customer’s perspective, but the story stuck with me.

So back to the "360 degree customer view", my unease with the term comes from that fact that although it may be possible to build a transactional view of all of a customer's interactions, orders, complaints etc with your company, those transactions only represent a tiny fraction of a true "360 customer view". A consolidated list of transactions with one company tells us nothing about how a customer is thinking or feeling at any given point in time (this changes constantly based on a whole range of factors that are entirely outside of our control). For example, a transaction that tells me that a customer had broadband installed, probably doesn't tell me that the engineer was late, rude and left a mess in the customer's living room. An inside-out list of transactions tells us nothing about a customer's dealings with competitors, their pain points, their value drivers and more importantly how these change, chameleon-like, according to the situation the customer is in.

Now before you ask, social media is not the panacea. Social media is not the missing link in the 360 degree view. Yes, of course you can supplement CRM data with social data and yes, this can sometimes give you more of an indication as to who the customer really is and what they really think. But, one of the dangers I see with adding social data to CRM is that it can make marketers act like kids in a candy store and it can perpetuate inside-out thinking. With so much data to slice and dice, it becomes even easier to perform a segmentation and blast more and more inside-out offers at customers (people aged 21-25, living in NYC, who wrote a product review of an MP3 player in the last month, who clicked on an add must surely want a targeted email offer for a pair of headphones so let’s keep spamming them???).

A harder position to take, but in my view, one that can yield better results (in the form of long terms profitable, win-win relationships) is one that seeks first to understand the things customers value, the journeys they go through and the critical moments of truth within those journeys. Second, to acknowledge that you can't control how a customer thinks, feels, buys, complains but you can give customers tools to help them create value for themselves and you can sense, respond and fix things when they go wrong. When I first heard the story of the Swiss bank all those years ago the simplicity of listening to customers, rather then making assumptions about them stuck with me. Today, we are awash with data, the challenge is in how we use it.

The three big challenges facing organisations investing in CRM today

There was a time when the main challenge facing an organisation investing in CRM was the amount of discount they could negotiate on their Siebel licences. That was a time, when for many companies, CRM was all about technology. A time when the original definitions of CRM like “building mutually beneficial customer relationships” were ignored in favour of technology bells and whistles. Today the market has matured. CRM buyers are pretty savvy – many were burnt by investing in CRM the first time round and are still suffering from the hangover. I’m often asked by clients who got things wrong with CRM a decade or so ago, how they can ensure that they get things right today. I see three big challenges that need to be addressed to ensure CRM success.

The first challenge I see is that “failed CRM” was all about value to management. People invested in sales force automation solutions in order to get better visibility over their sales reps, which in turn enabled better forecasting, better alignment of resources to priority accounts (in the current quarter) and in theory a reduction in the loss of account knowledge when a sales rep left the company. Alternatively, within Customer Service management attempted to enforce call scripts, the measurement of everything (like average call handle time), scripted cross-selling in every call, or enforced channel shift to reduce costs (instead of “your call is important to us” read “you may want to speak to an agent but our CRM system will push you to an IVR (which in turn will advise you to go online) because it’s cheaper for us”). To be successful CRM investments need to unlock value to a balanced group of stakeholders. At a minimum this includes management, front line users who interact with the customer and of course, let’s not forget customers! Unless you have a clear picture of how your CRM investments will help unlock value to those stakeholders (particularly customers!) you are simply pumping money into the CRM technology slot machine and hoping to win. Most sales people I speak to hate “failed CRM” because all it did for them was create 2-3 hours admin on a Friday afternoon. Most customer service people I speak to hate “failed CRM” because they felt uncomfortable reading the script, or having to cross-sell to an angry customer. But critically, most end customers I speak to hate “failed CRM” because all they wanted to do was speak to someone about their problem. Transitioning to an outside-in, customer-centric mindset and balancing your understanding of value is the first challenge.

Once you have a balanced view of stakeholder value, the second challenge you need to think about is the full range of capabilities that need to be improved in order to unlock that value. I frequently come across CRM business cases that show a clear and direct linkage between a technology investment and a business outcome with no consideration to the inter-connected capabilities that might get in the way. For example, making an assumption that investing in XYZ technology will reduce sales force admin time is fine, but assuming that sales people will use that time to open up new accounts may be questionable. For that to happen it may well be that incentives need to be changed, that new business development or solution selling skills need to be improved, or that the sales organisation is simply structured in the wrong way. Without addressing those broader but dependant capabilities, you simply cannot guarantee that CRM investments will release value.

Finally, most people I speak to these days about CRM face a delivery problem. “Failed CRM” was monolithic and big-bang. Implementations took many months or even years before users saw anything. On the whole, clients I speak to today want to embrace a more iterative, agile way of implementing but that’s not as simple as flicking a switch and becoming “Agile” (and certainly not as simple as buying a cloud-base solution). I’ve seen several Agile programs that started with the best of intentions but ended up in tricky situations as maybe the business didn’t quite understand the level active participation and involvement that would be required, priorities across different business stakeholders and technology were not properly aligned, the technology simply wasn’t particularly suited to an agile implementation, or the technology solution evolved into SaaS best of breed Hell (see Ray Wang's latest from CRM Evolution 2012 http://blog.softwareinsider.org/2012/08/14/event-report-crm-evolution-2012/. Agile done well is a delight – expectations are aligned through constant communication and progress is visible for all to see. Agile done badly is a pretty dangerous delivery approach – at its worst used to justify taking unnecessary short-cuts or avoid any planning. Transitioning to an agile delivery approach is the third challenge.

The three challenges are not exhaustive but I certainly see them repeated across a number of different clients and industries. What do you think is missing?

CRM Strategy interview transcript

Below is a rough transcript of an interview I gave to Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Vantive Media, for CRMsearch.com You can download the interview as a podcast from iTunes here.

 

CS - Before we talk about designing and implementing CRM strategy, let’s start with a clear understanding of what we mean by CRM strategy. Can you define or explain what you mean when you reference CRM strategy?

LB - Let's start with defining CRM. For me the oldest and simplest definitions of CRM are still the best. There are 2 that I like: one is "treat different customers differently" and the second is "CRM is a business approach that aims to build long term, mutually beneficial relationships with customers" 

So CRM strategy for me is about forming a vision of where you want to get to with CRM, evaluating your current state and the strengths and weaknesses of your capabilities and then defining the path to achieve your goals. Typically a CRM strategy would look at improving a range of capabilities required to enable your vision (from technology to people to process) and then forming a prioritized roadmap for implementation.

CS - Has it been your experience that CRM strategy is changing or evolving?

  

That's an interesting question - on one hand, if you go back to the definitions of CRM that I previously gave then CRM as a topic has changed very little.

 

The problem is that for the first 15 or so years of the CRM market people approached CRM in a technology-centric way and an extremely inside out way. So a typical CRM strategy was about defining a future state that was a static destination 5 years in the future, enabled by a monolithic technology program. The over-riding ethos was one of command and control - CRM initiatives tried to control all customer facing data, processes and customer facing employees e.g. forcing them through a script or forcing them to enter their contacts into a database. CRM initiatives even tried to control customers (defining when customers bought e.g. end of quarter, and what service channels they used).

 

As understanding in the market has improved, the original definitions of CRM have really come back into fashion and so CRM strategy has evolved. I think people are going back to basics and are thinking if we really want to build “mutually beneficial customer relationships" then we need to focus on more the customer, rather than the technology and understand what the customer values from a relationship, what jobs the customer is trying to do when they interact with us and how we can help the customer do those jobs better than the competition. So I think what's changed in CRM strategy is an increasing importance of customer experience.

 

The second thing I think has changed is technology - both the technology that enables CRM systems (cloud-based services, flexible, modular) but also the technology that customers use to interact with organizations (over the last 10 years we've seen the rise of social media, mobile devices, apps). This trend makes it increasingly difficult to try and define a static destination as a CRM vision - the reality is that both consumer and enterprise technology is constantly changing so a CRM strategy needs to reflect that and really design for change from the outset

 

CS - How do you recommend business leaders go about designing and implementing their CRM strategy?

 

LB - 1. Create a compelling need for change - people have got to want the change. This could be a competitive threat, customer numbers on the decline, or an opportunity that excites people, but we need something that galvanizes people.

 

2. Get customer-centric, outside-in thinking into the definition of your vision. A good way of doing this is through customer journey mapping - looking through the lens of the customer at the jobs they are trying to do and the moments of truth they face in their journeys.

 

3.Clearly articulate that vision (which again, may not be a static destination) it may be a set of principles, but key is that people understand and buy into them.

 

4. Evaluate your existing capabilities (tech, people, process)

 

5. Form a prioritized delivery plan of which capabilities you need to improve (of course acknowledging that many are interlinked)

 

6. Start small, iterate and iterate and iterate!

 

CS - Is it necessary to first build a business case to support implementing a new or revised CRM strategy – and if so, what should that business case include?

 

LB - For me, CRM should be linked to an organizations corporate strategy. If the corporate strategy is to compete in the market with a differentiated service experience then CRM should be about enabling that and the business case should in turn be directly linked to those corporate objectives.

 

The types of benefits you would look for in CRM usually related to improved revenue and profitability from doing more business with existing customers for longer. But of course some CRM projects are justified with cost savings derived from channel shift or process efficiencies.

 

Ideally, when you think about benefits you should also think about value to everyone in the chain e.g. employees, customers, suppliers etc

 

CS - Do you find that implementing a CRM strategy often entails a cultural change in the business?

 

LB - Without question and that's the hardest challenge.

 

If you look at the rise of social media and big data - everyone is obsessed by the technology challenge of filtering through vast quantities of data, but to me the biggest challenge is an operating model challenge. I've seen countless organizations struggle with social media because it challenges their silos, their speed, their command and control mindset

 

CS - Do you find that there’s often a mismatch between what businesses think they do well and what they really do well - or between how businesses believe there customer relationships are as opposed to how customers would rate those relationships?

 

LB - yes - frequently.

 

One Pharma client I worked with was shocked to discover that their sales people were spending over 50% of their time on activities that their clients valued as low or insignificant. The top things that clients valued accounted for less than 10% of total sales activities

 

CS - if so, why the mismatch? And what do about it?  

 

LB - It's a difficult challenge.

 

First – you need to make people aware - in the example I've just given the CEO and sales director were shocked and that created a need for change.

 

But realistically many of these behaviors are ingrained in an organization - most sales people are still taught that the most important customers are the ones who are going to place an order this quarter and are measured ruthlessly in closing the deal before quarter end. It's a big shift in culture to prioritize long-term relationships and to do the right thing by the customer - both senior management and front line employees have to believe that it's the right thing to do

 

CS - When developing a CRM strategy, how and when does CRM software fit into the process?

 

LB - Quite simply technology is one enabling capability within a CRM strategy. It's unfortunate that the terms has become so synonymous with technology because the reality is that most organizations buy far more technology than they actually use and they cannibalize on the complimentary capabilities required to release the value from their investments 

 

CS - Do you find that its still a common scenario whereby companies implement CRM software before they’ve articulated a CRM strategy or defined their customer-facing business processes? Why?

I hope we're through that phase in the market but reality is I think it's still the case that people buy technology first and than 6 weeks / 6 months into a program they start to question why are we doing this? What's in it for customers? How can we prioritize our delivery sprints if don't have a clear picture of what's important.

 

CS - How is developing a CRM strategy influenced by disruptive technologies such as SaaS or the cloud, or social media or social CRM?  

 

LB - To some extend SaaS has made things worse - because it's so much easier for a line of business manager to purchase (outside IT) and get up and running with a siloed technology solution, SaaS can be seen as a silver bullet (which of course it is not!).

 

However, at the same time, SaaS  of course presents a fantastic opportunity to deliver some of the technology capabilities required to enable a vision much faster and in a more flexible way. Let’s be clear though - you still need a vision and strategy – there are no shortcuts here.

 

Social CRM has reinvigorated CRM because it has created a compelling event for most organizations to change. It demands the acknowledgement of customer power and control which in turn demands outside-in, customer experience thinking.

 

CS - When CRM strategies fail, what are the most common reasons they fail?

 

LB - In my experience most tend to blame the technology but technology is rarely to blame. I wrote this piece on “6 ways CRM projects go wrong” which covers reasons for failure like the inside out mindset, “analysis paralysis”, “once bitten twice shy”.

 

CS - If we look ahead a little bit, what changes do you suspect we’ll see in terms of creating, implementing or refining CRM strategies?

 

Actually I think we will see a theme of back to basics thinking on relationships. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of a new technology but the reality is that people not technology build relationships and healthy relationships are never one sided.

 

The second theme I see is the pressure to try and design for change. It’s clear that product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter and consumers are constantly swarming to the latest device, social network or app. We have unparalleled ability to interact with consumers in new ways and learn vast amounts about them – they challenge is how we apply that insight to the business and how fast we are able to respond.

Fixing Sales Force Automation

For the past 15 years one of the most common causes of Sales Force Automation project failures has been that they have added approximately zero value to users. Most projects prioritized sales management first and sales people a distant second. SFA projects aimed to imprison sales people; tracking their daily activities, forcing them to give up the knowledge, scripting them through a sales process and creating admin for them. Is it any wonder that the majority of users treated these systems with utter contempt? I have spoken to countless sales people who looked upon their SFA systems as 2-3 hours of admin time per week, usually on a Friday afternoon.

Sales people who find themselves the victims of bad SFA implementations typically enter the bare minimum amount of information required to cheat their managers into thinking they were using the system effectively, paying particular attention to working out how best to game and not commit the ultimate sin of over-forecasting a deal. Despite the millions invested in SFA applications rogue pipelines in Microsoft Excel complimented by to-do lists on scraps of paper arguably remain the most widely used SFA platform today. Unfortunately this creates a vicious circle of failure. As soon as management start to mistrust the forecast coming from their SFA reports, they too start finding other ways of improving forecast accuracy. They arrange daily or weekly calls with sales people, drilling down on every aspect of a deal, mentally adjusting their forecast figures up or down.

 

So how do we fix this issue? Most successful CRM projects now adopt an approach of trying to help customers fulfill their needs or wants – in other words the jobs they are trying to do. If we can help customers create value and be successful then we stand a much greater chance of building a mutually beneficial relationship. Exactly the same principle needs to be applied to employee sales people. When embarking on an SFA project we must understand how to create value for a sales person and one of the easiest ways of creating value is through information.

 

Several years ago I worked on an SFA project for a pharmaceutical company in Australia. Their typical profile of a sales rep was a 50-60 year old who travelled vast distances around country Australia, visiting pharmacy customers, whom they had known for many years, selling them over the counter medications. Most of the reps were superb sales people – they had amazing relationships with their customers, knowing every detail about the lives and businesses of the people they were dealing with. Two major problems existed. Firstly the reps had to do quite staggering amounts of admin (mainly faxing orders to wholesalers and chasing orders from wholesalers). Many reps stopped productive sales work at lunchtime and spent each afternoon doing admin. Secondly, the reps had no information about their customers other than that in their head. They had no idea which customers were the most profitable, which had the highest share of wallet, which switched suppliers frequently based on price promotions or what other dealings their customers had with the company e.g. with Finance. Finally, for additional context a significant proportion of the reps (say 20%) had very little IT experience. My advice to them was that they badly needed SFA but that SFA would kill their sales force. Instead of blindly rushing to roll out a laptop based SFA solution that at least 20% of the reps would not have been able to use, we took some time to understand the needs of the reps and how they worked. Of course when we spoke to them (and also their clients) they all wanted to reduce their admin time, they all wanted to be alerted when one of their major clients failed to pay on time, they all wanted to spot new opportunities to upsell additional products to their clients or find new opportunities, they all wanted to manage their time better and spend time on the things the activities that would increase their commission stream. In the end we implemented an SFA solution. But it was a very different SFA solution than you probably have in mind. Sure, it had many of the same features and functions but they were embedded within a simplified solution that added value to the rep and that the rep would actually want to use. For the 20% of reps who had literally never switched on a PC in their lives we set up a sales support desk. They carried on taking orders with pen and paper but before they visited a customer they phoned the sales support desk to get an update on any missing orders or payments. After the visit they phoned back and the sales support clerk typed in the orders as fast as they could speak – no faxes, no re-keying, no admin.

 

Now of course the example above is rather crude. The project won an award for the best CRM implementation in Australia (I think in 2003), but frankly we had a fairly easy opportunity to generate huge benefits given the lack of effectiveness within the sales force. Most sales forces today are far more sophisticated but similar problems still exist around admin time, lack of science in how reps treat different customers and lack of intelligence. Fundamentally reps in more sophisticated sales organizations still want the same things – “make it easier for me to sell”, “reduce my admin burden and help me make my commission targets”. In today’s “big data” world information and insight is key but we cannot expect our sales people to turn into data analysts. We must find ways of blending insight into SFA applications in ways that genuinely add value to sales people. For example our SFA systems should hide complexity of front / back office integration but:

 

• Supplement account knowledge, for example with information gleaned from social networking sites e.g. Fred used to work with Joe at ACME, he writes a blog about financial fraud etc.  Information from social networking sites can be valuable in helping a sales person find and qualify a new opportunity or understand the relationship networks around a target account. Take a look at this whitepaper from InsideView for more information: “Sales 2.0: Tap into Social Media to drive Enterprise Sales Results”.
• Alert sales people to potential new opportunities based on patterns of what other customers are buying or what other successful reps are selling.
• Show sales people how they are doing against targets and model commissions and how these will change based on different levels of quota achievement.
• Predict the revenue and profitability impact of changing focus to a different account or set of activities.
• Show how different competitors are impacting discounting, credits & losses and show how this impacts commission.
• Model the impact of complex pricing changes to help structure deals better for customers, provider and of course sales rep.
•  Alert the sales rep to back office information that could be crucial in structuring a deal e.g. supply chain information that might prevent an order being shipped on time. This ensures that sales people make promises that they can deliver on, which in turn makes them more successful and saves them time and effort in re-visiting bad deals.
• Connect the sales person to internal social networks and knowledge bases to find knowledge experts, peers or content easily. This can be extremely valuable for competitive information or sharing case studies of wins and losses.

 

SFA implementations are tough. Sales people are notoriously protective of their account information and insight and bitterly resistant to admin and control, but information can be a key to unlocking value for both organization and rep.

 

This article was originally written to support SAP’s 21^st Century Sales Warrior Guide. See http://saleswarriorguide.com/