When I took Snickers on her morning walk today, we ran into someone I’d never met before walking his dog down the street. After our dogs finished sniffing each others butts, the man surprised me (no, he did not sniff my butt).
He said,
I’m Dave. I used to live in your house.
We started talking. Dave owned my house 10 years ago. When his kids went to college, he downsized and moved a few blocks over. He sold the house to the people who I eventually bought it from.
In addition to sharing the history of the neighborhood, Dave was able to alleviate a concern I had since moving here 2 years ago:
When I first moved in, I noticed that the house had were security cameras and alarms everywhere. There were covered every door, window, the driveway, the fence, yard, pool and even the street.
It appeared that the previous owners had used 2 different alarm companies and were extremely concerned about break-ins.
After eyeballing all of these security measures, I was a little worried that perhaps the neighborhood was not as safe as I had imagined.
Dave explained that many years ago, someone had broken into the house and stole his laptop while he was at work. He was so upset, that he “kind of went overboard” and installed a state-of-art security system. To be extra secure, he also contracted with 2 different companies for 24/7 alarm service.
He laughed about it today. It was the only break-in he’d had in more than 30 years in this neighborhood. He said now, In his current house, his alarm system is his dog barking.
Our conversation made me feel better.
Just like I was regarding the history of my home, many sales teams don’t know the history of their leads, accounts and customers.
When this happens, your sales reps waste valuable time and money focusing on activity that will not generate revenue.
Leads. Reps continue to cycle through bad leads that will never buy. This includes leads that are bogus, people who have left the company, non-buyers, etc. I’ve seen reps contact leads for years until I pointed out that despite making 30+ calls and sending 50+ emails, they’ve had no actual contact with the recipient.
Accounts. Like leads, accounts need to be qualified in or out of the pipeline. Some will never buy and should be killed off. Others should be “parked” and worked at a later time (eg. the account just purchased from a competitor and won’t be due for a refresh for 3 years). Others should be worked in a very specific manner based on your prior interactions with them. Reps can be very reluctant to give up accounts they have “worked” even if they’ve gotten nowhere with them. It’s up to management to help ferret these out.
Customers. When engaging with a customer, your rep need to know what’s been purchased, who the key people are, the buying process, etc. Otherwise, it’s like making a cold call every time your rep speaks to an existing customer. This frustrates the rep and the customer.
There’s a simple solution to all of this:
Teach your reps to document every interaction with your leads, accounts and customers in your CRM
This seems painfully obvious. Despite that, I estimate that less than 10% of all sales reps do this and that few sales teams do this consistently.
There are several reasons why:
- Your CRM sucks. Many CRMs are bloated, overly complex or setup so badly that reps avoid using them whenever possible. (For some thoughts on fixing this read this post).
- Management doesn’t rely on the CRM. Perhaps management talks about the “importance of entering everything in the CRM”. But during 1:1s and pipeline reviews, management asks reps to fill out an excel sheet or Word Doc manually. There’s nothing reps hate more than doing data entry work only to have it be ignored.
- Your reps hate doing “admin work”. Most reps hate to spend time on meaningless admin work. If you are effected by #1 or #2 (or both), address it first and you’ll find #3 can be resolved with a little coaching and reinforcement from management.
It should take a rep only a few minutes to update the CRM with notes. Even better, most CRMs today can be configured to automatically track calls, emails and interactions.
Do this. Then have your sales manager use this data when coaching the reps, doing pipeline deep dives, and forecasting.
You are guaranteed to improve your sales results.
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