Why Salespeople are bad at updating their CRM

Companies buy CRMs tools to manage their sales staff.

CRM tools at their core, are where sales people report on their sales activities so their managers can report and manage their team.

Aside from basic functionality developed in the late 1990’s there has been very little improvement on helping a sales person manage their opportunities pipeline.

All the big CRM companies are trying to sell integration with the rest of the business (accounting, inventory etc), but you are no further in helping a salesperson to sell more.

What is a CRM? 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools manage the company’s interaction with current and potential customers. It is used by both customer facing sales people and their management to improve business relationships with customers and ultimately drive sales growth. 

Improvements to CRMs over the past 25 years have  been incremental at best. They have gotten more sophisticated, but not better at helping us improve our relationship with customers. 

For example a CRM does not help a salesperson be psychologically prepared to engage with her customers through building the following traits:

  • Winning

  • Empathy

  • Assertiveness

  • Vision

  • Storytelling 

In addition very few companies integrate the short customer stories and other micro-content into their CRMs to help enthuse potential buyers. 

CRMs do tax a salesperson’s most valuable resource - their time! But provides very little in return.  

The major CRM vendors include:

  • Salesforce

  • Hubspot

  • Sugar 

  • Pipedrive

  • Dynamics (Microsoft)

  • Zoho

  • SAP CRM

  • Oracle CRM

CRMs are too complex and take too much time for sales consuming to update, but most importantly don’t really provide much help to improve the salesperson’s effectiveness. 

A great CRM would help the salesperson to:

  1. Get into a positive mindset to sell. Effectiveness hinges on a positive mental state

  2. Map the customers’ decision process (not our sales pipeline process), and suggest smart actions 

  3. Incorporate a playbook with useful microcontent. 

Using Scarcity to Increase Sales

How did seeing empty food shelves during COVID-19 affect us? 

We over-buy of course!

It is a human reaction explained by Robert Cialdini in his books, Influence. https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X

Scarcity makes things more valuable to us when they are less available. It causes us to pay a premium or purchase soon than we originally planned.

You can use scarcity to increase the chances of sales for your startup!

Here are two examples:
1) The standard price for your SaaS is $1,500 / month. However the first 20 customers have the special price of $950 / month for the first 2 years, in exchange for testimonials and giving product feedback.  

2)  Your business has a surplus of consultant time next month. If customers decide to purchase by the end of this month the configuration fee will be reduced from $10,000 to $5,000!

What are you doing to leverage the power of Scarcity for your Startup?

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What time should I phone a Senior Executive?

In a post-COVID-19 world, when is the best time to phone?

If you need to call someone that is notoriously busy call them 5 mins before the hour.

I know that sounds crazy, but trust me it works for people who tend to be “very busy” and have less structure around their time.

After identifying yourself, the first thing you should say is, “Have I caught you at a bad time?”

If they are in a really stressful situation, it gives them an out. But most people will give you a minute to speak if you ask that question.

It should be enough time to:

  1. qualify them in or out of your sales prospecting

  2. share your micro sales content to influence them to the next stage

Give it a try!

On Partnerships

It can be a wonderful thing for your startup to partner with a bigger organisation.

Larger partner organisations can provide access to their customers and markets which can significantly impact on your success  

Here are the benefits: 

  • Access a network of existing customer relationships. Saving you heaps of time and leg work. 

  • Leverage a bigger and more well known brand than yours. They have generally been around for decades. 

  • The relationship may lead to an acquisition of your startup in the future!   

Successful  partnerships need to provide value for both parties. 

A few things that can help your startup be a valuable partner: 

  1. Find ways to enhance your partner’s value to their customers. This might involve understanding what they struggle with and helping them to solve it. 

  2. Don’t just wait for them to open customer opportunities. Talk to your own network and see if you can open opportunities for them also. The larger partners hardly ever see that happen. It will make your startup stand out from the crowd. 

  3. Always bring your “A-Game”. Partners need to be sold to first. Once they are confident you can deliver they will then open the door to their customers. 

However please be aware of the following:

  1. Clearly define what you will and will not do as a partner and then stick to it. You need to have the same consistent message to everyone in that organisation.    

  2. Don’t let them push you around. If you feel the relationship is not equal then it is better to walk away. In negotiation always understand what your “BATNA” is. 

  3. Understand that partnerships take time. Don’t expect them to fully trust you straight away. Many larger partners have been burnt by smaller partners being greedy and not keeping their end of the relationship. 

Remember that partnerships are not based on paper contracts but personal relationships of trust, respect and commercial value for both parties.

Anyone can be a partner to a big organisation. To really make it work requires you to make effort in building value and managing those relationships.   

 

Our Reaction to Loss

This week while moving offices I lost my best sunglasses.

They were an expensive purchase that I had enjoyed for the last 6 months. 

The feeling and frustration of the loss was quite intense! I would have done anything to go back in time and take a little extra care of those glasses. 😎

The next day my wife mentioned that I should sell a bicycle that had received little use since I purchased it. The sale of a second hand bike was equal to the repurchase of a new set of sun glasses.  

But my initial reaction was “meh!”.

I knew I could make this gain and make up for my loss, but I didn’t feel that interested.  

Scientific research shows we are keenly more aware of loss than of gain (Amos Tversky’s “loss aversion” principle (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979)).

Sales Startup Tip - don’t make yourself too available to a customer. You want her to think she could miss out on getting the best deal from your product.  

Shaping our perceptions

So much of our world is based on our natural and learned filters.

Powerful brands don’t try to sell to us, but seek to influence the way we think. 

An influential brand makes sales easy. 

As a startup founder how can you leverage your personal and business brand to influence the way people think?  

If you think powerful brands affect the way you spend, please tell me which one in the comments below. If you don’t believe brands affect you, please tell me why.  

Here are a few ideas on how to leverage your startup and personal brand: 

  • Categorise your competitors in a way that makes it difficult for them to fight back. If you do it well the more they work against that perception, the more it will reinforce the difference. 
  • As a startup you have no history. You are not tied down to the past. You are free to build the brand that suits you now! 
  • Once you decide on what your brand is, then reinforce it on everything that you do. All your selling. With your cofounders. With your employees. LinkedIn posts. Advertising. YouTube videos. 

 

 

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Slow down!

When you have your sales meetings, you need to be in a relaxed mental state.  

I have seen the following factors disrupt me in meetings: 

  • I am new and still feel uncomfortable with either the people around me or the content being covered.  
  • I allow stress to get a hold of me.  
  • I am relying on other technical experts in the room and this makes it difficult for me to provide a meaningful contribution .

Feeling stress and anxiety in a sales environment reduces our cognitive ability to that of a 12 year old. Even if we are a smart PHD our fear will cause us to stumble on our words and miss obvious social cues. 

If anxiety is affecting you and your ability to sell here are some activities that help me:

  • Write it down. Discover what the causes are and do something about it. 
  • Give it time and be patient with yourself. You will get better at this job. Reflect on your past successes.  
  • Talk about it with a trusted colleague.  
  • Exercise. 
  • Bring humour into the conversation. Laugh 😂  

 

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Finding your Hook

How do you confirm best strategy on selling your startup product to your customers? 

Just like fishing you need the right hook to land your customer. 

In all my career the best way to sell has been knowing what my customers will respond to best. Knowing that if I say “X” then they will likely respond with a “Y”.  

If they do not respond in the way I expect them either I do not understand them well enough or they are not the right customer.  

Before you know what hook to use, here are some questions you could ask:

  1. Why did you accept my call or meeting request? (This will help you know if they have something pressing to tell you now. Such as they need to purchase immediately or they have an emergency that they need your help with.  
  2.  What are you currently using and are you happy with it?  (Deeper understanding. You could also ask them a NPS (Net Promoter Score) question to drill down deeper.  
  3.  If you were wanting to make a chance, what would cause you to take action?  (Getting deeper into their motivation to change and how likely they will do it).  
  4.  What is your organisation’s decision process?  (By far this is the most important question to ask in a meeting. It helps you and the customer to start thinking about steps needed to turn this into a reality).  

These steps are you need to over time uncover the right approach to sell to your customers. 

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Top 10 Sales Methodologies - by HubSpot

In a recent article, HubSpot has listed the following top ten sales methodologies:

  1. SPIN Selling
  2. NEAT Selling
  3. Conceptual Selling
  4. SNAP Selling
  5. The Challenger Sale
  6. The Sandler System
  7. CustomerCentric Selling
  8. MEDDIC
  9. Solution Selling  
  10. Inbound Selling  

A couple of methodologies were completely new to me.  

Behind each of these methodologies, is a sales training company that makes money from teaching and training it all over the world.  

Some of them rely on claiming to have researched thousands of organisations in order to develop their methodology.

I am suspicious about “independent research” that has not been independently peer reviewed. It is too much of a leap of faith for me to believe.  

On the positive, a sales methodology helps the organisation to have a commmon reference point and a good way to onboard new staff.  

So shop around and find out what methodology suits your startup best! More importantly make sure the sales trainer you hire knows how to translate the theory into applicable knowledge.

 https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/6-popular-sales-methodologies-summarized

 

 

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