Are you at your office right now? If you look through the window, do you see the parking lot? If so, do you also see the fancy cars of the sales people? Yes? Bad news: you are losing revenue.
Why? Your sales people’s company cars shouldn’t be parked at your office, but rather at the premise of your clients and prospects.
Office time = wasted sales time
It’s very common to see Sales people overspending time at the office. Sure, it’s nice and valuable to meet with colleagues, catch up with your admin work and have a coffee or two, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for your sales revenue to have the salespeople to stick around the office.
How is it possible the parking lot full of sales people’s cars? Allow us to be brutally honest: it’s all about making excuses. “I have to prepare for my meeting”, “I need to input all client data in our CRM”, “I have to write up some tenders” … Often, sales reps are making excuses while in fact, they’re not in control when it comes to their own sales process, and even less when it comes to the buying process of potential customers. They are waiting for their clients to get back to them.
On average, 6.3 stakeholders are involved in complex B2B buying decisions. Yes, you guessed it right: that’s a lot of individual agendas to get in line for your sale.
Great sales professionals continuously manage the buying process of prospects which means guiding the 6.3 stakeholders to a consensus decision in their favor. As a sales pro you have to spend time with each of the stakeholders to understand their ambitions, present and valorise the benefits of your offer. For each of the 6.3 stakeholders. That’s a lot of time to spend with the customer and not in the office.
CRM is for a company, what a beer tap is for a pub
The best sales people live on the phone with prospects and customers, and spend time in the office of prospects and customers. Their challenge is how to keep an overview of the interactions with the 6.3 stakeholders in each of their prospects? Just put all information in CRM, how difficult can this be?
Why is it then that so many CRM systems look like abandoned buildings? When CRM is just a passive repository, sales people don’t bother to spend time in the office populating CRM, time they would rather spend with customers. How then to support sales people to keep an overview of opportunities and leads?
We’ve done some recent projects with The House of Sales to help sales people align their Sales process with the Buying process of their customers in order to keep that end-to-end control. Our ambition was to provide digital support allowing Sales to share relevant insights to each of the client stakeholders at the appropriate stage. Think of a library of reference questions when diagnosing the needs of prospects, a simulator of total cost of ownership when the value has to be proven or an offer tool to rightsize proposals together with the prospect.
When the sales tools integrate with prospect information in CRM, everybody wins: sales people get insights in buying stage of stakeholders, an overview of activities and suggested next actions. In addition, Sales management gets accurate insights in the pipeline. In short, the CRM gets adopted by your Sales team as their partner in crime.
Process-driven sales tools integrated with your CRM will eliminate excuses to be at the office. Is your sales team making excuses? Let us know. There’s a good chance we can support you.