What powers a sale? If we look at recent best-seller sales books such as The Challenger Sale, power equals relevance to the prospect or customer, and an ability to challenge their views, in effect helping them to see their world with new eyes.
How can sales management empower sales executives with the real-time intelligence to be highly relevant and strong and credible challengers? It starts with understanding the prospect’s context – and that context is multi-faceted, with information about it stored anywhere and everywhere – and certainly far beyond the CRM system.
Add to the equation all of the tools your company has created to ensure your sales executives can be that credible challenger. Where does all of this information reside? How does sales discern which content is most appropriate for which prospect? Where do you store customer and prospect interaction data?
If yours is like most companies, information about your prospects and customers, plus all sales tools and interactions reside in a multitude of systems, and in a multitude of formats:
It’s in social media, CRM, financial systems, communities, email, call transcripts, websites and more. Add to that, examples of similar customers and their products and histories, the right presentations, product literature, blogs and all customer/prospect communications and interactions.
It’s also in the knowledge of colleagues and even former colleagues – people who know and have expertise about that prospect or customer, or about the applicability of your products to that prospect. You also need to consider other sales execs who may be selling in to the same company, at the same time, across the world. And don’t forget to factor in products from your company the customer may already own, and their experiences with them.
How can a single sales executive know all of that, for each customer, during each encounter? Unfortunately, not by CRM alone, not even with all the modules of the leading CRM, Salesforce.com.
Imagine if all of that highly relevant information could be instantly assembled and atomically presented to sales executives, as they are working on specific accounts. Imagine them powering their way to challenger status – flying through relevant intelligence that has been intuitively pre-assembled for them, automatically – directly within their current CRM. Directly within Salesforce.com.
Change is coming, and it will be radical. It will make your sales teams love your CRM. It will help them successfully challenge the status quo, and to close sales faster and more frequently, through relevance and intelligence.
What information sources power your sales?