Fuel the People Engine with Analysis

CRM Magazine recently published a great article written by Jim Dickie titled Fueling the CRM Engine. The sub-title, Sales reps are spinning their wheels waiting for sales knowledge and relevant management tools to be integrated, summarizes the artcles message.

The key reason, he explains is that many companies have installed CRM applications expecting to see improvements simply based on the technology's presence. Somehow Dickie reached back fifteen years for a great quote by Jessica Keyes: "Technology does not beget a competitive advantage, any more than paint and canvas beget a Van Gogh." Fifteen years ago the Pentium was just coming out, but this statement still really applies in today's market.

The fact that "sales people still cannot easily get access to the knowledge they need to effectively compete," is reinforced by citing a 2007 analysis performed by CSO Insights. Firms were asked what information their salespeople needed to sell effectively, and to assess how easy it was for the salespeople to access that information.

Several very basic types of sales information appear on the resulting list. Namely, simple contact information, purchasing history, case studies, executive profiles, previous sales and marketing efforts and the customer's industry. It makes sense to the canny salesperson who is used to having to "Google" the customer, look up past purchase orders or even sift through pages of web content to track down the name of a decision maker before picking up the phone. This is really some very basic but critical information. So basic that it's painful to think that salespeople have to spend any significant time and effort to get at it. Precious time and effort that could otherwise be spent selling.

The process of collecting the required sales information must become as automated as possible in order to minimize the amount of detective work done by salespeople. A great deal of this information is readily available on the web databases. Salespeople know this because they "Google" for the information. The trouble is that locating good information can be like finding a needle in the giant haystack of web content. A task that text mining is perfectly suited for. A text mining tool can meticulously comb web content and analyze the results to eliminate unneeded information and report significant customer information such as contact information, executive information, industry, customer lists, partners and recent events. Ideally all of this would be connected to a CRM system with customer reports available to salespeople at the push of a button.

With all due respect to the author Mr. Dickie, I would have titled the article "Fueling the People Engine". Simply fueling CRM still does not beget a Van Gogh. The the real engine in the sales process are the salespeople and businesses are clearly saying they need more access to higher quality food.