CRM/Digital Archives

According to a study carried out by IKO system in 2012, 59% of sales representatives' working time is not directly devoted to sales! A scathing observation that reveals the weight of numerous time-consuming ancillary tasks: internal meetings, administrative tasks, transport...

Restoring sales to its rightful place in the activities of sales representatives is, therefore, a major challenge for Sales Directors and a necessity for the company to develop its profits and optimize the use of its resources.

So how do you turn this seemingly unfavorable situation into an opportunity? For example, by exploiting the optimization opportunities available through your CRM!

These figures, extracted from the very interesting study conducted by IKO system [1], "Sales Action: 66 statistics and infographics", reveal the unproductive or excessively time-consuming tasks that plague the lives of sales representatives:

Is the time sales representatives lose on tasks outside their core responsibilities unavoidable? Fortunately, no!

Here are 4 ways a CRM can help you:

To improve the productivity of your sales teams (and therefore their results)
To save your sales representatives from a nervous breakdown!

1. Optimize unproductive time

An obvious first area of focus is optimizing all unproductive time!

This involves, for example, working in a taxi, on the subway, while waiting for a plane or train, and therefore treating all this unproductive time as opportunities.

To do this, some CRM solutions offer 2 possibilities:

- the mobile applications
- the ability to work offline

ZohoCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, for example, provide mobile applications that are enhanced based on settings and customizations.

Offline versions of CRM solutions, on the other hand, are generally based on strong integration with Outlook.

These are all opportunities for your sales representatives to capture their activities, the verbatim from their interviews, or to configure their follow-up and reminder tasks during previously unproductive moments.

2. Enrich customer / lead data.

All CRM solutions facilitate the enrichment of customer data in different ways:

- by standardizing this data (for example, defining and standardizing the address format) to facilitate its use (generating reports, configuring marketing campaigns, etc.)
- by verifying their consistency through control functions that check the existence of addresses or phone numbers.

Two major innovations are pushing this logic further for BtB and BtC:

The first is the complete integration of data from specialized external databases. This can be achieved through dedicated interfaces (such as Zebaz, which works with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Yellowbox, Easiware, Marketo, Eloqua, or Digatelo) or by providing specific modules. For example, Data.com or Amabis have created a CRM solution based on their business directories (data is their primary focus), but these companies have recognized the importance of offering a technical solution to leverage this data directly. We can also mention the 2I solution from B&C Technology, which offers an enriched single customer view.

In both cases, the interface allows for automatic and simplified data import, which is directly linked to existing accounts in the database (no duplicate creation, thanks to a similarity search system, with equivalence rate). Information updates are automatic and in real time.

This allows you to update administrative data (address, SIRET, etc.) and qualitative data (activity, turnover, workforce, etc.), but also to enrich contacts: roles, organization charts, etc., with rich data with high added value for sales representatives!

The second is the integration of professional or personal social networks directly into the contact record in the CRM. This allows you to centrally monitor contact updates within the tool without getting distracted and improves the relevance of your interactions (by tracking the person's and their company's news, understanding their interests, and identifying their network for potential introductions and recommendations).

IKO System offers intelligent alerts about your prospective contacts, clients, or competitors to increase the responsiveness of sales teams.

3- Qualify and score leads.

In addition to the integration solutions already mentioned with external databases, which facilitate lead research and the import of rich data into the CRM, the major innovation of recent years has been the explosion of Marketing automation modules.

These modules, which vary in functional richness (and cost), enable the implementation of nurturing strategies. This involves offering personalized content (messages, offers) and promoting interactions with identified leads (based on Inbound Marketing scenarios) through various channels.

This process enriches the database with actionable behavioral data and allows for both:

- to nurture a prospect's interest in your company/offers
- to develop and deepen the relationship with them over time
- to identify their interests and habits (behavioral data)
- to support them in developing their project and towards making a purchasing decision
- to establish lead scoring based on different interactions to identify hot prospects and deliver them to sales representatives at the right time.

This marketing channel ultimately feeds the leads available to sales representatives, providing them with a database of qualified contacts with a history of interactions. The list of solutions is extensive and the offerings are varied: Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Exact Target, Silver Pop, InfusionSoft, Koban, Act-On, SalesFusion, Click Dimension, etc.

4- Share knowledge and work collaboratively

As is often the case, this innovation comes from Salesforce, an innovation that has been adopted, supplemented and adapted by the majority of CRM solutions on the market.

Consider each entity as a Facebook page: an account, a contact, an opportunity, etc. What may seem anecdotal at first glance mainly allows you to store unstructured data on accounts and contacts instead of sharing it by email, thus avoiding loss of information and allowing a newcomer to integrate customer knowledge beyond the figures.

Unstructured data includes: interview transcripts, organizational charts, data related to the client's market and its offers (in a BtoB context)... That is, data that does not fit into standardized "dedicated fields" and cannot be automatically imported.

By allowing them to be stored and displayed on the page dedicated to the account or contact, the CRM meets several needs:

- Keep track of this information and archive this knowledge, which falls under Business Intelligence and adds significant value to the sales process.
- Share it, so that different actors can contribute to feeding and enriching it (a member of the customer service or a project manager can glean key information on the client's decision-makers or projects during his exchanges with him, which will have an important value in the eyes of the sales representative)
- To "historize": link the rich information thus obtained to the history of interactions between the company and the client, and thus allow any interlocutor taking over the file to quickly become aware of this information and take into account the client's history.

The ability to subscribe to « feeds » to follow the « news feed » of a contact or account can allow the manager to manage the activity of his sales representatives, the sales representative to follow the news of his client... or several members of a team to work together (sales representatives working together on the same account, sales + marketing + customer service teams).

This also avoids a dramatic pitfall often encountered in teams when a CRM is not used: the pure and simple loss of information, or its control by a single person (who may leave the company).

CRM is therefore a real goldmine for optimizing sales force and developing a more collaborative approach within your company... Provided that you choose it well and that it is actually used! Two essential elements on which we support clients of all sizes from many sectors on a daily basis, such as:

- the healthcare sector: BIOMNIS
- The leisure and event sector: STADE DE FRANCE
- Industry: GPN (Groupe Total), GEMALTO
- the service sector: GL Events, APICIL

And how do your teams use CRM tools? What benefits have you observed, and what difficulties have you encountered in implementing such a tool?

To learn more about CRM solutions and help you with your projects, find all of our methods and tools here:

[1] http://go.iko-system.com/rs/ikosystemtrial2/images/eBook_statistiques_action_commerciale_2012.pdf

You can find the article in the September issue of Action Commerciale magazine, currently on newsstands.
You can also purchase and read it online at www.epresse.fr or in the Le kiosque ePresse.fr app, available for free on iPad, iPhone, Android smartphone or tablet, and Windows 8.

Share your projects with us! Feel free to contact us with your questions; we will be happy to answer them.

The objective of such a survey is twofold:

- Gathering the perception and impacts of the crisis on companies
- Assess the ability of companies to respond "on the ground" to the impact of the crisis on Customer Relations issues:

– Relationship Marketing
– Sales Efficiency
– Customer Service

Download the complete study

The company – particularly its Retail and Professional Markets Department – wanted to enable its marketing department to manage more diversified campaigns with greater responsiveness.

L’expertise des consultants KESTIO a su créer les conditions d’un dialogue constructif entre les différents acteurs impliqués dans le projet :

– the departments that are the recipients or users of the tool (marketing, sales, customer service)
– the company's long-standing IT partner
– the integrator of the chosen technical solution (the UNICA software package, published by IBM)
– the internal IT department (Information Systems Department)

It also enabled the implementation of governance based on effective management tools and indicators, for clear, precise, and shared monitoring of compliance with specifications, schedules, and defined budget, at each stage of the project.

This resulted in the selection and then the implementation of an operational technical solution that met the identified needs, in compliance with the defined cost and time objectives.

Work carried out with an active approach to change management: involving the teams throughout the process (study, selection, implementation) is indeed the best guarantee of future approval of the tool by its recipients!

The benefits of the project:

For business teams:

Increased productivity and work quality through access to new features or improvements to existing ones (more precise targeting, automated and more comprehensive tracking, possible multi-channel campaign management, faster pricing tool, etc.).

For the company:

The completion of the project (currently in the testing phase)
Respecting the expressed and defined objectives and constraints.
Establishing a dynamic of constructive exchanges between the various internal departments involved (Sales Management/Customer Relations/IT Department/Marketing) and with external partners (IT service provider and integrator).
Genuine team involvement in the project, and better ownership of the tool by its users.
An optimization of production costs
Improved service quality for its customers.

In summary: a measurable financial, technical, and human ROI, in the short and long term.

Discover, through this webinar, how to conduct another optimization project: the optimization of your sales asset.

In this article, you will find a summary of a comprehensive survey covering the implementation methods of CRM tools, usage patterns and identified obstacles, perceived benefits, and our recommendations for reconciling salespeople and the tools provided to them.

Sales functions often suffer from the CRM tools available to them, even though the goal is to help them improve their sales performance. Indeed, while a large majority of the companies interviewed (80%) recognize that CRM tools allow for better customer knowledge, nearly 75% of them observe resistance to their use for reasons independent of the tool implemented (ergonomics, availability of information, etc.)

In many CRM projects, difficulties related to deployment to end users are added to the problems of solution design and configuration (more than 73% of the companies interviewed acknowledge that the CRM tool in place in their company was not sufficiently mastered by users and adopted by managers). Consequences: users refuse or only partially fill in the tool, sales managers continue to use their old systems to manage activity, etc.

The entire project's sustainability is then called into question due to a lack of operational results. Everyone knows that the tool is not an end in itself and cannot compensate for user reluctance and obstacles. Often, the solution lies in management approaches.

This study shows us two major trends:

1. The collective interest, namely that of the company, in CRM tools is not questioned by users and their managers: almost all recognize that the tool allows for advances in knowledge and information sharing around the client. However, these contributions remain fundamental to all CRM tools (including free solutions!).

2. However, when it comes to personal involvement in the implementation and use of a CRM tool, many resistances emerge and make its deployment to operational staff complex, even impossible. The tool becomes poorly informed, criticized, unused, etc.

In conclusion, the collective stake in this type of project is, for the most part, shared but conflicts with the individual interests of the targeted users, the sales representatives.

Our vision: CRM tools are not essential for individual sales performance. Many salespeople continue to perform well without using a comprehensive CRM solution. However, the growth of sales and marketing organizations and competitive pressures now require customer relationship management to refine their understanding of targets and improve information sharing.

In summary, the question to ask is this: How can we align the individual interests and benefits of salespeople with the overall and collective challenges of the company?

To learn more about CRMs and help you with your projects, find all of our methods and tools here: