Forget Romeo: Selling Takes Long-Term Relationships

Wining and dining is not enough. Photograph by Jenny Downing.

When it comes to managing customer relationships, your typical business thinks it’s a right Romeo with the clients. But in romance, as in life, actions speak louder than words, and if you ask these supposedly relationship-focused organizations:

• What’s your call planning process?
• How do you define the most required sales competencies for closing deals?
• For hiring new sales reps, which skills count most?
• What’s the state of your contact management?

… too often, the answer is: “We use an ad hoc process.” Translated into actions, here’s what that means for:

• Contact management: Sales reps waste time searching for customer information before visits.
• Call planning: Instead of doing their homework, salespeople “wing it” and don’t meet their quotas.
• Reporting: Sales activity reports get compiled manually.
• Training: Salespeople receive little skill development or coaching.

The end result is that customer relationships—not to mention sales productivity and morale—suffers.

Sales Reps Are From Mars, Customers From Venus?

The broader issue is that too many sales organizations define “relationship management” in When Harry Met Sally terms. Two people meet, form an emotional connection, and after a few high jinks, cue “happily ever after.”

When it comes to sales—qualifying leads, turning prospects into customers and beating out the competition to close deals—relationship management isn’t just about creating an emotional connection, but rather finding the best building blocks, and then managing these relationships, with a large number of people, over an extended period of time.

Based on Innoveer’s extensive CRM experience, we’ve identified the four best practices—not coincidentally, also part of our CRM excellence framework—required for excelling at relationship management: activity management, selling competencies, call planning and contact management.

Here are tips for mastering each:

The Sales Rep’s Diary

If an organization’s SFA adoption rate is low, the typical culprit is salespeople not bothering to log activity information in the CRM system. How can an organization entice salespeople to use SFA and log activities? In fact, there are five sure-fire techniques for increasing SFA adoption, including give and take (asking salespeople what the SFA system can do for them), incentives, as well as making SFA the only reality. In other words, create a culture where sales information only exists when it lives inside the CRM system.

That works both ways. Because organizations that manage activity data well can maintain a single, easy-to-search place to find any information relating to a customer, as well as to monitor and analyze sales, marketing and service trends, to find new ways of getting close to their customers.

Are You Skilled?

What are the best building blocks for creating lasting client relationships? With ad hoc processes, salespeople pursue clients their own way—wining & dining, ballgames or whatever they choose. Whereas more advanced organizations create a formal model that defines what managers see as the best skill set for managing relationships. Oftentimes, this includes everything from building rapport and presentation skills to persuasiveness and the ability to diagnose a customer’s particular product needs or business requirements.

Biotechnology company Genzyme, for example, turned to Innoveer to help it create a formal relationship management model. This begins by committing your plan to paper, because articulating exactly what you’re trying to achieve helps make both your plan and your activities even better. Indeed, with a formal plan in place, Genzyme is now developing a tool to score their sales reps on how well they’re doing in each defined category, so the company can better train, coach and hire for these sales competencies.

Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You

When it comes to planning customer calls, the most effective organizations use standard templates to guide sales teams and track their progress. They also maintain a single view of all relevant account information, often by using dashboards with activity-related information.

As with so many aspects of CRM, another requirement is to get all call-planning-related data into the CRM system. For example, a large European investment bank wanted to increase the efficiency of its call planning process, which was largely paper-based—teams often shared printouts or emailed spreadsheets. Working with Innoveer, the firm moved its call planning to an online CRM system, making it easier for salespeople to collaborate as well as maintain a single version of the truth.

Only Connect

More than half of the organizations we work with today don’t maintain a central repository of customer contact information. But without one, you can’t understand where you stand with a customer. For example, Innoveer client ANSYS, a high-technology product developer, formerly used multiple CRM systems and contact databases, which made it difficult to understand the current state of any relationship. Salespeople especially didn’t want to try and up-sell or cross-sell a client without first understanding whether the client had any open trouble tickets.

Now, however, thanks to consolidating its CRM systems, ANSYS has fostered better and richer interactions with customers, used these relationships to find new customers, and even enlisted customers to help maintain their own contact details with self-service tools.

Sleepless in Salesland

For organizations pursuing relationship management using ad hoc techniques, the thought of approaching customer relationships systematically, using well-planned and measured techniques, may knock some of the romance off of a wining and dining sales culture. But the simple truth is that if you eliminate ad hoc practices, you’ll not only land more customers, but amass them more quickly, then keep them longer.

The spontaneous outings? Save them for your free time.

Learn More

For any CRM program to be effective, you need to entice salespeople to use SFA.

To maximize the effectiveness of your overall sales program, based on Innoveer’s experience, you should focus on mastering not just relationship management, but also pipeline management, sales force leadership, sales force measurement, and territory management.