Sometimes you just need to push the envelope.

For years, excelling at customer relationship management (CRM) practices has meant learning how to master these three customer-facing capabilities: marketing, sales, and service. Then social networks came along.

Today, consumers are spending more time than ever not just online, but on social networks. Accordingly, businesses have a new CRM mandate: learn how to overlay social capabilities, to ensure that they’re courting customers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or anywhere else where customers or sales prospects gather.

Of course, for many businesses the bottom line will be simple: How do we use social networks to sell more?

4 Best Practices For Social Selling

The short answer to that question is that organizations that want to excel at social selling must master four best practices:

• Relationship networking: Detail the methods and technologies you’ll use to connect with prospects, customers and influencers, using social media and social technology
• Social commerce: Use social technology to make offers directly to prospects
• Profile management: Design, create and implement a “social business profile” for each customer or prospect
• Social activity alerts: Capture information from social networks and translate it into sales alerts and next-step activities

Here’s more about each of those best practices, and how to put them to work:

Relationship Networking

Relationship networking means this: How will you connect with prospects and customers on social networks? In terms of specific social networks, LinkedIn is probably the most common one now for business use. But with newer Salesforce.com technologies such as Radian6, you can also integrate Twitter streams or Facebook profiles into what your social network intelligence-gathering activities.

The payoff from this work may be high-level, or it may be more mundane. For example, if you’re a pharmaceutical sales representative who’s planning to call on a doctor next week and try to secure five minutes of her time, but you see on her Twitter feed that he’s about to be out of the office for two weeks while on her honeymoon, then you’ve just saved at least an hour of your valuable time. Likewise, if you see a prospect posting new tweets, it’s a good sign that they’re at their desk, meaning it’s a good time to try and get them on the phone.

Social Commerce

How do you use social technology to actually create sales proposals for people? Putting this into practice could involve designing specific landing pages for social customers, then emailing them or tweeting about it. Delta Airlines, for example, has created a Facebook page that allows customers to book flights, and seen its Facebook fan count increase sharply as a result.

Another example involves American Express, which has been teaming up with foursquare to offer discounts. Namely, anyone who uses foursquare on their smartphone to check-in to a location they’re visiting, and then pays with their AmEx card, can see a discount or earn loyalty points. Meanwhile, both organizations get to gather more data about their customers’ habits, which gives them a foundation for improving their future marketing and sales efforts.

Profile Management

How will you set up and structure the profiles that you capture about your social customers, to maximize their relevance and ease of use? That’s a crucial question to consider as you pursue social CRM capabilities, and first requires detailing your social CRM business goals, to ensure that your sales activities work toward delivering those targeted results.

On a related note, the forthcoming winter 2012 Salesforce.com release will include customer social profiles. For Salesforce.com users, that will obviously provide a straightforward approach for supporting profile management best practices.

Social Activity Alerts

When it comes to social selling, creating social activity alerts is a relatively advanced capability, which defines how information captured on social networks can be used to automatically trigger next steps in the CRM system, including sales activities.

In a best-case scenario, for example, say your CRM system is “following” someone on Twitter who’s a prospect, and that person says something on Twitter that’s relevant to the types of products you sell. For example, say you’re following a medical technician, who poses this question: “We’re in the market for a new MRI machine; who’s got the best price/performance these days?”

As a result, your cloud CRM system will automatically create a sales activity triggered by the Twitter comment. Now, while this sounds relatively advanced — to me as well — I think we’ll see this capability get built into CRM systems in the near future.

Just Jump In, Now

When it comes to social CRM — including service, marketing, as well as sales — it’s important to note that no one has all of the answers. But with customers spending more time on social networks, the imperative for organizations is to create a social CRM attack plan. Start by asking the right questions, to ensure that your social CRM sales efforts lead to business returns.

In other words, when considering relationship networking, profile management, social commerce, or social activity alerts, first detail your organization’s social-CRM-related business requirements — for example, to increase penetration of existing accounts, or to convert 5% of new customers via social networks. Then design and implement a social selling plan designed to deliver those results. Finally, get selling.

Learn More

Why become a social business? The answer is simple: more than 800 million people use Facebook, while Twitter has 175 million registers users. Either you’re selling to those people, or you’re missing out.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Steve Jurvetson.

Who doesn't want to be the big gorilla?

Truly, it’s a fine time to be a high-tech business. As organizations search for new ways to increase productivity while employing fewer people, vendors of enterprise software and hardware have seen their profits surge.

Productivity-wise, the high-tech industry likewise practices what it preaches. It’s long been one of the most enthusiastic — and successful — adopters of the latest CRM technology. To date, for example, Innoveer has worked with at least 50 high-tech hardware and software businesses with annual revenues of $1 billion or more who are diehard CRM aficionados.

Accordingly, when identifying the best way to get the most from your sales, marketing and service investments, as well as partner relationship management (PRM) programs and social enablement strategies, pay attention to the below best practices from the high-tech industry.

High-Tech: Live On The CRM Bleeding Edge

What does it take to succeed in high-tech? According to Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame, whoever becomes the “market leader,” aka gorilla, stands to command 50% of the market share and 80% of the profits. Accordingly, being first counts for a lot, not least because once customers see a clear winner emerge, they’re more likely to adopt its products en masse, and stick with them.

The alternatives aren’t pretty. Non-winners will constantly face the threat of extinction. But a bit more long-term, that goes for market leaders too. Novell, for example, was the leading  technology company of its time; it invented networking. But the company failed to beat Microsoft in the 1990s, struggled to reinvent itself for the open source age, and was finally sold largely for its patent portfolio.

Heavy Sales And Marketing Investments Pay Off

In their push to become the market leader, software companies typically invest millions or billions of dollars to develop a product. But once the product goes to market, the marginal cost involved in selling a DVD or online subscription is quite low. Innoveer client Citrix, for example, which sells virtualization and networking technology, and cloud application solutions, sees gross profit margins of 86%, and its end-of-fiscal year revenues increased from $1.87 billion in 2010 to $1.99 billion for 2011.

To make balance sheets like that a reality, high-tech companies tend to channel a lot of their profits into sales and marketing. The goal: expand faster, gain more market share, keep an eye on the company’s social profile, and route the best customer feedback to their engineers, to help them continue to develop market-leading products.

Automation Eliminates Friction

The imperative for high-tech companies is to remove as much friction from their customer-facing practices as possible. Accordingly, they pay close attention to sales automation, including sales process optimization, SFA system and order entry system integration, product configuration tools, lead management improvements, and sales territories. Indeed, while the typical company reorganizes sales territories every year, rapidly growing high-tech companies may do so every three months.

Automating the pricing, discounting, and related approval process for sales is likewise essential. Oracle, for example, is notorious for starting its sales discussions at 80% off list price. Only a company with profit margins in the neighborhood of 90% can afford to do that, but it still needs to do so carefully.

Obsession: Case Resolution

When it comes to service, the main driver for high-tech companies is simple: resolve cases. The mantra: “How do we intake a customer’s problem and solve it as fast as possible?” That happens via knowledge-bases, self-service tools, as well as automated systems that determine entitlement, meaning the service level to which a particular customer is entitled.

This push for maximum automation as well as case-resolution speed has seen many high-tech companies successfully turn service and contact centers into profit centers. Furthermore, many companies are tasking their field service personnel to gather intelligence about customers’ existing technology investments and in-place technology from competitors, so that salespeople can pitch replacements.

PRM Handles Mass Distribution

For selling more, as quickly as possible, high-tech companies have perfected the art of selling via business partners. Because once you become the big gorilla, the problem is no longer having to sell your software or hardware, per se, but rather distributing it as far and wide as possible, while continuing to burnish the brand.

High-tech companies typically build an independent distribution network to handle these demands, and offer profit incentives to distributors or third-party resellers. But at the same time, high-tech gorillas must carefully manage their partners. The goal is to reward successful distributors by funneling more business their way, as well as to identify and help underperformers to improve.

Social Enablement Spells Market Traction

The latest must-have high-tech capability: social enablement. We’re seeing significant increases in funding for social business endeavors, including managing and monitoring companies’ reputation on Twitter, Facebook, as well as other social networks.

High-tech companies are on the leading edge when it comes to creating bespoke communities — self-service or otherwise — devoted to their own products. These communities not only demonstrate to prospective customers that there’s a rich user ecosystem ready to handle any product-related challenge they may encounter, but also provide an inexpensive, crowdsourced knowledgebase that helps high-tech companies spot emerging issues, close trouble tickets quickly, and increase the quality of future products.

Going Forward: Go Social

By and large, high-tech companies excel at CRM. If they have one weak point, it’s that their data-loving leaders have historically been enamored with creating a 360-degree view of their customers. We’re not against that, but the concept is often pitched as a panacea for solving all customer-facing challenges.

In fact, for solving challenges today, the clear call to action is now to become more social. The mandate isn’t to know everything about a customer, but rather everything essential. Increasingly, that information is arriving via social networks, and as customers spend more time there, those networks become the go-to space for conducting marketing, sales, and service. At least, if you want to be the big gorilla.

Learn More

Do you see social CRM rising? Think that a 360-degree view of the customer should remain a top business priority? Want to lodge a complaint about the over-abundant use of animal metaphors for describing sales and marketing dynamics? Get your feedback in now, as we’re preparing our predictions for 2012 CRM trends.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Duncan McKinnon.

With social CRM, as with marathons, you won't win by sprinting. Instead, condition yourself to run the miles.

What’s the best way to embrace social technology in a manner that leads to maximum business benefits?

One strategy is to treat ROI as secondary for social CRM; just jump in. That, however, presumes that your business has perfect, advanced CRM processes already in place. And, as Gartner Group’s Michael Maoz cautions, “It is pretty amazing to find the number of customer service organizations that are deep into discussions on Social Media and Social 2.0 or 5.0 or whatever we are up to today, yet have broken customer service processes.”

Accordingly, the better strategy is to aim social CRM, just like classic CRM, at achieving specific business goals. We call that becoming a social business. This approach treats social CRM not as a silver bullet, but rather as an essential overlay — required for a world in which social interactions are outpacing traditional Internet surfing — on your existing marketing, sales and service practices.

Define Your Social Business Goals

Ideally, building a social business attack plan begins with this question: How will social CRM help your organization generate additional revenue, reduce costs, or improve the customer experience?

Here’s how some businesses are answering that question:

• Reduce costs: BA recently tweeted (as far as marketing costs go, how inexpensive is that?) about a flash sale on flights to India occurring within the next six months. As someone who will be making that journey, I bought in.
• Increase efficiency: Customers want to use the self-service channels with which they’re most comfortable. Well, will most organizations’ current approach–predominantly, using Web pages–work while they’re stuck in a traffic jam on route 128, outside of Boston, and using their smartphone? No, they want Facebook, Twitter, or even Siri.
• Improve the customer experience: Consider all of the ways you can delight your customers. Take the KLM Surprise Team at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, which this past summer monitored all of the @KLM tweets people made, then bought a little surprise for some of them, delivered during their layover. The result has been excellent publicity and goodwill. Everyone loves a great customer satisfaction story.

One of the great legal fictions today is to talk about corporations as if they’re people. But one significant social CRM upside is to actually make businesses more personal, and not just as a legal hedge.

Assess The 5 Social CRM Proficiencies

What’s the best way to encourage social CRM proficiencies to flourish? Based on Innoveer’s CRM experience, we’ve identified five best practices for benefiting from social CRM:

• Strategy: Leverage social business strategies to enhance current marketing, sales and service processes
• Marketing: Deploy social technology to improve marketing outreach and campaign effectiveness
• Sales: Maximize revenues by mastering the sales potential and deep customer insights afforded by social technology
• Service: Use social CRM to improve customer service processes, including case management
• Collaboration: Ensure social technology leads to enhanced interaction and coordination between customer-facing groups

Assess your business’s current capabilities in each of those areas, as well as your business goals, to rapidly develop a strategy for improving overall social CRM capabilities and truly becoming a social business.

Learn To Be Social As You Go

How you plan may also depend on your choice of technology — such as Jive, Lithium, or Salesforce.com — because such tools are not yet commoditized. Accordingly, your social CRM capabilities will depend on what you pick, and will also help shape your actual social CRM business strategy.

But as with any tool, businesses that simply throw social technology at their employees risk project disaster. Instead, clearly articulate the business case for using them, as well as how you’ll be monitoring, encouraging and reinforcing social CRM.

The goal is to help every customer-facing part of your business to adapt. Before, for example, each of your salespeople may have had 10 leading customers, which made tracking their interests or hobbies relatively easy. But what if they each have 1,000 customers? How will you keep your salespeople feeling connected to them all? The easiest approach, arguably, is now to use LinkedIn and Facebook to help stay connected, and add greater dimensionality to the relationship.

For almost any business, however, “going social” will require mental adjustments, unlearning old habits, and developing new skills. It’s like the mental conditioning of a marathon runner: Don’t try to win the marathon. Instead, condition yourself to run the miles; with repetition comes mastery. So too with being social.

Learn More

Innoveer helps organizations assess their existing social CRM strategy, sales, marketing, service, and collaboration capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Innoveer’s Social Business Framework, based on the best practices of hundreds of CRM practitioners, which we use to help businesses rapidly develop a social CRM adoption strategy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user lululemon athletica.

Innoveer Solutions consultants share customers' top responses to the sales effectiveness questions we most frequently ask.

Top Consultants Pose Excellent Questions

Using CRM technology to improve the effectiveness of your sales program can be hard work. But over the years, we’ve found that by asking the right, key questions, we can quickly gather the information required to make killer recommendations for taking your sales program to the next level.

What are the best questions to ask? On the Innoveer website, we’ve detailed the top 10 questions that our consultants pose when they’re assessing one of our client’s sales effectiveness capabilities. These questions touch on:

• Quality: Do all salespeople receive the same quality leads, or are your best salespeople tops because they’re cherry-picking top leads?
• Adoption: Have your salespeople widely adopted CRM?
• Relationship: Rather than being “Romeos,” do your salespeople practice smart relationship-building strategies?

Customer Answers May Surprise You

Now, what are our customers’ typical responses to these questions? To learn more, I turned to Innoveer consultants to ask them, on video, what they’re hearing. Hit the video for their deep thoughts on how customers are tackling sales effectiveness improvements.

And, what do you think about this video-based blogging approach? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Learn More

For all of Innoveer’s videos, see our Facebook video page — you can even “like” us. Also follow Innoveer on Twitter.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user jsawkins.

Does your sales strategy involve more than simply putting out fires?

Identify Top Sales Program Goals

“What’s the #1 goal for your sales program?” The answer, of course, will depend on who you ask, and when.

During the economic downturn, many executives, during one-on-one project interviews, told us their goal was to make their salespeople more efficient. But when we put the “what’s your top project goal?” question to these same executives in a group, the answer was often very different: cut costs. As in, “make each individual salesperson more efficient, so we can make do with fewer people.”

Both of those responses, reflecting a mix of business ideals and realities, are valid. (Though companies that focused exlusively on cost-cutting during the downturn arguably put themselves at a competitive disadvantage during the recovery.)

But there’s a bigger picture: Of course you want to control costs. Of course you want to increase salespeople’s efficiency. But what’s the fastest, most economical plan for translating those goals into practice, and more importantly, generating a positive business impact?

5 Steps To Sales Success

Answering that question requires taking a step back. Notably, based on Innoveer’s extensive project experience, we’ve found that sales programs excel when they master these five best practices:

• Relationship Management: Have you mastered the CRM “people equation”?
• Sales Force Management: Are you creating effective sales teams?
• Territory Management: Can you optimally match efforts and activities?
• Pipeline Management: Do you practice the art and science of advancing a deal?
• Sales Force Measurement: Are you destined for success?

The question for any sales given project, then, is simple: Which capability should you address first?

3-Day Workshop Prioritizes Sales Strategy

To answer that question, Innoveer offers a brief sales workshop that compares your organization’s current approach with our benchmarks of hundreds of businesses’ CRM programs, to see where your program excels, as well as where it needs work.

Say we find that your organization has difficulty establishing long-term relationships with customers. We’ll also dig deeper, looking not only at high-level relationship management competencies, but also at your organization’s current approach to the core, underlying components — contact management, call planning, reporting, and training.

For example, one of the most common shortcomings that we see in sales programs is poor call planning. Typically, this reflects a sales culture that’s focused on running and gunning — why plan sales calls, when you can hit the road and simply woo potential customers on the fly? Unfortunately, this approach is inefficient, and a surefire way to not create strong customer ties.

Start Here For Business Success

The philosophy behind Innoveer’s assessment is simple: with a customized sales-improvement attack strategy, you’ll understand the next, “best steps” for your sales program. Because if one of your sales program’s capabilities is less advanced, then any investments you make in the other capabilities are almost being wasted. Instead, start by fixing what you’re not good at, to pursue sales program improvement projects that offer maximum return for minimal effort.

Learn More

Take our Sales Program Quiz for a preview of the areas in which your program currently lags or excels. (Innoveer’s actual workshop drills down much more into each individual sales capability.)

To reap even bigger benefits from CRM, also make sure you’re seeing the big picture. To help, review our “top 10” marketing, sales or service questions to see how your program compares to best practices and our benchmarks.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user The National Guard.

Want to make your sales program excel? Then learn how to put your best foot forward

Turn Salespeople Into Better Sellers

Want to get more out of your sales program?

When it comes to increasing sales team effectiveness, businesses naturally reach for CRM. Manage customer relationships better, and you’ll have more opportunities for selling.

But too often, I see businesses approaching CRM primarily as a technology challenge. In fact, the goal of any CRM project — including cloud-based SFA — should be to improve business results: better revenues, higher levels of customer satisfaction, and faster organizational growth.

10 Steps To Stronger CRM

One of the surest ways to achieve those business goals is to increase salespeople’s effectiveness. Organizations have numerous opportunities for putting this into practice, most of all by focusing on:

• Productivity: Increase the productivity of your existing salespeople without having to put more boots on the ground
• Speed: Minimize the time they spend on administrative tasks
• Automation: Standardize and automate lead tracking, quoting and order-taking
• Data: Gather enough data to drive managers’ decision-making tools
• BI: Standardize how customer data is gathered, to improve business intelligence
• Forecasting: Streamline sales forecasts
• ROI: Tie sales quotes and closed deals to marketing campaigns
• Adoption: Ensure that a large number of salespeople adopt the CRM system
• Planning: Start projects small and tie each stage to delivering a specified project goal
• Value: Emphasize projects that always articulate and pursue the next “best step”

What do these best practices have in common? All can be achieved by using CRM software. But CRM software alone won’t get you there.

Start Here: Sales Force Effectiveness

Accordingly, where should businesses begin?

To help organizations answer that question — and excel at sales — Innoveer has developed its Sales Effectiveness Solution Discovery. This accelerated analysis helps your organization identify the surest and fastest path for applying CRM to increase sales effectiveness.

In a brief, focused engagement, Innoveer assesses your organization’s sales environment and business process maturity. Based on that analysis, we identify the next “best steps” to take to increase sales performance, reduce the time users spend on administrative activities, and deliver more accurate and effective information management, reporting, and business intelligence.

What’s the Next, Best SFA Step?

To design that strategy, Innoveer’s Sales Effectiveness Solution Discovery focuses on the following areas:

• Pain points: What are your business’s core sales processes, and what are their pain points?
• Next steps: Using Innoveer’s CRM Excellence Framework, we identify the next “best steps” to maximize sales effectiveness
• Sales models: We define a new sales model that will satisfy two top needs: 1) the sales team’s ability to execute; 2) capturing and delivering the data that sales managers require to make decisions
• Infrastructure readiness: Innoveer analyzes your organization’s current technology infrastructure, identifies data requirements, and creates a technology infrastructure action plan

These activities will enable your organization to identify immediate enhancements that utilize existing capabilities, as well as medium-term goals that will lead to an even greater return on CRM and SFA investments.

Learn More

Work with Innoveer to identify the next “best steps” for your sales program.

Also know the best questions to ask, to take your SFA program to the next level.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Hobvias Sudoneighm.

Move fast, but make it seem effortless.

Maximizing Sales Demands SFA

Excelling at selling demands sales force automation (SFA).

Historically, of course, many salespeople — even top sellers — “made do” using ad hoc, disconnected, paper-based or offline processes for tracking accounts, activities and contacts.

But in today’s ultra-competitive and multi-channel world, customers demand a seamless experience. Furthermore, businesses need to see increases in efficiency that only automation can provide. In short, organizations require SFA.

End of story? Not quite. Because when it comes to adopting SFA, too many organizations take a technology-first approach — especially with SaaS (aka cloud-based applications). The result can be software that doesn’t meet an organization’s particular requirements, a sales force that hasn’t been primed for SFA adoption, and in some cases, project failure.

The Secret To SFA In Just Four Weeks

The secret to successful SFA — for any size project — is to identify the most important business requirements, find technology that suits, and then ensure that projects are implemented in small, discrete stages that deliver the targeted functionality.

To help, Innoveer has developed its SFA Accelerator. In just four weeks and for a fixed price, the SFA Accelerator creates a fully functioning SFA program for up to 50 users, using either Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand, backed by expert guidance, an appropriate scope and a compact plan. As a result, organizations can quickly deploy high-return, easy-to-manage SFA functionality, using minimal internal technology staff or resources.

Start With Essential Business Capabilities

The SFA Accelerator provides organizations with the most essential sales-related business capabilities:

• Account management
• Opportunity and pipeline management
• Sales stage capabilities
• Activity and calendar management
• Pipeline reports and dashboards

(Organizations can add additional capabilities, though this may alter the cost and timeline.)

The SFA Accelerator is based on Innoveer’s 12+ years of experience in working with more than 400 clients on over 1,000 CRM projects. During that time, we’ve identified the most important sales capabilities, the best techniques for prioritizing an organization’s business requirements as well as proven strategies for rapidly implementing CRM to meet business requirements.

Beware Out-Of-The-Box Anything

Out of the box, SaaS applications provide organizations with many options, but little guidance. Accordingly, Innoveer’s SFA Accelerator closes that gap, by providing organizations with a solid plan for achieving their required sales capabilities.

Furthermore, implementing SFA correctly the first time — tied to a particular organization’s own business requirements — creates a solid CRM foundation for adding additional marketing, sales and service functionality.

Learn More

Find out if the SFA Accelerator is right for you.

To succeed with SFA, also understand the big picture. Our top 10 questions for sales success will get you started.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Paul Sapiano.

Lindsay has brains, beauty and above all a great fashion sense, but only recently did we discover that she can also teach us a thing or two about CRM.

What can Lindsay Lohan teach us about excelling at business, and especially at customer relationship management?

If you believe recent reports: Watch who you hire as your manager. Guard your brand. And never, ever wear a leather frock with mock-crocs. Especially when contesting a felony grand theft charge.

But Lindsay Lohan can teach us more — much more about CRM. Here are her 5 rules:

1) Beware Signs & Portents:

While I’m not saying Lindsay’s career is like Siebel — peaked early and didn’t provide enough value through the upgrade cycle — there are ominous signs. “As we now see Mercury in retrograde, so too has Lindsay Lohan’s path diverged from the way of harmony,” British astrologer Hortence Cruickshanks tells me by phone. “This will only lead to her to increased dissatisfaction, without the support of her close friends.” In other words, always plan for the future.

2) Success Builds The Brand

Are you an actress? Model? Socialite? Fashionista? Beware trying to do too much. Brands are like products — pursue too many and you’ll confuse your fans with product proliferation. Furthermore, don’t aim for a “big bang,” of new ideas, but rather a slow and steady output that gives people what they need (even if they don’t know it). Create one or two successes, then build. Entice people to want more.

3) Assemble An A-Team

Who will you work with? “Lindsay is so picky about her friends,” a source close to the actress tells me. “She can’t have people recording her every move, then selling that information for money indiscriminately to hacks. She would feel so betrayed. It would be, like, so Judas.” In CRM terms, Lindsay’s message to us is clear: when it comes to picking your CRM team, be choosy.

4) From Fashion, Derives Wisdom

Dress properly. “Wearing a skin-tight, buff-colored number described in the press as walking that Sharon Stone line between ‘proprietary and provocation’ isn’t going to endear you to the magistrate,” says Rebecca Wettemann, Vice President of Research at Nucleus Research.

Instead, first identify the best approach for getting the job done. Of course, that requires setting priority #1 (“avoid jail time”) versus secondary priorities (“garner media attention,” “flog clothing line,” “live in infamy”). Preferably, test your strategy in advance too. But most of all, “choose your clothes carefully,” Wettemann tells me. “And wear them wisely.”

5) Lose The ‘Momager’

It’s a natural impulse when you get famous: Call your mom.  But really, leadership must be clear, concise, and unequivocal. “Lindsay’s got to realize that having a manager who’s your mom, who’s potentially competing with your career while managing it, is leading to misplaced priorities and wasted energy,” says Wettemann. “I’m not channeling Machiavelli here, merely suggesting that she evaluate replacement talent.” In other words, know when to say “you’re fired.”

The ‘LL’ CRM Takeaway

To recap: Live fast, die young, don’t forget CRM.

Thank you, and watch for my forthcoming monograph on this topic from Harvard Business Press.

Celebrity CRM Continues

Next week: Don’t make Tom Cruise’s top 5 CRM blunders! Meanwhile, for our European readers, we examine the CRM implications of the television show currently rocking the Netherlands: “Farmer Looking For A Woman” (Boer Zoekt Vrouw). Too choosy? Too many smackdowns? Beware.

When not attempting humor and prognosticating on Lindsay Lohan’s relevance to the business world, we at Innoveer actually do offer hard-hitting advice. And while many people thought my previous blog post — Stick With Siebel — was an April Fool’s missive, I humbly suggest otherwise.

Finally, read all of our other eyeball-grabbing celebrity posts:

• Transform Your Salespeople Into Angry Birds (link)
• Royal Secrets: Kate & Wills’ LOL Marketing Tips (link)
• The Service Savvy Of Desperate Surgeons (link)
• Alcohol Aficionados Talk Customer Relationships (link)
• Donald Rumsfeld Talks Dirty (link)

Does the zip code that exclusively covers the Empire State Building produce more sales than a zip code in Salt Lake City, Denver, or Greenwich?

How Do You Measure CRM Success?

Creating a CRM program that maximizes sales doesn’t start with selecting a CRM software package. Rather, it begins by knowing the right questions to ask.

Accordingly, what are the top 10 questions that the best CRM consultants ask when they meet with you to improve your sales program?

Let’s start here:

1) Territories: Do your territories maximize the effectiveness of every sales person — as opposed to being a slice and dice exercise?

Innoveer worked with one large software company that based its sales territories on zip codes (aka “postcodes” for our British readers), dividing them equally amongst sales representatives. But senior executives suspected that this approach didn’t split territories in the most efficient way, and turned to Innoveer to help them identify a better approach.

Zip codes are a funny beast, as we learned. The Empire State Building alone, for example, has its own zip code. Sales-wise, the rep covering just the county of Fairfield in Connecticut had sales results that far exceeded territories in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

Accordingly, Innoveer helped the company design a new territory plan, remapping territories to provide the best coverage. As a result, the firm could ensure that its salespeople were always focused on prioritizing activities that provided the highest possible level of return, and working in territories.

2) SFA Adoption: Have your salespeople widely adopted CRM?

Want to succeed at CRM? Beware the cloud. True, the cloud provides great functionality, at an attractive price point. But too many cloud-driven SFA programs will fail, because project teams think the technology is a silver bullet. It’s not.

Rather, creating a successful CRM project — whether on-premise or in the cloud — starts by defining your business requirements, and then selecting the best CRM software to meet those needs. Implement the CRM software in small, rapid stages, ensuring that it provides essential new functionality to users (thus increasing their interest). Finally, from the get-go, focus on user adoption, because it’s the single biggest contributor, in our experience, to creating a successful project.

3) Conversion: Do you track and maximize the exact percentage of leads converted to sales?

Maximizing the impact of your sales program requires making the right offer, at the right time. Doing this doesn’t require a 360-degree view of your customers. In fact, you could make do with just 20 degrees — provided they’re the factors you need for knowing how and when to make the right offer.

At Innoveer client ABN AMRO, for example, advanced dashboards and business intelligence capabilities help the firm best support its high-net-worth individuals. The requirement isn’t to know everything about customers, but rather, just enough to identify the right service, at the right time. That’s why the firm tracks customers’ major life events — births, deaths, marriages, and so on. This information enables ABN AMRO to advise its clients about when they should open a retirement account, move into equities, or funds, or bonds.

In other words, the financial services organization doesn’t try to know everything. Just the right things.

CRM Answers? Ask The Right Questions

The above are just three of the top 10 questions that our consultants ask when working with organizations to improve their sales program.

How did we arrive at this top 10? At Innoveer, we’ve taken our experience of working on over 1,200 projects with more than 500 customers — including the likes of Abbot Labs, Biogen Idec, Bose and Integra LifeSciences — and distilled it into our CRM Excellence Framework.

The framework helps organizations understand, “What’s the next, best step that we should take to make our sales or CRM program better?” Because to succeed at CRM, that’s the first question you should ask.

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To ensure that your CRM program excels, understand the big picture. To help, review our “top 10” marketing, sales or service steps to see how your program compares to best practices and our benchmarks.

Even better, we’ve now placed a subset of that framework online, enabling you to play CRM consultant from the comfort of your own home.

Selling to surgeons: Medical device manufacturers need SFA too. Photograph by Spirit-Fire.

How should organizations that rely on manual sales processes manage the transition to using CRM and sales force automation (SFA)?

At medical device manufacturer Integra LifeSciences, an Innoveer client, for example, the sales team formerly relied on paper records and spreadsheets for tracking details. But whenever salespeople left the company, crucial information departed with them, because it had never been captured.

Now, Integra is addressing information capture, as well as streamlining sales and marketing activities, by implementing Salesforce.com.

To learn more, as well as best practices from Integra’s evolution from manual to SFA-based sales and marketing processes, I spoke with Drew Edinger, Integra’s CRM systems manager.

What pain point drove Integra LifeSciences to adopt CRM?

Edinger: Whenever a salesperson left, and there’s a fair amount of turnover in the sales force, we lost their contacts, the visibility of consignments, where things were in the sales cycle, and who their customers were. The only thing we could do is to try and pull something out of Oracle E-Business Suite. As in, “Here’s all of the new customers in the territory, new salesperson — good luck.”

Why did Integra select Salesforce.com?

The flexibility that Salesforce.com offered seemed to fit where we wanted to go, at least until we decide what our longer-term CRM plan and platform will be. We haven’t answered that question yet, so we continue to enhance our core Salesforce.com environment.

How did Integra implement Salesforce.com?

When I first came in here, our CIO had said we’d deploy accounts and contacts — only — using CRM … which solved the “losing contact information when you lose your rep” problem. But it provided no actual value to a sales person. And why would you do that — and spend the money on Salesforce.com — when the price point for Oracle CRM On Demand was roughly half?

If you’re going to do accounts and contacts, you want to do opportunities, and if you want to do opportunities, you want to capture leads. So we started bringing in more value not just to sales, but the marketing through to sales aspect.

Was adopting CRM a big cultural shift for the marketing group?

For sales, we were coming from a really paper-based process, using spreadsheets, Outlook, and in many cases, pen and paper. We had the same thing on the marketing side. We’d do trade shows and get spreadsheets of leads that someone put together, and they’d try to figure out who’s the right contact person, email them. Maybe they’d email back.

Three months after our SFA deployment, however, I was thrilled to bring in limited campaign management. And about two weeks in, [marketing] saw their first lead converted into a sale. They saw a metric for the first time ever, booking a deal from a trade show.

Do you have a full, closed-loop system — from marketing and lead management through to sales and booking deals — now up and running?

We’re just beginning the marketing piece; leads are just starting to flow in. We don’t have a high volume of leads; the majority of our process is tracking our high-value pipeline. Because as we always say, “We’re a med device company, we’re not big pharma.” It’s a mantra which is silly, and not. In the pharma model, you have people tracking every visit, every click, every call, all day.

But our focus is on the value add: you went out, did an evaluation and inspection of a device on premise, you did in-service training — those are the things we want people to track, and they’re actually required to. So our softer benefit was: “We said that if you want to track your calls, manage your time better, guess what? Salesforce.com can help you do that better.”

Now, we have success stories that we’re starting to accumulate: salespeople are improving efficiency, tracking their efforts, improving reporting, and getting more time back in their day.

What’s your 2011 CRM plan?

Two things that we want to see are more robust marketing — and the ability to bring product marketing specialists in — and also providing more value to the sales reps, and saving them more time. So for example, we’re talking about how to automate quoting for the sales force.

Any CRM implementation pain points you wish you’d avoided?

No, because I think we did this right. We started small and then expanded the functionality, and as you expand the functionality, we listened to our users. For things that didn’t make sense for them, we improved on the process.

What advice would you offer to other organizations implementing CRM?

Make sure you keep CRM relevant: listen to users, start small, add value over time, and make sure you have your executive support. The big bang doesn’t work — that’s a surefire way to fail on any CRM implementation.

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When implementing SaaS or cloud-based CRM, help avoid SFA failure by starting small, having a good plan, and executing quickly. Also ensure that users embrace CRM, using our best practices for CRM adoption.