Three Secrets to Winning with CRM

By Kate McPherron, technology evangelist

In the May 15th SAO Marketing and Sales SIG, experts discussed two CRM options, based on their respective company’s offerings: on-demand versus on-premise. Presenting the on-demand option was Roque Versace, vice president of sales, Northwest region, for Salesforce.com, a leading Web-based CRM solution. Presenting the on-premise option was James Wong, co-founder and CEO of Avidian Technologies, Inc., who argued the strengths of the traditional software model based on his experience with Avidian’s Prophet CRM software. Moderating the event was Scott Ransmeier, manager of sales readiness for Serena Software and former SAO Marketing SIG committee member.

Versace: On-demand CMR “community” outstrips client-server limitations
To paraphrase Roque Versace, CRM can encompass a wide range of functions, including sales-force automation and customer-support tools. A good system will automate sales, marketing and customer activities, even extending into product marketing and management, engineering, and finance. The system is deeper when these functions are involved – even though they many not often touch the customer – because the data set is richer.

These tools have evolved a lot from the early days, when companies used Visual Basic to create them from scratch. The Internet had a profound influence on the quality and speed of online software. Amazon has been at the forefront, innovating and proving ease of use.

As for CRM success, there are three stages: evaluation, implementation and “up and running.” The first stage is to identify business goals and get executive buy-in to justify the project. It’s important to remember that this is a revenue decision, not a means to cut costs or create efficiencies. Ask yourself what it is worth to have the data. That’s where people and processes come in. A good manager may identify immediately that this means having information that enables people to know what to do. A less-savvy manager might see this is a way to have data and numbers to know where the business is. But the manager who says “It makes no sense if I can’t get the reps to use it” isn’t ready.

Today’s CRM systems are great tools for forecasting, and well beyond. The trick is to talk to people about what they want to do better, how they want their lives to be easier, and then use carrots and sticks to drive adoption.

Implementation should go briskly and keep high expectations of vendors. Before you buy, you should thoroughly evaluate a variety of tools to find the one that works closest to the way your organization works. And through adoption, the business application should be as easy as a customer application, like Amazon’s.

On-premise solutions can be insular, whereas on-demand, Internet-based solutions have the support of a community.

Wong: CRM made useful through a focus on the needs of users, not managers
To paraphrase James Wong, it is essential to understand not only what CRM is, but also what CRM is not. CRM is not management pushing what they want down people’s throats: that just leads to people doing the least possible. It is not on-demand versus on-premise or open source versus proprietary or any other comparison. It’s more than all of those.

What CRM should be about is ease of use. Outlook is a tool that most of us use regularly, if not every day. It’s the first application we open and last one we close each day, the one we use for handling e-mail, contacts, calendar and reminders, which constitutes about 50 percent of CRM. Outlook was designed as a personal information manager, not a CRM solution, but people embraced it, and if it had CRM sales features built-in, they could take advantage of how people already work and want to work. This is what we at Avidian did with our product, Prophet.

The biggest problem with software of any kind is adoption. Sure, Amazon is easy, but easy isn’t everything. It is vital to consider whether a given software product adds, instead of subtracts, value. In other words, does it take more time to learn and use than it saves? When management deploys a big Siebel or Onyx system and says to staff, “You have to use it,” most people will put just the minimum information into it, because it takes extra time. And a lot of information, already in Outlook, does not make the cut.

Avidian is designed to make it easy: Everything you do in Outlook is tracked, plus it has the extra tools you need for sales, follow-on, and so on. Conclusion: CRM is not about management needs, it’s about users’ needs.

From the audience: adoption issues
To paraphrase questions from the audience, how best can you motivate salespeople to put information into Salesforce? In response, Versace said that salespeople need to meet the goals of the organization, their targets. It’s a process of getting the salesperson to see beyond himself or herself. It’s not any harder, and in many cases is process improvement. For example, instead of e-mailing a specific product manager, the salesman enters a “case” that goes into a queue that is routed to the first available product manager. The second system tracks everything and uses resources better.

This is all about changing human behavior and habits, change management. You can use the “stick” and say that if they don’t enter their data, you won’t pay their commission. But the “carrot” is better: if you do this, we’ll give you so much more, e.g., history, data, reports. Salespeople ultimately need the system to know what they did and what they are doing. That’s the biggest motivator, when they do it for themselves.

For their part, management needs the information for activity reports, dashboards and, ultimately, at the CFO level. A good CFO knows that a six-plus month pipeline can change the company’s valuation. That’s a goal. And it’s important to set goals. Keep in everyone’s mind that the reason we’re all doing this is to grow the company. And you have to get your hands dirty and really use the system, to see what will work for you. Ideally, when the new system works the way people are working, and people don’t feel that they have to change their habits, then adoption issues are minimized.

About the panelists
Roque Versace is vice president of sales, Northwest Region, at Salesforce.com. After earning his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Gettysburg College, Roque served as a lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne in Operation Provide Comfort, protecting the Kurds from the Iraqis post-Desert Storm. After the military, Roque earned his M.B.A. and joined Andersen Consulting in 1994, where he built custom CRM applications on a Microsoft Platform. In 1988, Roque joined BroadVision, where he rose to vice president of product management/marketing for the company’s commerce line of products. In 2002, Roque joined Salesforce.com as a sales executive, and in 2005 began to manage the Pacific Northwest region. Salesforce.com grew from $50 million revenue in 2002 to $500 million in 2006, with 2007 forecasts of $725 million.

James Wong is co-founder and CEO of Avidian Technologies, Inc., one of three successful companies he has founded. Wong was recently honored with the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 award. Under his leadership, Avidian was a winner of the 2004 Seattle Mayor’s Small Business Award and was honored in 2005 and 2006 by Washington CEO magazine as one of the “Best Companies to Work For” in Washington State. Prior to Avidian, Wong was the co-founder and president of Foci Technologies, which was acquired by Meritage Technologies in 2001. Before Foci, Wong held positions at Arthur Andersen in New York City and Chevron Corp. in San Francisco. He holds a B.A. in business administration from the University of Washington and is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

About the author
Kate McPherron, a technology evangelist, has helped technology and industrial firms manage and market their products and services for 20 years. She can be reached at klm54@cornell.edu.