It's the Little Things

Inbound lead! That's what I'm talking about. Let's go! But wait. This contact is in the CRM already and attached to three different accounts in Hubspot. In SalesForce it's a Lead and a Contact. Two different titles and no salutation. Two different emails? Is this the same contact? Looks like they downloaded a white paper. And now they are requesting pricing. Didn't I meet this person at an event? Let me see if I can find those notes or a business card. Ah, here she is. Met her at ISTE. She works at Washington Elementary, but she put her district down as the org on the contact us form. Should I attach her to the school or the district? Wait. I've already emailed this person - I can see it in my Sent mail. Why isn't that logged in the CRM? Is she in a nurture sequence already? Which emails has she gotten? Has she opened them?

You get the idea. That's just tip of the iceberg stuff. This is the reality at many companies. I've seen well-established companies where the sales team depends on spreadsheets and/or note-taking apps, because the CRM is not setup to support and accelerate selling. These things might seem like details, but they add up quickly. They rob your front-line team of valuable selling time, and worse. I've seen companies that take a top-down approach and target the superintendent and their leadership team. But they don't capture title and salutation. These things matter. Just address a superintendent you do not know as "John," instead of "Dr. Williams." You will not get a response. And you will likely create a negative impression of yourself and your company.

But why don't companies set things up properly - In a way that makes selling smarter? Many reasons. Sometimes the team is bringing e-commerce experience into a direct sales model (doesn't work). Sometimes the rush to set up a sales team doesn't leave time for setting tools up properly. Sometimes (often the case at startups), there is no enablement function; there is nobody training salespeople, setting up and documenting processes. Whatever the case (and I'm not assigning blame!), it's going to slow down selling, annoy your salespeople, and make investors raise an eyebrow. And it only gets worse as the company grows. New hires inherit the problems, adapt in individual and non-repeatable ways, and a sense of inertia and habit make it more difficult to make changes. The faulty systems have more data, making it more costly and time-consuming to clean and re-organize. The team, now growing, will require more training, and being used to doing it their own way, will often consider new processes a form of micromanagement. No matter how desperately they are needed. Others on the team will think the management is inept, overburdened, or does not care enough to set up the tools properly.

If there is one thing all salespeople loathe, it's spending time on non-selling activities, such as training, re-training, data entry, merging records, trying to figure out (at a glance) which is the Orange School District or Lincoln Elementary they are looking for. Salespeople also loathe things like expense reports, but that will be a separate post covering tools and processes not related to CRM, data, and automation.

In the words of George Michael: "if you're gonna do it, do it right"