What does the BP oil spill and sales performance have in common? I began my career working for a large process automation company providing systems to the oil and gas, petrochemical, power, and paper industries. We provided these industries with process control automation to insure that these plants ran smoother and safely produced the maximum amount of product at the lowest cost.
After installing a new system we would commonly get complaints from plant operators. The most common complaint was that the system was different and more difficult. Many times they would ignore what the advanced controls were telling them to do; even worse they would ignore the process alarms and even bypass them. This not only undermined the production improvements that the automation system was supposed to give, but it also made the plant unsafe.
More often than not, these issues went away as the operators became use to the new system. But this was not always the case. Sometimes you would come back to a plant, years later, and find that they still didn’t know how to correctly use the system. These faulty plants always had one overarching theme, their management didn’t make their operators use the new system. Some management didn’t step in because they didn’t want to get involved or they, like their operators, were also resistant to change. Sometimes a plant would ignore the system, or even override the safety controls, just to push for more product/profit. Many people believe this was the cause of the BP oil spill. It will be years before we truly know what happened.
Sales people using a new CRM system are much like the aforementioned operators. They almost always have resistance to change in the way they’ve been running their sales. The solution for your sales team is the same for the plant operators, management has to believe in the CRM system and enforce the use of the system. Management needs to use the tool as well. Nothing kills a CRM project faster than having a manager ask the sales people to put together their forecast in an excel sheet. The sales managers should do all their reviews with the sales team, leveraging the capabilities and data in the CRM system.
I also think that the key to having a successful CRM system is to have the sales process driven by the CRM system. To not have the sales process in the CRM system is like not having safety or advanced controls in a chemical plant. It still baffles me that most sales organizations don’t have a defined sales process and that they only use the CRM system as an electronic rolodex and maybe as a forecasting tool.
Other keys to making a CRM system successful are making it easy to use, making sure it helps sales people do their job, and training, training, training. If BP had provided more training and insured that alarms weren’t ignored, maybe we wouldn’t have had the oil spill. If your company used a CRM that drove your sales process, maybe you would get more orders and maybe the quality of the orders would be better.
Good selling,
