Evolution of Tools for Sales

Written by Bernard Lunn / January 14, 2009 3:00 AM / 20 Comments

Revenue growth is priority #1 for most businesses today. So, good salespeople are in demand, and management wants to give them the best possible tools to make them productive. Selling is a numbers game. As long as you do reasonably sensible things, the time invested tends to corelate to revenue earned. Therefore, productivity really does matter. This is not an area to skimp on. If you can make somebody who brings in $1 million in revenue 10% more productive, that would mean an additional $100,000. So, what is happening in the market with tools for those who hustle on the front lines of business, the people who sell the products and services, who get capital for your business and sell it when the time comes, who hire the people who can grow your business? What will they be using in future?

The Post-CRM Opportunity

Back in pre-historic days (before email) the big productivity boost came from digitizing paper rolodexes into contact management systems like Act! and Goldmine. This is still the baseline, and these vendors have updated their products well. Salespeople who became accustomed to these simple tools tended to object when somebody told them to switch.

Which is what happened when CRM came along. These individual contact management tools were not considered enterprise-quality. But from the individual sales guy's point of view, CRM was all too often something imposed on them by management, with two objectives:

To generate reports automatically. The biggest chore for managers is reporting. The good ones want to spend their time coaching, motivating, and recruiting, not reporting. So, individual salespeople did benefit indirectly, but it was not often perceived that way. In too many cases, CRM was seen as a burden put on the front-line revenue generators to make their managers' lives easier.
To get all salespeople's contacts into one system. Salespeople hoard good contacts. They are their primary asset. Salespeople are only as good as their last quarter and get fired easily if they don't perform, so it is natural for them to hoard their most productive asset.

It's All Email

CRM was invented before email became the dominant form of communication. But by the time CRM grew up, it was all email all the time. CRM does a good job of tracking contacts across email, phone, fax, mail, and, if you configure it correctly, carrier pigeon and telepathy. This is great, but we still spend 90% of our time, when not face to face or on the phone, on email. CRM, then, starts to look like a distraction from email. So, we integrated CRM with email. But the reality is, we still spend most of our computer time on email.

This "email first, plus all the other bits" (calendar, tasks, contacts) mentality is why Outlook remains so incredibly entrenched, despite its basic flawed architecture (being PC-centric, not web-centric). Gmail, with Google's laudable loose coupling, is not as well integrated as Outlook.

Hit The Road Jack and Get Some Face-to-Face Time

A wise sales manager tracks the F2F time of her or his salespeople. Anything other than selling F2F is just preparation or follow-up. Sales is a contact sport, always has been and always will be. Telephone is okay for follow-up or simple deals. For anything more important, "Shake their hand, look 'em in the eye, and ask them what they want to eat."

So, mobile access is not an afterthought. It is not an extension. Salespeople need to be able to live on their mobile devices. The tools they have need to be mobile-native, which is why you cannot pry a Blackberry from the hands of someone who has to get a lot of things done, even if the iPhone is sexy and fun. (Now that Obama is a well-known Blackberry head, the coolness factor has returned a little.)

Any new tool that starts on the desktop is appealing only to salespeople who don't sell. The ones who do sell are on the road with their eyes glued to their Blackberries when they are not looking their prospects in the eyes.

To my knowledge, nobody has gotten this right yet.

To Get Paid, You Need a Document

Email, phone, contacts, calendars, task lists, and all the rest of it are all very well and good, but to get paid, somebody needs to sign a document, and that is usually preceded by all kinds of other documents. So, you need built-in document management as well.

Given a life of a salesperson on the road, these documents need to be online and easily accessible from a mobile device. We may not want to read and write large documents while on the road, but we certainly want to be able to send them and maybe do some light editing and reviewing.

Basecamp Is for Projects, Not Sales

I love Basecamp. We use it all the time at ReadWriteWeb. It has totally changed collaborative project management for remote teams. But it is a project-oriented tool, built by developers for developers and other "creators." It is not a sales tool. Salespeople hang out on Basecamp to work with the folks who build what they sell. But it is not an ideal tool for selling.

LinkedIn Is the First Fundamentally New Tool to Emerge in Decades

We have written many times about LinkedIn and why it is the first fundamentally new tool to emerge for salespeople since... well, since digitized rolodexes such as Act!. LinkedIn automates what all good salespeople have done forever: keep tabs on their network to find people who can help them on a particular deal. Without automation, we would be able to effectively tap only about 10% of our network. LinkedIn shows us the other 90%.

(Yes, yes, it's not as much fun as Facebook. But personally, I want to get the job done, get off my damn computer, and do something really fun, like play with my kids, go skiing, or have dinner with family and friends. I want to get the job done, not have fun online.)

LinkedIn may be missing the big picture, or maybe it is just executing carefully to get there. It already has a contact graph. With some good email-based task management, it could replace Outlook as the place where business people "live."

Becoming another destination website would be just plain annoying to those of us who have entrusted LinkedIn to manage our contact graphs. We want that contact graph to be accessible with the applications that make us productive. Those apps could come from LinkedIn or anybody else. But if we have to work too hard to access the contact graph, we will take the time to re-create it from somewhere else (like from our email, which wouldn't be that hard).

Zentact Is Intriguing, but Bleeding Edge

Zentact looks like it may have a key role to play in the earliest phase of relationship management: when we make serendipitous connections online. But the app looks like it may be a "biz dev" tool for people who do biz dev very occasionally, or a feature extension for a primary tool that biz dev people "live in."

Integration Matters

Lots of Web 2.0 services did great with minimalism. Twitter is the most obvious example. Basecamp is great because it doesn't try to do too much. Google's apps are loosely coupled, with no attempt at lock-in.

But this comes at a price. We have to be able to move between systems. We have to sync and transfer. All of that takes time, and time is the one commodity we cannot create more of.

So, they need to be integrated. But also simple. And mobile-native. I should be able to access my contact graph seamlessly. Have I seen this perfect tool yet? No. But like great art, I will know it when I see it.

Have you seen anything like this?

(Photo by TOKY Branding and Design.)

Comments

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Less lead generation from conventional channels, like:
- Trade shows are on the decline.
- E-Mail marketing is becoming less effective (need a lot of email addresses).

Your website:
Most B2B deals (7 out of 10) start with an Internet search.
However your online forms or contact information will only capture 2 to 3% of all of your website visitors.
Hence know the companies that are visiting your website by implementing a post-click marketing web service.
This will give the companies that are visiting your website, their company information and their interest by the pages visited.

Qualify these companies as leads based upon all the information received (including possible contacts).

Then you can cold call (phone or email) on these "warm" companies with a high chance of success. http://bit.ly/tSZF

The goal is to integrate seamlessly your website (visits), the Internet (information and contacts), your emails (communications) and the CRM (for follow-up). The CRM becomes a source of information, not a data entry system.

www.LEADSExplorer.com

Posted by: LEADSExplorer | January 14, 2009 3:58 AM

Thumbs up Bernard!

The days of standalone emails are long gone.

Life is too short to spend it jumping between applications and endless browser windows, copying & pasting ad nauseam, reconciling discrepancies and worrying that we've missed something.

All advances in email in the last 20 years were incremental improvements. First it moved to the cloud. Then more storage. Then better search.

Email needs to jump the curve (using Guy Kawasaki's parlance), and it means that email, CRM, contact graphs, calendar, and projects are becoming one. They are!

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko | January 14, 2009 4:21 AM

Try www.JobBlogs.cc

It does CRM and PM from your iPhone and desktop. I believe they are adding integrated email and other mobile devices as well. This is the only service I have found that is integrated.

Posted by: John Bardos | January 14, 2009 4:45 AM

Most every company has a star sales rep. If we have 10 reps and the star is selling $1M a year and the other 9 are selling $500K, what would happen if we bottled the star's success formula and gave it to the other 9? The potential is an extra $4.5M! CRM tools are great for telling us where things are or where we need to improve, but they don't help with best practices or methodology on how to improve. If your sales stinks, don't blame your reps, blame your process. How do you give demos, when to incorporate closing words, etc. are just as important as keeping track of appointments. There's a whole market of software I think sales VPs are missing and that's process and best practice management software. The tool needs to be easy-to-use for reps and nimble so it's easy to change process as quickly as the market changes. Rather than reducing sales head count, I had my team try new techniques (some are dramatic) and I also have a way to govern the new approaches with our process tool.

Posted by: Paul Dandurand | January 14, 2009 4:54 AM

E-mail ( Otherwise known as E-FAIL ) has outlived its usefulness and no longer functions as a communication tool.

Millions of man hours are completely wasted daily on E-FAIL. It would take all of half an hour to learn to use an internal wiki and abandon E-FAIL.

Businesses claiming they must use E-FAIL are either in denial or ignorant or hypocrites ( Hypocritical to state your in the business of making money, you're strict on costs and wasted man hours...then use email internally ).

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001191.html

Posted by: Todd | January 14, 2009 6:14 AM

It's great to see emphasis on integration as it relates to Web applications. SAP's Small Business Team concluded that integration was the #1 "feature" valued by their customer segment. Simple web-apps are useful for many and were necessary for a new industry to "find its feet", but for most businesses they make the integration problem worse.

As I watch thousands of teams moving from a variety of desktop / ruby-me-too utility sites to an integrated feature-rich service (yeah I'm biased but it can be anyone's) I see integration brings as much value to the business as the applications themselves. Work feels easier and moves faster - when it does this users get excited and the system get used (unlike the traditional CRMs as you mentioned).

You've represented a Salesperson's needs and behaviors well. With small teams the expectation is not to implement robust processes required in Enterprise scenarios, it's about simple management of contact information, reporting and getting back to the shop floor / customer's site. Often in small businesses the same staff are responsible for both the selling and the project management. Having a simple system to that integrates these related "messy bits" of a business is invaluable to them.

Posted by: Steve Ireland | January 14, 2009 7:06 AM

Bernard, any reason why you didn't mention SalesForce?

We've been looking into a CRM tool and thinking about SF but perhaps your omission is a statement as to its utility?

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks.

George

Posted by: Agoracom - George | January 14, 2009 8:32 AM

You miss one of the most fundamental innovations in sales management in recent years - lead management software. Lead management is the highly sophisticated merger of CRM and email and I guarantee you sales reps who use it spend 90% of their time in their lead management system and not their Outlook application.

Increasingly there is a move from sprawling CRMS to lead management systems that focus on doing the most important part of sales really well! CRM is not dead but it is designed for customer management and not lead management, as it says on the tin.

Posted by: Nick | January 14, 2009 8:43 AM

Good post. Salesforce is noticeably absent in the writeup, however (as noted by George above). Salesforce is the best tool I've ever seen. It integrates with Outlook, it integrates with Blackberry, and these integrations free salespeople (and the support folks) from most of the manual entry. Force.com also has a large pool of 3rd party services and features that are industry-specific. If you intend to scale into a large business, SF is a great tool. If your business will always be quite small and/ or simple, there are LOTS of small companies providing OK solutions (just look at the shameless plugs in these comments).

Posted by: coldbrew | January 14, 2009 8:59 AM

What about Xobni? believe they are in great position to build a CRM/Task Managment type module on top of their already great product.

Posted by: Josh | January 14, 2009 9:32 AM

How can you not even mention Salesforce.com in an article like this?!? Anyone who has used that, and the blackberry version of it, would know just how well CRM is doing. I would rank SugarCRM, Oracle and MS offerings all as second.

If you are "good" with outlook and take a peak at Salesforce, you don't know what you don't know, you'll miss the magic of it. If you actually SELL for a living, you'll know just how amazing Salesforce (and other CRM tools) are doing.

I'm not a shill for SF, just a huge fan, it's making fanbois out of grown salespeople the way the little ones drool at an apple store. I *hate* the fact it cost me $1400/yr for my version but damn is it worth every penny.

Here's a tip. Use Salesforce, box.net for files, and Google Apps for email, and quickbooks online. Poof, your business is in the cloud. A nice password manager to make logins easy, use firefox to autostart to all of the pages, and in one browser with a few tabs you have your entire business. THAT is web 2.0 people.

good luck!

Posted by: Mario | January 14, 2009 10:06 AM

E-Mail, 'E-Fail'? Get real, that's rediculous. I would ask that person to stop using e-mail entirely please and see how many sales he makes :)

Posted by: James | January 14, 2009 10:17 AM

Great post Bernard and thanks for the Zentact mention. I think you're exactly right in saying that, "We have to be able to move between systems". Browser adds-ons are making this easier for those that use web based communication tools (gmail, Ymail, hotmail, twitter, etc.) to be able to move between their various systems. With Zentact, we want to be there when you're communicating, in the tools you already use, and make contact mgmt enjoyable - not to mention valuable.

Browser addons only go so far. Josh is right in calling out Xobni for their Outlook plugin - making use of LinkedIn's api and outlook usage.

Thank you for stressing mobile as well. As these sales/crm tools become portable, they will become essential.

As these worlds merge, the landscape will change and I'm excited to see where we'll take it.

Posted by: John Sampson | January 14, 2009 10:29 AM

@Josh @John Hi guys, I work with Xobni, just wanted to stop in and let you know that CRM is definitely one of the areas that we're thinking very hard about. Nothing in the product yet, but you're absolutely right that we've got a great position to deliver that kind of data, and we're well aware of it.

Cheers,
Evan

Posted by: Evan | January 14, 2009 11:29 AM

Most CRMs seem designed primarily for sales managers. The reports are great, being a sales manager was never easier, but it appears the CRM vendors put little thought into making it easy for salespeople to actually use them. And the sales mansger focrce the CRM on their salesteams. It's no wonder that most salespeople hate their CRMs. They spend 2+ hours every Sunday night updating their data before the Monday sales meeting. They tend to do the minimum amount of work required. And the best salespeople generally ignore it altogether because they know there are no repurcussions.

At least ACT and Goldmine made it easy and efficient to use. They were designed for the lone salesguy. Salesforce.com (and the SugarCRM clone) do a great job of tying into the corporate back-end but are an ugly mess to learn and to use.

Having spent most of my career in sales and having used all of the above, I got so fed up that I wrote my own web-based CRM. Salestrakr. I just wanted something that was easy to use. Take a look and let me know if you think I got it right.

Posted by: Paul Freet | January 14, 2009 11:30 AM

I don't agree that LinkedIn is "...the first fundamentally new tool...for salespeople." That may have been the original intention but now it is just a great tool for recruiters and members who want to spam their groups. All my recruiter friends happily pay to search all the resumes. Who else pays? You want names, try Jigsaw.

I also see comments about salesforce.com. Those of us sales reps who used it in the early days loved its simplicity. Now it's too big, cumbersome and slow, as most 800lb gorilla companies become. Definitely looking for the next CRM tool.

The real evolutionary sales tools?

* JigSaw for names & contact info for prospecting
* Inquisix if you want to give & get referrals
* Skype & a webcam when you need more than email but just less than F2F
* Last but not least - crowd sourcing websites - ie customer reviews on your site about your products that everyone can see. Your customers volunteering to be references for your product - now that's a worthy sales tool!

- Michael

Posted by: Michael | January 14, 2009 7:42 PM

Strongly agree with Mike@Inquisix on this: JigSaw is the revolutionary contact platform. LinkedIn is a powerful tool and platform, but SalesForce (past) and JigSaw (present) are having a much larger impact on the sales community than LinkedIn.

Another company mining the social graph for sales leads Auren Hoffman's Rapleaf.

Posted by: Dataspora | January 14, 2009 7:55 PM

What a great post; however, I would caution the thought that

Increased Activity = Increased Sales

and that

Better Tools = Better Sales.

why? Because its not necessarily true - and its the type of excuses that salespeople use to explain why they don't make quota. The reality is, I was selling for a company that had HORRIBLE tools available to us. I went out and figured out how to get sales done. And, sometimes I got criticized for not spending as much time cold calling and the like - yet I was the #1 salesperson. Why? Its not about increased activity, its about focusing on the right activities - and making sure you are moving towards a close. You can go to 1-2 meetings and get the close if you know what you are doing. You can also go to 10 meetings and NOT get the close if you don't. So - increased activity doesn't always mean better sales.

On the tool side: Yes, tools, help, but you need to know how to sell without them. Salesforce.com is a HORRENDOUS sales tool for sales people. Its amazing for sales managers, but using this to manage you personal sales tasks is awful. Find your best sales guys in the company - I will venture a guess that they are the ones that DONT have all their info in sf.com. They are the ones the manager is fighting with to get the data in. Why? because the best salespeople are SELLING and sf.com doesn't work the way they think. So, they put in the basic information the boss wants, and then move on to actual selling. Without all these tools, the salesperson in trouble will point to "I don't have the right tools" but the reality is, sales have been happening without tools forever.

On email... I became the top salesperson at one of my organizations in a matter of a few months. How? I called people. sf.com made it real easy to blast out emails, to follow-up via email. And... the reports showed how "active" you were in following up on leads. The reality is, those were fruitless activities. No-one cared or read those emails that were sent. When I called people, we talked and decided if there was reason to move on - or to move away.

As a sales manager, I saw, yes - find the tool that works best for you to manage your team: maybe it is sf.com, maybe it is Highrise, maybe its something else, but the tool is not the answer - its just that... a tool in a big toolbox.

Tools don't make the carpenter - his craft and skill does. The same is true in sales.

Posted by: Mark LaRosa | January 15, 2009 7:13 AM

The whole SFA/CRM industry is totally bunk. SFDC is an expensive contact manager. The rest of the solutions stink. On the CRM side, RightNow is expensive junk. It's really depressing.

Posted by: jd | January 15, 2009 9:17 AM

I'm surprised that there was no mention of 37signals' Highrise in this article (http://highrisehq.com). We've been using it at our company for several months now, and we absolutely love it. The recent addition of the "Deals" feature has made it a great platform for sales tracking too.

Posted by: Jason M. | January 15, 2009 11:49 AM

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