During early 90s, Tom Siebel gave birth to CRM to scale up quality selling. Now it is time for taking sales organization to the next orbit.
Why enrich selling?
I walked into a shop to buy a product. One of their existing customers came in to report an issue with the PDA. When I realized the sales person was not responsive to their customer, I walked away. In another experience, a pushy sales person knew nothing but the price tag. Again, I walked away and purchased from a serious and knowledgeable sales person.
Once I asked the sales person about the difference in the two LCD TVs. He said that one is 30 inch and the other is 40 inch. I asked if there are any differences that I cannot see. I am surprised that the sales person could not explain. Do they expect us to do all the product research and go to them only to place the order? How long does it take for them to learn everything about that one item that they see day in day out? Are companies completely ignorant about this?
In the case of enterprise solution, I have heard about the presales team going through hundreds of slides trying to communicate to the prospects without knowing what their real pains are. I have heard about cases where the customers are very angry when they had to repeatedly explain their needs to different people from the same organization during the sales cycle.
How to drive smart selling?
After seeing great sales people and some not so good ones, I feel that sales organization should ensure that the team is well informed, monitored and mentored through a systematic approach.
While CRM addresses the sales operation including lead management, KM can empower the sales organization through common customer knowledge and WT can change the way the sales team learn & work.
Solution Details
- Build customer knowledge base, capture lessons learned and organize them for perfect information delivery to sales team including partner community.
- Build marketing communication platform to effectively disseminate information & changes and monitor.
- Capture the RFP, discuss and quickly create a proposal including solution roadmap & estimates to maintain accuracy and consistency.
- Establish platforms to drive collaboration among presales, sales, partners & product teams and to facilitate real-time expert interaction for discussing the leads.
- Deliver knowledge through a scalable approach, assess the skills & gap, manage learning and measure the self-sufficiency of the sales team.
- Integrate CRM system with the KM system to exchange information between these two systems.
If you need such solution, please contact greatwork@lpcube.com.
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