To understand whether the answer to this question is of relevance when looking for ways how to improve productivity of a sales force, let us ask
Why is Knowledge Management important in Selling?
There are many formulas telling what is needed for having success in sales. While these formulas vary slightly, knowledge seems to be an essential component in all of them. So it seems useful to look into the question how well CRM systems support salespeople in holding the needed knowledge readily available. To answer this question, we need to look at different aspects of knowledge
The 3 C’s of Knowledge
For a successful sales campaign, adequate knowledge is needed about:
1. The customer’s/prospect’s situation
2. The competitive landscape
3. The supplier’s capabilities
How do CRM Systems Support These Domains?
Using the above framework, we can make the following observations.
1. Customer Knowledge
One of the primary purposes of CRM systems is to provide data structures allowing tracking every relevant interaction between the companies customer facing people with the customers/prospects, they look after. Thus a body of situational knowledge is created. Consultation of this knowledge is then particularly valuable in the maintenance of a customer relationship.
This body of knowledge is however not sufficient when building or expanding a customer relationship. In this case, the following additional elements are needed:
• Background information about the prospect
• The current situation the prospect is in
• Trigger events causing sales people to want to build the relationship to eventually close a deal.
While CRM systems might provide a structure to capture this information for ready reference, the original source is outside of such systems. What is captured is the knowledge salespeople have gained through research activities such as: General searches on the internet, reading general printed press or specific trade journals and increasingly through the use of specialized systems made available in a Sales 2.0 context. CRM systems support the research activity through specialized systems by providing embedded links to such system. The research can be conducted without leaving the CRM systems context. Some of those specialized systems can also automatically push information into CRM data structures.
2. Competitive Knowledge
For building and consultation of competitive knowledge, CRM systems are used pretty similar to what is described above for customer knowledge. In large companies, there might though also be dedicated people researching the competitive landscape and making it available for ready reference in CRM systems, together with the knowledge built up by sales people themselves from information learned through customer interactions.
3. Capabilities Knowledge
Was one to ask salespeople where they get the information about their companies and product and services capabilities so they know what to say in a particular sales situation, they hardly would answer, that the CRM system is the primary source. Most CRM systems do though hold some capabilities knowledge usually referred to as company literature. The original design idea for this was to enable sales people to easily and efficiently answer fulfill information requests from their customers. There are though two factors that limit the usefulness of such company literature repositories. First, the internet has caused the number of such direct information requests from customers to drop drastically. Second, it is a well known fact that salespeople consider such literature not to be of much use in their campaigns anyway and make thus little to no use of it.
Capabilities knowledge is probably mostly stored in Sales Portals. These portals are often built from a product marketing perspective. Salespeople are thus left on their own to match the complexity of the customer requirements and the complexity of their companies capabilities to propose a valuable solution to the customer. Furthermore, customers today do not tolerate salespeople being simple conveyers of canned marketing prepared standard value propositions anymore. Salespeople are expected to be able to add value to the interaction. The messaging has to be adapted to the individual customer and to the current context of a sales campaign.
Conclusion
While CRM systems are configured to guide salespeople in what needs to be done in a sales campaign through the implementation of sales processes, they provide no support for the sales people of what is best said to the customer in a particular phase of the process. Sales portals are also no help for this as capabilities knowledge is stored under a different view point there. It becomes thus pretty obvious that sales enablement systems guiding salespeople in what needs to be said in a particular phase of the sales process and allowing furthermore the tailoring of the messaging to the specific customer context can significantly improve the productivity of salespeople, while maintaining image integrity required from a marketing perspective.
About the Author:
Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping leaders of large, global B2B sales organizations to increase their productivity.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/camaurerconsulting
http://ultimatesalesexecresource.blogspot.com/
See also:CRM
Knowledge Management
Sales Enablement
I like the term “sales enablement system.”
[...] by salesenablement on July 2, 2009 On June 22nd, 2009 Christian Maurer @camaurer wrote a post on the Enable Your Sales [...]
Christian
Very good article. A little lite on content. I would like to send you a free copy of SLS-B-100 Basic Sales – A Review and Advanced Sales – An Introduction (52 pages). There is a section within that book that contains some of the information that a sales professional should be capturing and maintaining in their CRM system. I would also like to speak with you about co-authoring a Learning Unit on CRM configuration, data mining, and maintenance.
Mike Cannon
A good case against CRM as a sales enablement tool. I see CRM as a tool for sales management not sales person performance.
That said, do you have an alternative in mind? Its something that was on my mind again this week. I was contemplating a customer intelligence system. A knowledge base that draws from crm, capabilities/resumes, blended with social networking tools, market intelligence and vendor capabilities. Obviously it is no replacement for a solid business/industry/technology understanding combined with consultation and a sprinkle of creativity.
Got solid ideas to shake up the status quo? Maybe we build something?
Michael, Lee
thanks for your comments.
Michael,
I would appreciate receiving your book. On my blog (see second link below article) you can find my contact details on the side bar about half way down. I am also open to discuss your proposal for collaboration.
Lee,
the article was written with what Bizsphere can offer. I suggest you should speak to them directly.
You hit on a very valid point, and I think that both CRM and Sales Enablement each provide value to the organization – just in different ways. CRM tends to be something that benefits management, while Sales Enablement is really by the sales rep and for the sales rep. They both have their place. To that end, I’d say to anyone who is evaluating a Sales Enablement solution that you should consider a solution that can integrate with your CRM system so that you are fully leveraging the benefits of both. I have seen companies integrate the two and actually align content to particular sales stages and industries – that just-in-time/relevant-to-me push of the right content and information based upon the selling situation. I think that is what every company tackling the Sales Enablement challenge is striving for.
It is great to see the various comments to Christian’s blog post. Let me add one more tought to the discussion: The integration of Sales Enablement with CRM systems is definitely a big benefit – not just when it comes to the alignment of content with sales stages. For example, also cross-selling or win-loss information from the CRM system could be leveraged by the Sales Enablement system to make sellers more effectiv.