Why won’t Johnny use the CRM to telephone prospect?
Companies spend untold amounts of money implementing CRM. There are multiple reasons why CRM does not help in the process of setting initial appointments with new business targets. The question is why?
The simple answer is that CRMs were not built to automate the business process of telephone prospecting. The better question is why we continue to use them for that purpose. The answer to that question is a combination of:
· We view CRMs as the Swiss Army knife of sales tools,
· The CRM is already in place,
· The lack of use of the CRM for prospecting is lumped in with the lack of CRM use in general,
· Poor prospecting activity is the ‘elephant in the sales bullpen’ anyway, so blaming the CRM is easier than facing the truth,
· Lastly – and this is the biggest reason – we don’t really grasp that prospecting is a process, therefore we don’t appreciate the real role of automation to its success.
This ‘real reason’ is a big topic at www.coldcalling101.com where telephone prospecting is correctly defined as a business process. This process requires us to assemble the correct combination of Art, Best Practice and Science to be successful. That’s right, without getting all three business process components correct, we fail.
The purpose of the Science component is to provide efficiency. Specifically, allow a sales rep to quickly, easily and accurately navigate the Best Practice for the pursuit of a target, while in the pursuit of 100’s of targets simultaneously and to automatically report on prospecting activity.
CRMs are not only inefficient in this role; they are proven during benchmarks to be counter-productive. For instance, it takes twice as long and 85% more effort to follow the typical Best Practice for B2B telephone prospecting in a CRM. It takes only 45 minutes to benchmark a CRM; to benchmark yours email us at bhoward@klpz.com.
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