I can recommend a very good read, which pulls no punches and describes what we have been doing for thirty years and expecting a different result - "Is CRM out-dated?" from the Smart Selling Tools website.

I was there when we first started and that was when we called it contact management.  We needed a way to manage all contact with our customers, prospects, suppliers, etc. We then went one stage further and started adding opportunity management, marketing, and customer service functionality so that we could manage everything we did with the outside world and also increase visibility throughout the organisation as to customer activities.  We then decided to call it CRM.

This has been a great innovation, but we now seem to be stuck on technological advancements, such as supplying CRM as a Software as a Service (SaaS).

With our clients we have found that more than ever they are looking at ways of applying their processes within systems that are flexible to meet their requirements and offer benefits to the user.  A sales person wants minimal interaction with the system and maximum interaction with the client.  He or she wants a tool that helps him or her manage the sales process, qualifying prospects, measure progress towards getting the order, and at the same time allowing management to use the same information to produce their reports.

The next wave of development in the sale arena are systems that can cater for any sales process, giving management the ability to monitor results produced by using the process so that it can be refined if necessary.  It could be that by using a process, it is shown that sales person needs coaching or that the marketing message/plan needs reviewing.

CRM systems are activity based, but where is the process.  The ability to review the sales situation from an elevated position can be achieved using systems that can cater properly for processes, I mean processes not procedures. Procedures/activities are a means of getting from one step, within a process, to the next. You could say that CRM is a subset of the next generation of systems.

We are dealing with sales performance management systems that go further than managing targets and incentives. As the article says CRM systems are essentially still an interface to a database.  Sales Performance Management systems use the CRM functionality but take it to the next level, to have a direct influence in winning sales.

I came across an article on the Sales Benchmark Index website entitled ‘Sales Performance Management: Getting A Fighting Chance'. It was an very interesting read and furthermore I completely agree with the key finding that viewing your data in different ways is not the most important thing and that attaining and maintaining accurate data is the basis of any decision making process.

There is the traditional method of ‘carrot and stick’, the carrot being remuneration dependant on the level of accuracy of the information that is entered into a system whether it be contact details or sales forecasts, or the stick being the regular review where the cross-examination establishes whether the information is credible.

The sales performance management system needs to be able to store snapshots of what is happening thereby building up a trend analysis database. By using the historic data it is possible to quickly establish whether the sales opportunity is being handled correctly or the sales person is not entering the data correctly.

In the example below the system is tracking the information with regard to the key criteria so that progress can be measured. The opportunity is stagnating why? Looking at the criterion ‘Factors governing the decision’, the status went from ‘established and agreed in our favour’ to ‘established but not agreed’.

Source: SymVolli - Order Slippage Report

The sales person could have left the status as ‘established and agreed in our favour’, but the opportunity is stagnating and that is showing up in the slippage report shown below.

Source: SymVolli - Order Slippage Report

The reports are not only seen by management but also by the sale person, so the next time he or she enters data without substance they will think twice as they know that it will be easily identified.

Setting up the system up correctly with proven processes will go a long way, but the system needs to have the ability to highlight exceptions thereby helping maintain to integrity of the data.

You are asking for trouble if you are adding garbage knowing that it will eventually be trapped.