Why is corporate America hell-bent on providing crappy software for their employees, especially ineffective sales systems? 

Whether you’re a one-man band selling a homemade product in your local community or a global powerhouse selling industrial equipment, you’re likely using a sales system to track your opportunities, contacts, next steps, and maybe much more. Clearly, companies don’t intend to roll out lousy systems, but most still do. 

Sales systems most often fall under the larger category of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). A quick search on CRM applications will reveal hundreds of different, mostly cloud-based, applications in the space. As pervasive as CRM systems are today, there’s a vast sea of failed implementations and ineffective systems driving salespeople mad across corporate America. 

The failures typically happen at larger firms where there is a desire to improve the way the organization’s sales team operates.

Why Implement a New Sales System?

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the receiving end of several very poorly designed sales systems. The problem wasn’t the publisher’s software. The impending failure was festering well before the software got selected. 

When a company’s sales management team decides it needs a better way to see its pipeline of activity and to improve its forecast for closing business, it puts the CRM into play. This is exactly what management should expect from their sales system, after all. 

But they also come onto the scene when companies want a common prospect/customer file so marketing can target customers with new corporate campaigns, news, and events. This is an admirable goal but a damn hard one to implement. Product marketing would like insight into the sales pipeline to focus their engineering efforts. 

Eventually, more and more ideas permeate through the organization about what insight can be gleaned from the new sales system, all the while forgetting who the user of the system will be.

What’s the Weight of that Gorilla Anyway?

There is an 800-pound gorilla stumbling around in the conference room where the company’s executive team is giddily talking about their future sales system. Maybe the gorilla is invisible and that’s why everyone is ignoring it, but most executives know the history of business-oriented technology projects in the company. 

Even the politically correct brown-nosing executive admits that our projects are less than optimal. Translated, that means “most projects provide minimal business value, they’re never on time, and the initial budget was just a fantasy number.” If it sounds impossible that projects can be this bad, you have not been part of one of these misadventures. 

“What’s wrong with the current system?” a new executive to the firm rightly asks. She unknowingly just punched the fun right out of the room. 

“Most of my team don’t use it, and none of the managers trust the data,” the SVP of sales says, breaking the awkward silence with a stinging rebuke.

The executive team agrees to purchase the proposed new solution and completely ignore their ineptitude with these important programs.

Look into the Project Mirror

This Tire Swing project (well-known from ProjectCartoon.com) example always makes me chuckle. Maybe it’s because I’ve witnessed dozens of these wacky outcomes and can testify to just how close the cartoon is to the reality of corporate technology projects.

Good Intentions Gone Wrong

Corporate America has been implementing technology projects since the 1960s. With all of that history and knowledge, why do so many projects continue to deliver mediocre results or outright failures? The short answer is very poor leadership by the company CEO. There is no excuse for poor outcomes and failures given the ocean of information out there about getting projects done well. 

I’ve lost count of the number of times clients have said that innovation is the key to their business future. Upon further engagement with the client, I find out that they view IT as overhead and ineffective. In most cases, I also discover IT is understaffed and new projects never get the proper budget. 

Project Initiation

During the implementation process, it seems that anyone and everyone in the organization is given a chance to express what they need from the new sales system. 

First, marketing weighs in with a plethora of requirements. Here’s their chance to finally get better data from the sales staff to improve marketing’s fuzzy value to the organization (what’s an impression mean, anyway?).

Then, product development gets its chance. They want more data about what’s selling and not selling to better drive their investments. Hmm, this is an interesting notion, but it raises important questions: Is the tail wagging the dog or the other way around? Is product development looking to sales to drive the future, or does someone have a vision for the company and looking to sales to execute? 

Oh, and business and the Information Technology (IT) department don’t speak to each other. Or when they do, neither one listens to or trusts the other. How in the wide-friggin world in 2019 is this game of business and IT hating each other still going on? I mean, I understand why it happens, BUT WHY IS IT STILL HAPPENING? IT DRIVES ME CRAZY!  Shew, yelling is therapeutic.

What about the sales guys? What do they need to be more effective? Will the sales staff use the application? This most important group is essentially ignored, but if anyone looked closely at the requirements for the project, they’d note that sales will now be functioning as highly paid data entry clerks, all for the benefit of other departments not responsible for selling.

A Contest for Bad Applications

If a contest existed for the worst sales system, the one I experienced during a brief stint at IBM would easily be a top-three finisher. Here’s a key indicator your sales system ain’t gonna work too well: if an experienced salesperson logs into the system and can’t determine how to find their contacts and opportunities, you might have discovered a turd in the well. 

If you’re confused by this bubba-ism, a turd in your water well ruins the water for everyone. I guess those who live or have lived on a farm can better relate.  Here are a few other fun exploits I’ve experienced that torpedoed user adoption:

• Integration to the company’s email and calendar will be in the second release (actually the fifth release).  Wait, so you want me to do double entry while I wait two years for this critical function?

• A page full of data fields I don’t need to do my job. Oh, I see, this is where the extensive training needed to simply navigate the application comes into play. It’s to teach me when to use a certain field or ignore others.

• Your manager and senior management still use a spreadsheet to track the forecast. Hmm… there appears to be a lack of trust in the data here. Most people don’t want to do extra work, but if you’re dealing with partial or bad data, then the sales system is useless to everyone.

Just the Basics, Please

An exceptionally designed sales system should be intuitive, actually boost productivity, and be brain-dead simple. It should have about the same learning curve as the first time you used a smartphone. Here’s a comment from the top IT executive for a global pharmaceutical company I worked with in the past: 

“I won’t endorse us buying a new CRM system until the program team can tell me the five  things the sales team gets for one thing my organization or other non-selling group gets.” 

In other words, if a department outside of sales wanted something from the new CRM system, they had to justify it by providing five pieces of functionality to help sales.

Clearly, companies selling different types of products and/or services require adjustments in what’s presented to the end users. For example, the data needed for a more transactional sale should be concise and simple to manage on a day-to-day basis. 

If your sales result in closing three to five transactions per year, the information you need to help push your sales forward could be more extensive. Regardless of what you sell, there is standard information all salespeople need to do their job, like easily managing your contacts, opportunities, tasks, and pipeline.

Regardless of the type of sales, the end results everyone in sales — from an individual contributor to management — requires is confidence in the data. They must believe in the pipeline and forecast.  Sometimes, the best way to determine a superior automation design is to decompose how the sales process would get done if you had to do it manually. 

In part two of this post, we’ll take a trip down memory lane and explore how our brethren from the old days managed their sales.