I recently attended the SIIA On-Demand conference in San Jose. The most interesting comment I heard all week was: “SFA/CRM [sales force automation/customer relationship management] systems have never helped a salesperson sell a damn thing. They are a reporting tool.” The speaker: Anthony Lye, SVP Oracle Corporation.

WOW! I guess he would know; Oracle is arguably the largest provider of SFA/CRM systems globally. And, I completely agree. CRM systems are a scoreboard that feed information to sales management and finance about what has happened. Having a salesperson dependent on CRM systems is akin to driving your car by looking in the rearview mirror.

So, if CRM is historical and doesn’t help us sell, what does? 

This is the question the Prolifiq management team asked ourselves 6 years ago; and it is the question that drives everything we do. We set out to build a bridge between sales and marketing to deliver top-line revenue growth, reduced cost, improved productivity and an enhanced brand experience for the customer. Have we been successful? Yes and no. Yes, in that we service some of the largest companies in the world, who are all leaders in their respective industries. No, in that we don’t yet have you as a customer. But, you can change that…;-)

I have spent these past weeks telling the salesperson’s story to help you understand Prolifiq’s mission. I have personally enjoyed this journey because it allowed me to publicly say some things I would normally only say in private. This journey has been challenging and rewarding because it has forced me to step outside my comfort zone—so I thank you for taking the time to read my musings.

In my next post, we (the entire Prolifiq team) will begin a new journey. We will begin transparently telling the inside story of Prolifiq as we continue to grow and evolve. I invite you to join us as we take this journey for all to see.

I recently overheard a marketing communications manager state: “…we don’t have content that is aligned with the sales process.” Say what? I find this statement disconcerting, on so many levels, especially in these times.

My first question is: “Then, what have you been doing with your time and resources?” Because, in the absence of content that maps to the sales cycle, salespeople will do what they know how to do—improvise (see previous post: Betty Crocker vs. Rachael Ray). Salespeople will make their own content that fits their sales process. And it will not map to your marketing process and it is doubtful it will support our brand.

For salespeople to tell a story (see previous post: Tell me a story), they need content that is relevant to the customer; and, this relevancy is timing dependent. Salespeople will use your content and your messaging, providing they can get to it easily and they can use it in a cadence that fits their customer’s decision cycle and purchase path.

We just witnessed a near-flawless execution of this with the recent Presidential elections. Barack Obama won the election because he was on-message at every step of the campaign. He and his staff did an excellent job of knowing who they were talking to, what needed to be said and when to say it.

So, our relationship is pretty straightforward: I need you to tell me who to talk to, what to say and how to say it. I commit to deciding on the optimal time to say it and saying it to the best of my abilities. When we execute this properly, we will be celebrating many, many victories. I’ll be happy to pour the champagne.

One of my favorite questions to ask when interviewing is whether a candidate cooks. I have them describe how they do it, etc. Besides getting the candidate to step outside their comfort zone (probably not a question they rehearsed for) it helps expose their personality. What I am trying to learn is if the candidate is highly structured or can deal with improvisation and uncertainty.

Betty Crocker is a marketer’s chef – she has a highly structured, methodical, planned process. Rachael Ray is a seller’s chef – she is gregarious, unstructured and has an improvisational cooking style. Both produce excellent results.

There is a recipe to selling—it involves lots of planning and preparation. However, the most successful salespeople improvise all the time; because, we have to. Things rarely ever go as planned; ingredients are missing. The temperature is not quite right; you don’t always have the right tools. Demos fail; people don’t show up. Planes are late; conference calls fail.

I remember winning a deal for the strangest of reasons. We were scheduled to give a presentation to a HUGE customer (multi-million dollar infrastructure sale). Seven of us flew in for the meeting. We arrived at the conference room with the CIO, only to discover the room was too bright for the projection of our fabulous presentation because there were no window shades and it was brilliantly sunny. We all removed our suit coats and draped them over the windows to darken the room. We won the deal. The CIO chose us because she saw us adapt to the circumstances and overcome—this was more important to her than our 700 features and/or our price. This was never covered in any seven step training process; but, IT IS how life goes.

The moral of the story: next time you cook, pick a recipe without first planning all of the ingredients. Start cooking and when you require something you don’t have—adapt and see what happens. Trust me, you won’t go hungry.

The term windshield time is a term used to describe the personal bonding that takes place between field sales reps as they travel to and between sales appointments. The personal interplay on these trips results in the nuances of the sales process being transferred from one rep to another. It is why sales managers spend so much time in the field observing and coaching their reps.

The advent of web-based selling tools and travel expense restrictions are making windshield time an endangered species; I think this is potentially a tragic loss of institutional learning for organizations. I believe it is critical for marketers to do windshield time to intimately understand the entire sales process from start to finish.

I invite you to join me. Let’s team up to take one A lead from start to finish. I’ll have you join in on all of my calls as both an observer and participant. We will do the discovery call; we will conduct the needs assessment. We will do the departmental interviews; we will do the competitive analysis. We will jointly create the proposal; and we will jointly make the presentation.

This process will be good for both of us—you will witness first-hand how a customer reacts to what we have to say; I will benefit from your observations of what I am doing right, and what I can do better. And most importantly, we will win a new customer.

What I believe will be the greatest outcome of the process is you learning how integral marketing is to the process.

Having mastered the use of seven words (who, what, when, where, why, how & which) I can find out just about anything I choose to learn from my prospects and customers. These words create open-ended questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. They allow me to learn why a qualified prospect is motivated to buy from us.

The process of questioning a customer is a known as discovery interview selling; done properly it is the difference between mediocre and above average sales performance. Neil Rackham developed a selling methodology around this process known as SPIN Selling after observing some 30,000 sales calls and identifying what works.

Rackham found the most effective sellers had mastered the art of discovery and used what they learned to tailor the sales process to each buyer’s motivations. The resulting story (see “Tell Me a Story”) was pertinent and made the buyer feel the seller and their company was talking directly with them.

Following this process through the entire sales cycle, the most interesting result is the “close” becomes a foregone conclusion and ends up being a non-event in both the seller’s and the customer’s mind. So, sit back, listen and watch—we are going to make some calls. The process should help you with what comes next.