Do you see well organized CRM data driving a well defined strategy and a nicely honed set of tactics? Or do you see CRM data that suffers from duplication, omissions and other problems? Better than nothing – but definitely not the best starting point for scaling B2B sales.
How would you (perhaps privately) answer the questions below:
- Do requests for customer analysis just result in stories and anecdotes?
- Do you hear anecdotes rather than see coherent data, or evidence?
- Is your Sales function using native talent to compensate for shortcomings?
- Are Sales only really successful when leveraging history, relationships and so forth?
- Is generating genuine new business really hard?
What constrains your business?
- Does its history and people limit it?
- Do you find expanding the customer base costly?
- Do lists of apparently good companies produce few prospects?
- Does cleansing lists waste lots of sales time?
- Are you pursuing tactics without realising the common thread?
There are often three big problems
- No ability to rank new (i.e. uncontacted) companies for potential. Past history, internal measures or expensive data cleansing drive any assessment.
- No profiling to ensure you get prospects who are “similar” to existing customers. Any profiling is general. It isn’t refined to match the product or service you want to push.
- Chance causes sales people to pursue opportunities. Data and evidence don’t play much of a role.
You are not alone. Many companies are stuck. And common misconceptions hold companies hostage. Such as
- Failure to scale B2B sales shows lack of skill or effort.
- Marketing lists are a commodity and good ones are easy to obtain.
- Company data that passes credit checks is good enough.
- Cleansing CRM data is all about contact data.
- New marketing or sales approaches or even personnel will solve the problems.
