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  "PageContent": "<h3>Where Pipeline Manager Expresses Itself</h3>Posted on | June 11, 2010 | No CommentsHow did this even enter the vernacular? Decades ago, someone came up with the probability percentage and attached it to a methodology. A lot of good methodology work has been forgotten – but a probability field is easy to pop into a spreadsheet or a CRM so that’s what sticks.What is more serious, honestly accountable and credible: the ‘% likelihood to close’ or a smily-face?  Personally I can’t see the difference. They both indicate much more about the  mood of a sales person than they do about any customer’s intention to buy. Who can defend this thing as being a meaningful, high-quality metric?Minutes and even hours of non-selling time go into pulling this murky percentage from an undisclosed oriface – and then  a manager spends even more time second-guessing based on personality styles and insight into the SALESPERSON. Think about this. The manager isn’t spending time to guess the customer or the solution –  the manager is guessing the attitudeof the salesperson. I’ve dealt with huge organizations who do this up multiple levels and regions to get to the top offices. Hours and hours of psychology, juggling and finessing – all perfectly divorced from any knowledge of what the customer thinks about the products and services.So – Next time the CEO wants a forecast make it more visual! Switch out those 20%s for a frown face. The 50%s should have a bored face, the 70s get a happy face and the 90s get a party icon. The CEO is bound to say ‘Awesome work, dude!’Unless… suppose, for the sake of argument, the CEO and CFO actually have to make serious financial decisions based on a forecast. Then they might want something, say, credible. Or verifiable. Or defend-able. In which case you’ll have to drop anything that allows gut-feel to creep into the equation.The only things that should show up on a forecast are the customer’s buying signals. The forecast is the result of a series of clear steps that document how the customer agrees to engage within their procurement framework and that they are working with you to get increasingly serious about acquiring your offering.That’s the definition of a Stage.What helps them to make the decision to give you a buying signal and pass forward through the stage? Those are the actions that define the Stage.When a rep can make the progress through the all actions and the stages, that’s the buying process.When the client stays engaged into the final two or three stages, those two or three stages are the forecast. The homework has been done. The agreements to work together are clearly understood by both parties – or they wouldn’t have made the progress to get to the final stages.When the team is managed and monitored to follow this kind of clear discipline, asking the right question of their decision makers, there’s no need to waste non-selling time with percents or ‘commits’ and ‘best cases.’ The system that monitors and reinforces best practice keeps buyer and seller on track, asking each other the questions that make the best use of everyone’s time.And there’s nothing more valuable to a salesperson (or a CEO… or for that matter, to a buyer) than selling time.Posted on | August 5, 2009 | No CommentsAs the concepts for CRM 2.0 evolve, it is becoming clear that the grand vision for this evolution promises to deliver user satisfaction results just as disappointing as the numbers that CRM 1.0 delivered. The designers of the evolving 2.0 standard envision an integration of all media sources, emphasizing the rich, personalized web experience. This marketing experience will lead prospects into a buyer-driven contract experience that naturally flows into an on-demand personalized followup support experience. In this promised land, the selling company cedes control to the customer who now becomes more a collaborator in the buying process. The vision is a manageable progression from today’s wide range of CRM 1.0 functions, integrating the best of the web’s potential for commerce with all that analytics can plumb from multi-dimensional databases. From the IT point of view, CRM 2.0 is evolving smoothly into a series of specifications.What’s remarkable in all this is that the lessons of CRM 1.0 appear to all observers to have been ignored. Despite 25 years of development, user satisfaction rates are still under 50%, with many surveys reporting that 60 to 85% of CRM roll-outs are considered by their users to be failures, not delivering on the promises that inspired them to invest in the systems. In other words, despite major cracks in the foundation, the new architects are designing a building that relies on this crumbling foundation.1.0‘s fundamental failings have been exposed for two decades throughout the consultant punditsphere from countless credible sources, surveys, studies and polemics. There are many, many individual shortcomings that affect users, managers and the C-suite. Rather than rehash the litany of disappointments, the most useful examination begins with a review of root causes. This industry began with the goal of turning a Rolodex into a computerized database. This effort was successful. Programmers created a tool that was faster than the thing it was modeled on. With this success more aspects have been automated and an industry that was called, to its detriment, ‘Sales Force Automation’ appeared. Many see this as the conceptual point where the wheels jumped the tracks. It has been argued that many of CRM’s biggest dissatisfactions stem from an IT dream of delivering a ‘black box’ that will automate most – if not all – of what a salesperson does. This dream is reinforced by the people who buy the systems. After automating the receptionist and other routine jobs, they naturally want more. Many buyers who never really understood what sales reps and managers do have bought systems hoping that the deliverable would somehow allow them to have fewer salespeople on the payroll. Noone claims that there are bad actors in this scene. Top management is tasked with maximizing efficiency. IT is a natural focus for efficiency since it has delivered on many fronts. Problems have stemmed from not appreciating the limits of a system that is programmed by people who can only know so much. To understand a job, IT breaks the job down into definable categories and tasks. IT experts then weight scores of features, agreeing with sales and marketing about benefits as well as ensure that the solution is state of the art for their particular stated specification.The CRM industry has, therefore, been defined by what buyers and sellers hope will be deliverable. IT has never had a mandate to truly live the sales or marketing function. Their compensation will never ride on improved sales numbers. This has led to a buying situation much like the hungry family that compares countless fast food menus. The fast food providers deliver seeming limitless options to their customer. The problem is that the options are all within a defined paradigm that was never built to deliver the low fat, high nutrition, great tasting careful portions that would provide the kind of meal that really satisfies and promotes health. The consumer is unsatisfied and yet doesn’t have the luxury of being able to redefine what they want. They aren’t in the restaurant business. They don’t want to cook. They just know that anything that they might really want is probably too expensive. So they settle on their best option among the limited offerings.To return to the CRM buyer, most users, after investing 6, 7, 8 and 9 figure budgets in the CRM systems have not been satisfied.The obvious question often then becomes: can they ever be satisfied?  IT has rightly argued that developers can deliver almost anything so long as someone can create a spec. Sales has responded that are not in the spec business, they are in the people business – and that they don’t have a minute to spare because they are looking down the barrel of end-of-quarter quotas. There is a growing movement to revisit the original assumptions of CRM 1.0 before proceeding with 2.0. Users are challenging the CRM industry to rethink the assumptions that lead to satisfaction ratings that that would any other industry be unacceptable.  They are finally asking CRM providers to imagine the state of the automobile industry if 60 to 85% of the cars didn’t get people to where they want to go.CRM providers are beginning to face the limits of what their black box really does and not try to sell what they wish it would do. The architects of CRM are accused of glossing over countless human factors in this equation and they have a good business case for trying to avoid this black hole: Nobody really knows what humans do or are capable of doing. This is not simply a chess-master vs. computer assignment of cataloging all the possible options available in a transaction. This is an admission that sales reaches into the deepest weeds of human thought where automating psychology is as obviously absurd as automating medical care. In both cases the depth of the unknown makes the application of known information useless from a programming perspective.Psychology offers libraries of books on behavior theory. Much of that theory can be outmoded in an instant by the surprises that result from psychology experiments in the field. The simplest behavior studies prove over and over that people act differently than they think they act. A recent example from Harvard University: Put a teenager near some potato chips and ask them to predict how happy they’ll be when they eat those chips. When there’s a bag of chocolate nearby they’ll predict that the chips won’t make them all that happy. Put a can of Spam nearby and they’ll say they’ll be ecstatic. Let them eat the potato chips. Which group will be happy? Which will be unsatisfied?It is, at the least, overly optimistic to expect any black box to set up a wide range of buyers to perceive future happiness and complete the transaction before anyone actually discovers whether they are happy.The variables are endless. Can the black box be expected to control whether there is that ‘bag of chocolate’ in the room?What does that mean to the IT professional trained to see any process as a logical flow of gates and decision points that conform to and confirm buyer education based on a definable set of predictable expectations and outcomes? The buyer will come to a conclusion (or won’t) thanks to a known and analyzable batch of screens, fields and forms. The IT professional will try to improve their chances of a sale (or a prediction of a sale) thanks to historical data, industry statistics and predictive modeling all based on an assumption that the data is clean enough to be ‘on the whole’ valid. Real life often then makes crucial assumptions obsolete. Consider recent global economic events. What did they do to a forecast based in historical data? Will models in the future ignore most data captured during a downturn? Will there be some way of compensating for the aberrations? Will a sales manger who needs help be able to tell a good from a bad statistical model? Most are not trained in this area any more than they are in computer programming.There is a real danger to any organization that trusts a model that they don’t understand. If someone comes along claiming that their statistical model fully compensates for the vagaries of marketplace, how can a typical sales manager determine whether the model’s salesperson is full of crap? By the time a manager determines the model is lacking, it’s too late to do anything about it – and the vendor has moved on.There is still only one real and verifiable means to predicting and managing the course of a sale. Obvious as it is, this simple formula has been lost in the race to record an infinity of CRM touchpoints:Know what a customer wants and then give it to them.The vendor who isn’t sure what the customer wants is likely to lose the sale.The vendor who doesn’t give the customer what they want is likely to lose the sale.The manager who doesn’t teach the rep to ask the right questions that discover what the customer wants or who doesn’t make sure that the rep delivers is likely to miss their numbers.More and more CRM users are realizing that only when CRM consistently and repeatedly gets managers and reps to work together to anticipate and respond to the rapidly changing buyer CRM architects while giving them the tools to map a continual stream of new products and market conditions to the right buyers – only then will it be possible to make a case that CRM is ready for the next big thing.Posted on | October 11, 2008 | No CommentsLet’s say that CRM software could be better than it is today… What would you do?Posted on | September 8, 2008 | 1 CommentMy take on blogging: The best work comes from the people who take time to respond. When an erudite scribe takes time to form their thoughts they usually outshine most of the blowhards who start the arguments. Even worse, the blowhards are often trying to mix it up in hopes of a response. They’ll say something inflammatory or ill-informed, or they’ll just flat out lie in hopes of getting a rise out of someone. Life is emotional enough without the Pipeline creating a mood-altering-blog.So – if since you’re here, please take time to weigh in. Unburden yourself. Lay out biggest problems in your selling life right now. Do you see anything in our demos that might help? Say anything that comes to mind even if it seems off the wall. All I’ll ask is that you take pride in what you write so that I and others can really understand your point.Maybe we already offer some answers – or maybe you’ll plant the seeds of a major revision.Thanks for jumping in!",
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