Secrets and Lies: What’s Your Sales Team Keeping from You?

If your sales team are still tracking their pipeline and deals in spreadsheets instead of your shiny, new CRM, follow these tips to get them sharing.Sales departments can seem like secret societies sometimes, with everyone furtively whispering in corners and closing down their screens when colleagues approach their desk.

Sales departments can seem like secret societies sometimes, with everyone furtively whispering in corners and closing down their screens when colleagues approach their desk.

So with everyone wanting to keep their sales deals to themselves, how can you get them to use your new CRM? The benefits to you of this increased transparency will be manifold:

• You’ll know exactly what all your staff are doing.
• Forecasting will be easier, as you’ll be able to see what new deals are in the pipeline.
• You’ll be able to reward high performing salespeople, as well as help any poorly performing members of staff by offering them more training.

Before we go on, we’d better be honest with you. It won’t be easy: a LinkedIn poll of Sales Managers revealed that (at time of publication) 50% of their teams weren’t using their CRM for Sales in the way they wanted them to.

First, let’s look at the reasons why your team might be reluctant to share their information in the CRM…

Reason 1 – They are afraid of critical reviews of their deals.

Reason 2 – They believe that their value to the organisation will be diminished if their contacts and pipeline are no longer their secret domain.

Reason 3 – They are uncomfortable with the technology and don’t see how it can add value.

Reason 4 – They just can’t be bothered.

So how can you make them care and want to engage with the CRM sales system? It will be worth your while – research by Towers Perrin indicates that highly engaged sales employ­ees generate 19% higher operat­ing income.

The latest thinking on employee engagement for CRM is all about gamification – and building in challenges, incentives and rewards to encourage adoption of the behaviours that will help your business get the most from the solution.

CRM Insights has developed some gamification  tips that use psychology to increase sales and adoption rates. They are:

• Weave gamification into your company’s sales methodology to help set targets and track related achievements.
• Encourage and reward people for pursuing actions that you know are the right actions.
• Reward the desired behaviour with points.
• Use leaderboards to foster friendly competition between individuals and teams.
• Boost CRM performance further with different achievement levels and create unique rewards for each level.
• Incentivise sales people to target the right people – not just the ones who will take their calls.

Sales people are naturally competitive and will want to be seen to be achieving in an internal challenge.

So even though it might seem like encouraging people to play at work is the last thing you’d want to do, it can really reap rewards.

The Game On: Gamification Strategies Motivate Customer and Employee Behaviors article in CRM magazine has tales of 100% employee engagement in such initiatives, resulting in team members being excited to get to work and see what levels they’d achieved.

So make your CRM for sales work for them by scheduling some play time into the working day.