Q: Are the ‘interest’ and ‘fit’ parameters as part of a lead scoring subjective or objective markers and typically how do they impact the sales conversion rates?
A: In many ways they’re both:
Objective:
- You’ll assign a defined score to each touchpoint. Example: a visit to our pricing page is worth 30 points but an email open is only worth 1 point.
- You’ll do the same for firmographics – we have better conversion rates in the Finance industry vs Automotive Industry, so I’ll give a higher score to a lead from the Finance Industry.
- You will objectively be able to compare scores for multiple leads and prioritise them accordingly.
Subjective:
- While there are plenty of templates and guides out there (and we can certainly help with a starting point), the right scoring balance for your organisation is as unique as your value proposition – and what works for your competitors might not exactly work for you.
- It is a trial and error – or as I prefer, continuous improvement – process to reach an optimised lead scoring model for your organisation.
- But it will change over time – as your value proposition evolves, you expand into new verticals and the industry landscape changes, so should your lead scoring model.
Q: I'm a one-person publishing company and a one-person sales team. I need a CRM system but how can I apply your gamification suggestion to work for me well?
A: As a one-person company, you will always potentially struggle with one of the key motivators of gamification – competition with your peers!
However, there’s no reason why you couldn’t find ways of making the mechanism of achievement and reward associated with gamification work for you – define targets and rewards – CRM can help you track them and keep you honest. If you find the “self-auditing” difficult, maybe a close relative or friend could help with a regular check-in?
Q: Sales teams often struggle to keep CRMs up to date; what tips do you have to combat this?
A: They do – mainly because they don’t see any value or reason to do it other than keeping the boss and company happy.
If you want to drive adoption, you need to use both the carrot and the stick:
Carrot:
- Find ways by which CRM can actually make the day-to-day life of your reps easier.
- Don’t make their lives more complicated with 100 fields to complete on a CRM system “just because”.
- Reward good CRM hygiene (back to the idea of gamification).
- If you’re implementing a new system, make sure the sales team has an opportunity to input with what would make their lives easier.
Stick:
- Help them self-police – give the sales team the dashboards and reports they need to understand where they might have dropped the ball – like opportunities with no next step or close dates in the past.
- Use transparency to make sure there’s nowhere to hide – make those dashboards and reports visible to everyone and highlight where people are non-compliant.
- Use the data in your one-to-one reviews.
- Tie commission payment to CRM. If it’s not in the CRM, doesn’t get paid.
Q: With regard to empowerment, is there a downside to giving salespeople access to all this data?
A: There are three areas of risk around empowerment and data:
- Data Protection and Security: any reasonable CRM tool should be able to help you set security rules where while people can access the information to do their jobs, they can’t just walk away with it.
- Data overwhelm: providing so much they can’t make sense or sift through it. It’s not about giving a bunch of meaningless data – it needs to be filtered, grouped and visually represented in a way that makes sense to the sales team and which makes it immediately obvious. If it’s not, you’re not doing it right or you need to review the toolset you’re using.
- Competitive Distraction: You’ll always have the “one” who is going to use the data to spend endless hours checking what other are doing rather then doing his own job better than anyone else. The behaviour would be pretty obvious on the system (you can check which reports he’s been running and see the sales activity drop) which gives you the opportunity to 1) coach the right behaviour and/or 2) decide the person is not a right fit to the team.
Q: We are not sure our systems and processes will support all this where do you suggest we start?
A:
By validating if that’s the case. Take a step back -> look at how the business looks today and what it should look like in 3-5 years -> speak to the different areas of the business (marketing, sales, production, finance) and create your ideal world vision so that you can benchmark against it.Just don’t forget to keep focus on what really matters – how the system can enable you to reach your goals as an organisation – whether those are to grow revenues, provide a better customer experience, lower costs or have access to the metrics you need in order to make decisions.
Q: Can you provide a real-world example of how CRM lead gamification has improved sales performance?
A: Yes, and I can use our own example. Similar to many B2B organisations, we spend a significant percentage of our marketing budget in attending key tradeshows. Follow up of tradeshow leads has never really been as good as we wanted it to be – while a lot of enthusiasm was put in the first few days after the show, things then would get mixed up with everything else the sales team had going on. This year, we tried a different approach and created a competition for our BDR (Business Development Rep or lead generation) team – we run a team of three and established an award (a games console) for the rep who had the most leads from a specific show converted into Opportunity in the four weeks after the show. We converted more than 3x what we would historically convert in the same period after the same show.
Q: Can you give me an example of one of your customers where CRM has driven better employee experience and delivered a measurable impact on productivity and retention?
A: Yes. This publisher monetises their content primarily through subscriptions. They had taken the route of deploying the CRM module of their finance package on the assumption it would make integration and adoption easier. The end result was that because that module was not flexible enough to fit their requirements, they ended up with a number of workarounds which made the usability terrible – driving people to actually manage their day-to-day business in spreadsheets. In a very competitive Central London talent market, they lost multiple quality sales reps to competitors – and one of the consistent reasons given for leaving was how difficult it was to do their jobs with their current systems. They only recently (less than a year) moved over to Workbooks, but the initial signs are all very positive – retention is up and people are actually enthusiastic about how the CRM helps them do their jobs rather than complaining about it all the time.
You can view a recording of Andre’s presentation here.
