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Let’s Team Up to Put the “R” into Your CRM

03 Apr
2013
The "R" in CRM
In the previous post, we gave you tools and a lot of background to accelerate your Sales efforts by putting relationship selling to use.
It’s time for you to get it into gear and put this knowledge to work. We’re going to help you with an easily actionable first step. With your plans now directed at building Relationship Capital to enhance what’s achievable between your organization and your customers, between your Sales and your Marketing, we propose that together we build some Relational Capital between us (more on that later).
But to put it to work, first you need to tell your team that it matters, and how.
If You Measure It, You Can Manage to It.
One constant in any functioning organization: The work that gets done, the objectives most workgroups work towards, are the ones that are measurable, and measured, and reported, and talked about in meetings and by the coffee machine.
Organizations have cargo-container loads of aims, objectives, goals, targets, aspirations. Some are long-term or mid-horizon or just for this quarter and sometimes just this afternoon. But you already know that in the jumble of all that ambition, the individual items that drive performance for most of the team are the ones on which the team is measured. The ones that no one reports or no one gets evaluated on are the ones that are forgotten, neglected or ignored.
To repeat and elaborate on a point made in the previous section: If you do make a commitment to succeed in putting the “R” into your CRM and bringing your Marketing and Sales organizations into more productive alignment, you’ll only be able to win if you:
  • Explain to all involved that you care about the progress of the Relationship Quality (RQ) value - between you and your customers, and between Sales and Marketing - and craft hard targets,
  • Establish, continuously track and regularly report metrics that indicate your progress towards your targets,
  • Publicly praise successes and correct failures that happen in the pursuit of those targets.
If you’ve got an effective CRM system, you’re already partway there because that system is a foundation for the tracking and reporting the “R” measures you’ll manage to.
Tweaking Your CRM to Amplify Your “R” Value.
Once you’ve aligned Marketing and Sales by using the methods we just discussed, it’s time to make some tiny changes to your CRM system that, while easy, will deliver high-performance results. There are simple steps any CRM system can support, and a few additional steps all effective CRM systems can handle to boost your “R”.
In Any CRM System:
  1. Create or recycle a custom field for Relationship Quality, then document and train people in how and when to enter or update the RQ field.
  2. Make sure the Relationship Quality field is added to all appropriate entry forms and reports, so when people have information with which they can add to or update RQ, the field is accessible without further navigation (which would limit effectiveness by adding overhead and reducing participation).
  3. Track RQ progress by client organization and individual, and by each Sales and Marketing person’s contribution to increasing the Relationship Quality numbers (more on why you do this in a moment).
In All Effective CRM Systems, Further:
  1. Use the Relationship Quality field as a conditional variable in your correspondence/mail-merge routine. This way you can have, for example, most letters mail-merge the usual contact information, but also bring up all letters going to people with an RQ of, say 3 or 4, to be customized by the appropriate inside contact before sending. And you might not send the communication out at all to your best-RQ contacts since it might look to them like you’re relegating them to the mass.
  2. Use the RQ as a trigger in your workflows to channel special offers or have increases in RQ trigger apt workflows.
  3. Make sure management dashboards track group RQ building and point out all appropriate individuals’ contributions.
Of course, there are critical human processes to put into place as well, the change management required to gain and solidify buy-in. And, at least until the importance of RQ is internalized, hold a monthly, short, exclusively-RQ progress meeting that ideally includes all Sales and Marketing people or—as a fallback—a certain number of transmitters from each department. Once internalized, and RQ is a key performance indicator everyone breathes, you kill the exclusively-RQ meeting and incorporate RQ into your more general ones.
The Bottom Line
Sales and Marketing teams that build a strong Relational Quality within that extends outward to their prospect and customer bases not only meet or beat sales quotas and other KPIs, but enjoy their work and influence greater overall organizational success. Good CRM systems can help support this work, but the most important new practices are within human behaviors and relationships, and they begin at the top.
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