Author Archives: Brian Gardner

Manufacturer visits can be a pain point for distributors. The good (and maybe for some, surprising) news: They can be managed with your CRM system.

There’s more to success with CRM than your initial investment in a system. In fact, the cost in time and money can be up to four to seven times that of the software itself, depending on what you want to roll out to your team.

I’m a big believer in training not only on the How but also on the Why of sales process and CRM.

On this blog, we’ve covered 10 of the most common reasons that CRM fails – or isn’t as successful as it could be. Those include a murky management vision, not getting your top guns involved, trying to do too much too soon rather than easing into the new system, and not understanding the Total Cost of Ownership, including training requirements, from the start. (Read more about common reasons CRM fails.)

But every company has its own Achilles heel.

As discussed on this blog, it’s important to start slow and grow (see #5 in this blog post), and ease your company and team into CRM. That means picking just a few priorities at most to focus on at each phase of your implementation. When you feel like your team has embraced the functionality in Phase 1, move to the next phase and so on.

Many companies struggle to identify what an “opportunity” truly is. An opportunity is a qualified lead. It’s not rumor of potential business. It has real potential to move to the quote stage. (Learn what a qualified lead is in this blog post.)

Where do you get your leads from, and how do you know they are qualified?

Leads are the start of the sales cycle. They are part of what I call the front end of the sales process (along with opportunities). A lead is a broadly defined term that includes potential customers that may have shown interest in your products and services. Key word here is interest. At this stage, the lead is not yet qualified. You may refer to them as prospects.

In most industrial companies, the service group is an island. The team is in the shop or out in the field. And the interaction the service team has with the sales team is minimal.

But that’s a big missed opportunity.

Many industrial distributors, reps and manufacturers tend to view any kind of technology investment as a cost. Part of that stems from the need to budget the investment, which is typically done under the eye of the CFO.

In the past few blog posts on SalesProcess360, we’ve addressed the sometimes difficult transition companies have to make when they decide to move forward on a CRM project.

In this post, we talk about the importance of getting what I call your “top guns” involved in CRM implementations.