Collaborating with Sales – Documenting the Saga

Welcome to the Collaborative. This blog, which has morphed over time from a place to track the happenings of high tech collaboration to musings about collaborative communities in every day life to a quiet corner of the interwebs while I spent some time thinking about voids.

There’s something missing in collaborative communities online. Something that the blogosphere has passed over (at least as far as my browser can tell). While there are many resources about how to solve specific technology problems (complete with working examples) there are few if any places where CRM related change management and change acceleration are discussed in detail.

I’ve talked to a few readers and have heard what this space should not be: a place to simply pontificate about why change is important. Of COURSE it’s important. Those companies that change well thrive. Those that don’t or can’t, well they end up on the beach just as the tsunami of change rushes over them like a brick wall of energy and they are left to ask, “how did we miss this?”

So armed with what this conversation community won’t be, I’m taking a stab at what it should be: A place to share my experiences with change and how the Technical Strategy coupled together with cultural strategy creates effectiveness every time. Real examples, WIP, successes, mistakes, customer marvels and malcontents. All cards face up on the table.

Below is an introduction to such a conversation. I invite you to soak it in and join the journey with me. I’m not sure where this will end or how we’ll get there. Along the way we’ll debate, laugh call each other names and through the process, learn.

I look forward to the journey. Both the journey of bringing more and better change management to organizations of all sizes and for the opportunity to collaborative with you to make this a place to share and to effect change in all that we do.

Change and the Organization – A Match Made in Hell 2.0
Note: names (both individuals and companies) are removed to protect all involved. What matters is not WHO specifically but who generally and why specifically.

Picture a sales organization for a multi-billion dollar company. Exceptional industry knowledge, best of breed technologies to serve the customer, brand recognition to kill for.  Picture that same sales organization having revenue, cost center and incentive figures in giant silos separated by time and space. Picture a sales organization who’s idea of new business is growing current business next year by 5 points.

Layer into that picture a culture void of goal setting for sales people. Of course there’s goal setting for the business. Budgets must be completed yearly…but nothing to track a sales person’s performance.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle of the ocean a major techtonic shift occurs. Questions like, “shouldn’t we incent our sales people to sell?” arise from the murky depths and catch, because of changing leadership a current. The wave slowly grows in size, speed and force. Those caught up in it as it rolls quietly and quickly along ask similar questions. Those safely on shore start to hear reports of large, fast swells and want to protect themselves. They want to move inland and surround themselves with all the reasons that they need not change.

This then is the story of a company. A real living breathing company who is right now in the middle of this coming tsunami. My job is that of surfing instructor. I won’t stop the wave (I’ll encourage it) but I’m all about getting you on a board and hanging ten together. This space will chronicle that journey, as well as, provide a place for us to collaborate on thoughts, suggestions and lessons along the way.

Now it’s time for your feedback. Please find the poll below and let me know what you think. Hate it? Cool…we’ll scrap it and move on. Love it, we’ll find ways to get you and your change management successes and nightmares chronicled. Not convinced…tell me what we’re missing. My goal is simple: to share an experience that we can all study, learn from and add value to the collective pool of knowledge.

I look forward to the journey.

Collaborative CRM – We ALL Owe it to the Customer

“It’s MY customer. It’s MY call.”

That was uttered recently in a meeting. The meeting was to discuss business process (a subject near and dear to my heart) and more specifically to view our sales business process through the eyes of the customer. I’ve led many such meetings in my career and was pleased that my current employer was ready to embark on this cause. Little did I know how deeply engrained our silos…our fiefdoms were.

The issue arose from a seemingly insignificant exercise. Each team (representatives from each division) was to answer the following questions:

• What are the critical things you need to know about your customer to make decisions on next steps?
• Why are these pieces of information critical?
• How do these critial items enable you to best care for the customer

The idea was to then list these critical components to show how similar our needs were across all divisions. Like any sales organization, this one things that it (each division) is completely different than the others. And, after performing this exercise they found that, like any sales organization, they’re more alike than they are different. That realization created tension. For years (75+) this company treated it’s division as businesses built on the idea of how different, how unique they were. Now they were realizing how intertwined their services were.

We left that meeting with quality work completed (my vantage point) and a lot of uneasy feelings among team leaders. I felt like there’d been chinks strategically placed in the armour of space and time…that we were evolving. Time would be the next ingredient needed to continue this process.

The next thing that occurred was a customer meeting. One of our division sales people met with a customer and discovered in that meeting that another division had been talking to the customer. How dare they! It’s MY customer. I was in the meeting with the customer and a couple of things happened that disturbed me:

• The salesperson immediately stopped listening
• The customer found himself apologizing for contacting the other division

This customer needed the services provided by our other division. It was an upsell that the first division would get credit for yet all this guy could think about was how his colleague dare talk to HIS customer. In the car after the meeting we debriefed. When my sales colleage mentioned how angry he was about his cross division colleague talking to his customer I reminded him “it’s not YOUR customer. It’s OUR customer.”

I wonder what kind of service this customer would have received had we all put him at the center of our world. How much money was left on the table because we couldn’t get our collective act together. Does the customer feel like he’s working with a team focused on providing him an experience? (I asked and the answer is no…no doubt he’s now shopping us).

Are we focused on what belongs to us or on stewardship of our customer’s success.

Here’s to the latter. We aren’t given customer relationships for life. They are earned daily and we must be good stewards of that relationship with each interaction.

Here’s to becoming what our customer values.