There’s an irony of sorts in the story of CRM,
which was intended to make the salesforce more effective, and yet which
failed multiple times to becomes the salesperson’s friend, resulting in
dismal adoption rates by its intended users.
Now the
nature of the customer is changing, and the methods of the salesperson
are changing to adapt. Salespeople, with that rare urgency in their
jobs to perform unceasingly, are reaching for the tools that they hope
will help them succeed, and the tools are those of Web 2.0, which in
turn is forcing the growth of CRM 2.0 and Sales 2.0.
“I think Sales 2.0 is about what’s different the
second time around when the bloom may be off the first rose and the
customer wants a better product as well as service, support and so on.
“This is also the time when customers have more
leverage because they may know they have alternatives and they expect
to get exactly what they want or no deal. It’s that environment that
makes selling such a challenge today, and it’s why sales people look
for a new or better way to sell.” – Getting Specific
Salespeople – like the rest of us now well
versed in how to use the Web – are reaching for social networking
applications to keep up their drip lines of prospects and customers,
and cobbling together the desktop tools and online services (such as
online invitation services for example) that they need, while CRM vendors are coming to market with similar tools in a box that IT now has to deploy.
In
sales, as everywhere else throughout all organizations, Enterprise 2.0
is being forced inside the firewall by users in great need to produce.
“The bad news, at least according to these vendors, these technologies can fulfill a promise that CRM
made but never delivered: a more effective sales person. The good news
is that, these products tend to be cheaper and easier to use and able
to plug in rather effortlessly into other applications.
“Another way to look at it, Thompson said, is that
the two technologies are mirror images of each other, with neither able
to supplant the other. ‘CRM came first because it was a legacy
application – the result of the command and control nature of larger
organizations where you had a sales manager demanding reps enter sales
data and so on. In other words, at the end of the day it is a
management tool,’ he explained.” – Sales 2.0: Friend or Foe to CRM?
So it remains to be seen how well the sales
effort will be aided by the new generation of software. These are large
forces in play: one the one hand the great sea change of user
individuality and customer personalization; on the other hand the
sometimes entrenched waterfall and top-down approach of software
development and IT implementation.
Behind it all, and
overarching, is the corporate view that top line revenues such as come
from sales are the only numbers that count, and that customer service and support is nothing but a cost. Against this belief, even the gods may struggle in vain.
