Why Sales Training and CRM Don't Work on Their Own, and What to Do About It

Don't lose your mind over the CRM or the money you invested in sales training. It can all come together.

Salespeople want to be coached by managers who care

Experience has likely shown you what major training organizations have discovered through years of research: sales training, on its own, simply doesn’t work.

Shortly after training, sales reps forget almost everything they’ve learned.

This is mostly due to the fact there is no ongoing reinforcement and built-in accountability to drive the right behaviors and significant growth day by day.

You may have invested in customer relationship management (CRM) software only to find out that your sales team isn’t using it as much as you expected.

They find it time-consuming and not particularly user-friendly. As a result, your sales team reverts back to less efficient processes for managing their sales leads. All of this makes your job much more difficult. But what other options do you have?

To achieve their sales goals consistently, your team needs more than sales training and a fancy CRM. They need an effective process to manage their sales pipeline as well as continuous reinforcement and coaching.

This article explores the limits of sales training and CRM and explains the importance of a visual sales process that drives behavior, empowers sales coaching and is the best way to help your team reach its goals.

Your company depends on you

Managing a sales team is unquestionably a high-pressure job. The constant push to reach sales goals and support the growth of your company weighs heavily on your shoulders every day.

In your drive to meet or exceed sales goals, you work hard to hire the right people and keep your team trained, motivated and productive. Failure in any aspect of your role not only has a negative financial impact on your company, it could cost you your job.

You are not alone

Regardless of the industry and market, all sales managers struggle with similar challenges when managing a successful team. The reality is that many sales reps don’t reach their sales goals, but it’s not necessarily their fault. In spite of your efforts, your reps are probably working on too few sales opportunities, not contacting enough qualified prospects, and not efficiently moving their prospects through the sales funnel.

Reinforcement is a critical success factor in sales. Developing proficiency at a new skill takes time and practice. When there is no ongoing reinforcement of the sales training, reps forget what they’ve learned and naturally revert to old bad habits.

Increasing each person’s level of activity and effectiveness is important if you are relying on previous sales training or are planning new training in the future. Teaching your sales reps how to sell is not the same as giving them a sales methodology for moving a prospect through the pipeline and being transparent and coachable.

When applied consistently, a proven methodology beats innovative techniques in every sales environment.

• 87% of new skills are lost within one month of the training (Xerox).
• 80% of new skills are lost within one week of training if not used (Association for Talent Development).
• 85% of sales training fails to deliver a positive ROI (Chally Group Worldwide).

Why CRMs fall short

CRM software has matured dramatically over recent years and now offers sales organizations a long list of robust features. Despite these improvements, CRMs do not deliver the expected ROI because sales reps don’t like them and don’t use them to their full potential. There are many CRM options in the marketplace. They all, however, suffer from the same shortcomings. A common complaint is that they aren’t user-friendly enough. While most of the popular CRMs feature powerful tools, they tend to be data intensive, overly complicated and difficult to use.

Many times, CRM initiatives are driven by either IT or marketing departments whose focus is the need for information. Consequently, salespeople end up entering information that they personally find of little value and not relevant to their jobs. They feel like data entry clerks instead of salespeople.

If reps don’t like their CRM, they won’t use it consistently. If they don’t use it consistently, they won’t get the promised benefits. Productivity drops, sales goals are missed and morale suffers.

As Neil Rackham said, "Ask not what your CRM can do, but rather ask what it doesn't do."

CRMs don’t report on active prospects well

It may be maddening to you as a manager, although not surprising, that reps often choose to use both a CRM and other tools like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track their active prospects. This is usually because salespeople find it faster and easier to record sales statuses using their own methods and personal notes. They believe that the combination of their process and the CRM meets their reporting needs.

However, things change quickly in sales organizations, and while spreadsheets may work well for small sales teams, they lead to confusion in large teams.

CRMs don’t drive or display sales behavior

One of the most important reasons why CRMs rarely deliver on their promise is that they don’t drive behavior. They may be effective at recording data, but they don’t cause sales reps to sell.

CRMs are sometimes clunky, data-intensive tools that don’t drive behavior, so they rarely become an active part of the rep’s sales process.

When your reps don’t use their CRM, it makes your job much more difficult. If they aren’t keeping their activities up to date in the system, it becomes impossible for you to track their efforts, diagnose their behavior, and forecast sales beyond 30 days with acceptable accuracy. The best way to increase adoption of your CRM is to create a process and provide a tool that the sales team wants to use.

Should you hire new salespeople?

At times, managers are tempted to throw in the towel and start replacing salespeople. However, this is a time-consuming and expensive alternative. Consideration needs to be given to advertising and recruiting costs, as well as the time needed to screen and interview candidates. There is always a start-up curve for new salespeople during which sales results are limited, so the cost of training and integrating new people has to be examined as well.

Furthermore, managers often find that the new hires are no better than the people they replaced. The best salespeople are typically well rewarded by their current employers, and the ones who are available for hire are in the market for a reason. Managers are much better off focusing on their selling process and building systems which drive and reinforce the behaviors needed to be successful.

If you have invested in a CRM such as Salesforce or Dynamics for your team, then you know first-hand that the software rarely delivers on its promise. This failure is mainly due to low adoption. Reps typically don’t use the CRM consistently because they believe it takes more effort than it’s worth. Consequently, they never realize the promised benefits.

You may also have found that CRMs don’t always help you do your job better. Even though they hold valuable raw data, they don’t present that data in a way that allows you to coach each team member effectively.

The need for a rigorous pipeline and coaching system

Your success as a sales manager depends on how successful your team is at developing new business and making sure each customer experience is what your organization is committed to. You are responsible for ensuring that each sales rep is operating at a high level of both activity and effectiveness.

This simple equation tells you everything you need to know about the dynamics of sales: when the levels of activity and effectiveness are high, sales are high. When either or both levels are low, sales are low. But reps also need a manager who cares and is willing to help.

A high level of sales activity combined with a powerful sales pipeline system and continuous coaching delivers results.

Every morning when a salesperson starts their day, they have a choice. They choose their level of activity. However, they can’t choose their level of effectiveness. Golf is a good example. We can choose to show up on the golf course and play 18 holes, but we have very little immediate control over our effectiveness. Your team needs coaching that motivates them, which in turn boosts both activity and effectiveness.

How to finally make it work

As we have established, sales training and CRM alone do not improve sales success. To see significant results, you need more active and effective pipeline management and coaching.

Take a close look at the sales pipeline of your reps. Odds are it is full of stalled or dead prospects. Even though it appears there is a lot of activity, in reality your reps are reporting opportunities they will never convert.

Imagine this: our findings show that 75% to 100% of sales pipelines do not contain the date and time of the next meeting or step with a prospect. This is a huge problem for you and your team. Your reps’ pipelines should tell you when sales are going to happen, but they don’t. Because they don’t, you can’t consistently and accurately forecast sales.

A good pipeline system shows only those active prospects that are likely to close against a fixed deadline. It separates poor or inactive prospects from the gold. It is a visual system that shows you and your reps exactly what you need to know.

Conclusion

Keeping your sales team motivated and productive is an immensely challenging job. To help them reach their goals consistently, you need to provide more than sales training and a fancy CRM. You need to coach them on their sales pipeline, week after week, while they develop the habit of correcting themselves.

The Prospect Management System, created by Stephan Schiffman in 1979 and refined for more than 30 years, does more than teach your team how to sell. It gives them a picture of their business which drives behavior and empowers sales forecasting. You have one of the most stressful yet rewarding jobs in the world. Don't lose your mind over it.

Originally published on LinkedIn on August 28, 2019.