- November 12, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Are you old enough so that if you don’t write something on your to-do list you won’t remember to do it? That’s me. I don’t feel old, I don’t look that old, but I’ll be 60 next year and have become a slave to Wunderlist. On Monday, I forgot to push the correct notification button and only some subscribers were notified of Monday’s article. That article was perhaps the most important article I have written in all of 2014 and it introduced my latest White Paper – The Modern Science of Sales Force Excellence. This White Paper has ground-breaking insights and has already been nominated for Top eBook of 2014! The Monday article clearly shows the differences between companies with shorter sales cycles, higher win rates and greater increases in sales.
Last week, a new client was explaining how he called several of the nearly 300 opportunities that one salesperson had in his pipeline. My client identified 7 opportunities that had no recent activity, but had been in the pipeline for several months and were supposed to close. Imagine my client’s surprise when:
- My new client had no difficulty reaching the decision makers,
- The prospects were happy to speak with my new client,
- My new client learned that two prospects had gone with an inferior competitor – months ago, and
- My new client learned that the others had not even heard of his company.
How can this happen?
Did you read Monday’s article? There was one significant difference not included in that article. In 96% of the companies where new salespeople were outperforming those hired previously using other methods, those companies had integrated their sales process into their CRM or pipeline management application. Would that have helped here? That depends on which application was being used.
We use Membrain at both of my companies and we recommend Membrain to all of our clients. There are many reasons as to why we believe that Membrain is an ideal Pipeline Management tool. Here are a few that would have helped our client if his company had been using Membrain.
Membrain would have notified him that:
- These 7 opportunities were stuck when they were in that stage just one day longer than specified,
- The opportunities had exceeded the ideal time for their sales cycle,
- There were incomplete next steps, and
- These opportunities were no longer included in the forecast.
The application would have proactively notified my new client.
One of the biggest and most chronic complaints we hear from clients is that they either can’t get their salespeople to use the company’s CRM application, or they don’t update their CRM in real time, updating it only when asked to do so. Does that sound familiar? Companies with that problem – and that’s most companies – rarely see an accurate forecast, rarely know the progress their salespeople have made on opportunities, and rarely have the data necessary for their dashboards to display accurate information.
The thing we like best about Membrain is that salespeople like Membrain – a lot! It’s simple to use, has no complicated navigation, requires almost zero data entry and always shows salespeople their pipeline on login by default. It’s opportunity-centric instead of data-centric.
Most of all, it doesn’t require an integrator to customize it – to get your sales process built-in and hooked up to the pipeline, dashboard and forecast. Everyone on my team is able to easily work with the Membrain application and customize it for clients. It doesn’t take long, and the end result is an awesome, robust sales process/opportunity focused application and clients fall in love.
I have always preached that salespeople should live in their CRM. Membrain makes this possible.
In my 2005 book, Baseline Selling (kindle edition is ranked #53), I introduced the concept of a Visual Pipeline. Membrain brought this to life.
You can check out Membrain here and take advantage of the special pricing they are offering my readers! It’s ready to rock right out of the gate.
