Forewarned is Forearmed: Understand your Customer before the Sales Relationship Starts

Seth Patton, MicrosoftDynamics

Knowledge is power. We’ve all heard the saying, but the flip side of so much knowledge is that we are no longer living in the Age of Information but the Age of Information Overload. Today’s typical customer knows all about your company and services before they ever engage with you, which means that you have to know as much about them as possible before you engage. And increasingly demanding customers may also expect that each representative of your company is aware of all details of their previous interactions with your company—purchase history, likes and dislikes, issues, etc. As I mentioned in my blog, Becoming a Dynamic Sales Team, this rise of the empowered customer is forcing sales executives to look for new ways to equip their sales teams and help them stay ahead of the competition. A new generation of CRM tools is making it possible for organizations to arm their people with the foreknowledge they need to function in this new sales environment.
Thinking about CRM as going beyond managing the existing customer relationship to managing the future customer relationship can help your sales people close deals with new customers—as well as increase incremental customer lifetime value. Companies that use CRM to bring together relevant information in separate teams can extend knowledge about a case, customer or scenario beyond what is stored in the system of record. Participating in communities and using always-on tools, like Yammer and Skype, enables contextual collaboration among sales staff and their peers in the company at large. With this access to your organization’s “tribal knowledge” or anecdotal knowledge, your prospect and customer facing teams are able to propose solutions to fit each situation.
Take it a bit further by combining the information in your internal systems with data from social profiles and third-party data services to gain real insight into your prospects and customers. Solutions such as InsideView can be used to deliver timely, relevant sales intelligence to sales reps when and where they need it – in your CRM system. Serving this information up in the context of the sales cycle will help your  people have more relevant and targeted conversations. Better business intelligence can also enable proactive selling. CRM tools today are not limited to intelligence just on the customer at hand; rich analysis tools and BI enable you to cut across customers, segments, industries, or geographies to identify trends or anticipate needs, which can inform sales activities.
CSX Transportation originally deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM for sales and marketing, but as they brought their other teams on board, they found that they could collaborate on customer accounts more effectively, thus establishing a much more comprehensive view of their customers. For the first time, their sales people can see the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ involved in the service they have sold. With this insight, they can engage all the way down to the people who operate the trains and those most familiar with the customer to collaborate on accounts. CSX now does more team selling and cross-selling across business groups, such as intermodal transportation, to offer customers the best fit of services.
U.S. Xpress Enterprises was able to recover as much as $350,000 in lost-opportunity costs by deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Previously their salespeople spent as many as seven hours preparing for a sales meeting. Now they know their customers even better than before and gathering information takes minutes. They are able to accelerate the sales cycle, giving them more time to reach out to prospects and put deals in the pipeline.
STIHL dealer network recently deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM and integrated it with business analysis and enterprise resource planning systems. The solution enables territory managers to analyze and review sales data by dealer segment, drilling down into dealer information, such as issues under resolution, sales numbers, and sales targets. As a result, territory managers can approach dealers with just the right products and promotions, help them reach their revenue goals, and more efficiently meet their own sales targets. Likewise, company leaders have a high level of insight into market trends that affect dealer sales and can adjust company goals accordingly.
With the purchase experience being a key influencer of loyalty, equipping our sales people as best we can will pay huge benefits—not just in sales, but for the life of the customer-company relationship. New CRM tools can provide them with all the knowledge and insight they need, not only to sell more effectively, but to become the chief creator of the customer experience.