Saturday, March 15, 2014

WIIFM? – It Could Increase your CRM Usage and Adoption

WIIFM? – It could increase your CRM usage and adoption

As sales leaders we always coach our front line reps to distinguish themselves and our products, to understand the clients decision making criteria and to customize a solution that aligns with their corporate and personal goals. These personal goals are often referred to as “What’s In It For Me” or WIIFM, and when addressed properly will lead to shorter sales cycles, usually with higher margins.

It is this simple concept that sales leaders often miss or disregard completely when selecting tools like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, believing that tracking activities and documenting opportunities is what will make sales people more successful. This is completely backwards.

Any good CRM (and CRM implementation) will need to take in to account not just the reporting needs of management and executive leadership but also the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and usability for the front line sales people. A seasoned sales veteran once asked me “If I put all of this in to our CRM what is it going to give me back?

It was refreshing to see the WIIFM in action coming from a sales rep, and highlighted the need to understand behavior and decision making drivers. With regards to the question though, in some instances CRM usage is so inadequate the unfortunate answer is “nothing at all”.

What would a sales person want from a CRM? The biggest request I have heard over the years is for a tool that actually helps them sell more, not for a tool that only allows management to review/inspect what they are doing.

Too many CRM’s are selected by sales leadership to enable “greater visibility and reporting” which may allow for analytics that can be used to sharpen marketing efforts to increase sales, but how many marketers at small to mid-sized businesses are actually using CRM analytics today? I would be interested to see some data on that. (Comments below are welcome)

Some of the SFA features that sales people would like include automatic follow-up appointment scheduling, lead creation based on past opportunities (lease term, product life or warranty driven time frames), email campaigns by themes, mobile access (iOS, Android and BB) and  have real time visibility to their person performance and commissions calculations.


If you want your sales teams to be able to sell more they will need the tools you provide them to help them do just that. When selecting a CRM solution for your business did you consult your sales team?