While thinking about Post-Covid Selling, I read an article in Forbes where Laurel Farrer writes an interesting column: 12 Signs of a Virtual Micromanager. The article has a great checklist that any manager can use for self-assessment; ask yourself “Am I micromanaging my remote workers as a result of coronavirus changes?” The article concludes with good advice on how to empower your remote workers to do the job that you hired them to do whilst working from home.
Thought leadership
Forbes is not the only source of clear thinking on this topic of enforced remote working and the impact it has on post-Covid selling. I referenced opinion from Marketing Week on this subject in a recent blog: Post-Covid Selling: Top Tips. McKinsey & Co has also published material on resilience within sales organisations that is worth catching up on.
The bottom line here is that it’s all too easy to micromanage, over-manage and stifle the effectiveness of your remote teams in a genuinely well-intentioned attempt to build a new set of best practice rules. It is our opinion at Collier Pickard that there are very few organisations that actually have the tools in place to establish what ‘good’ looks like in the new rules that surround remote working, on-line only selling, pitching over Teams and Zoom and the lack of regular sales team collaboration. This lack of valid information has become the driver in micromanager behaviour to which Laurel Farrer refers in her Forbes article.
Is CRM the answer?
So if there aren’t tools in place all ready to work out a new set of best practice guidelines for post-Covid selling, then how do you go about your analysis? As independent CRM consultants, you might expect our answer to be based on better use of CRM data. And to some extent this is true. A well-designed CRM system can provide insight into the effectiveness of sales activities. Dashboards and BI can show the correlation between call rates, activity types and conversions to revenue.
For many organisations, this is simply a case of rethinking the way some aspects of sales activity are captured and analysed within CRM, for others it may mean a significant overhaul of the fundamental structure of CRM. But in our opinion, neither of these actions will show you what happens INSIDE an online sales meeting. What did the salesperson actually cover? And how well did this engage the customer? The lack of this insight is a driver towards micromanagement and time-consuming reporting through form filling or through online debrief sessions. Would it not be better to introduce new methods of determining what goes on inside a sales call, without having to consume extra reporting time from the remote salesperson and without the consequential negative impact on effectiveness and performance?
Micromanagement insights without micromanagement
We have scoured the market for tools that help with this level of insight. There’s a plethora of sales engagement tools on the market but few that fit the bill in our new world. So at Collier Pickard we have adopted the d!nk SalesMatik approach to support remote online selling. Not only does it turn pitch decks and marketing collateral into a toolset for collaborative meetings that truly engage the customer, it also generates the data the micromanager was looking for – as an automatic by-product of just using the tool in sales meetings.
Now it’s not the place of our CRM Insights blog to promote products; the blog is a centre for opinion and thought leadership. But sometimes it’s just time to cut through all the theory and consultant parlance and deliver a practical solution to a pressing business problem. Post-Covid selling is here to stay and we’re here to help you build new ways to gain the knowledge you need to define your best approach to the market and customer engagement – whether that be inside your current CRM tool or through the adoption of some new tools. Either way, just get in touch if you’d like to learn from our hands-on research into this whole matter.
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