CRM & Miller Heiman

CRM has had a bad name in the past and had a very bad reputation amongst sales people. Why?
Too many businesses have put the cart before the horse !
You absolutely need to define what you want a sales team to be doing before you tell them how to do it. You need to define best practice for your organisation. You need a robust sales methodology like Miller Heiman. A good methodology will define What you need people to be doing to have world class business development or relationship management functions, delivering world class results for your business.
It's a bit like giving people PowerPoint and expecting that in itself to make them a great presenter. It can surely help but only if you know WHAT to do with it, only if you have acquired some fundamental knowledge and skills in presenting.

75% of the average CRM system's data comes from the sales team. The 2 great barriers to CRM adoption by sales people are complexity and rework.

Sales people don't have time for complexity, they should be out there with customers. What they have to input has to be pragmatic and clearly helpful to them in achieving a result, progressing a deal, or improving a realtionship. The Miller Heiman 1-sheet-summary system is the most pragmatic and user friendly of all methodologies and that means it gets used.

Re-work is an anathema to sales people, typing information into a CRM system, and again in to a PDA and again into a methodology document is just not feasible or realistic, so something often the whole system gets ignored. Miller Heiman's Sales Access Manager software allows for easy integration of the 1-page sheets into almost all CRM's so avoiding the demon re-work.

Given this it's easy to understand that it's only organisations that successfully implement both CRM and a good methodology like Miller Heiman that see significant returns on investment.