[ITW Camille El Hage] Improving sales efficiency with a CRM system

We live in extraordinary times! For hundreds of years, companies' sales practices did not evolve. With the advent of IT and then the Cloud, companies have been able to take advantage of new tools to boost the sales performance of their teams. And yet, on closer inspection, few of them are really reaping the benefits of these new tools.

In this interview, Camille El Hage, founder of Cirrus Shield, shares with us his observations on the challenges of sales effectiveness in companies and on the implementation of CRM, and suggests a few ways of remedying the most common problems encountered in these projects.

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What are the challenges of sales efficiency in companies?

Camille El Hage:

First and foremost, it's important to understand that sales effectiveness is a cross-cutting issue for every company. Unfortunately, most companies confuse sales effectiveness with salespeople effectiveness.

Commercial effectiveness affects all departments and ultimately concerns everything that has an impact on sales, whether direct or indirect. The marketing of products and services is therefore not limited solely to the relationship between a salesperson and the customers of the company he or she serves, but must be taken as a whole, covering the entire customer journey and life cycle.

Companies' recent awareness of the importance of the customer experience is actually part of a broader reflection on the subject of sales effectiveness. When companies try to rethink the customer journey, their underlying objective is actually to sell better and satisfy their customers better, in order to build a lasting relationship with them, in other words, a profitable one.

Profitability, an age-old concept, is now taking on a new meaning thanks to companies' ability to measure each stage of the customer journey and the various components of sales effectiveness.

Software such as CRM makes it easy to monitor, and therefore better manage, the processes that have an impact on sales efficiency and, by extension, the company's profitability. With a CRM, companies will be able to put in place monitoring indicators, enabling them to see the impact of their sales, marketing and customer service actions and thus adapt their approach.

Surprisingly, there are no comprehensive CRM solutions that enable small and medium-sized businesses to manage the various aspects of their commercial effectiveness. As a result, they are faced with a dilemma: either multiply the tools that will each enable them to manage only part of their processes, or spend a fortune on solutions that will be oversized in relation to their needs.

Cirrus Shield was born out of this observation, with the aim of offering a CRM platform that is both complete and simple to set up, and that allows users to extend it easily with business applications configured with the mouse.

How does CRM meet the challenges of sales efficiency?

Camille El Hage:

Dating back to the mid-1980s, the first CRMs were nothing more than an electronic version of the Rolodex, a tool that collected the main information relating to a contact on cards. With the rise of call centres in the 90s, companies developed their IT tools, but always in the same spirit of storing and archiving information. Then towards the end of the 90s, with the democratisation of the Internet, the first Marketing Automation solutions appeared, and it was around this time that the term "Spam" was born.

This quick retrospective of the evolution of sales efficiency tools is intended to show that the main building blocks of today's CRM were all already present, albeit in basic versions, in the early 2000s. Since then, the foundations have not changed (or not yet): all CRMs on the market are built around the three building blocks of marketing, sales and customer service.

These three building blocks enable companies to manage customer relationships throughout their entire lifecycle by offering, on the one hand, the ability to record and store information and, on the other, reporting tools to measure the customer journey.

This vision sounds simple, but in reality it's not. In fact, many CRM projects still fail to deliver the expected benefits. The fault lies both with companies that underestimate the effort required to drive change, and with CRM suppliers whose solutions fail to live up to their promises.

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So what advice would you give to companies looking to implement a CRM?

Camille El Hage:

Best practice in implementing a CRM is a huge subject! Among the best practices, I'd like to pick out three that will maximise the benefits of implementing such a solution.

Tip No. 1: Take the time to think things through

First and foremost, companies wishing to deploy a CRM should consider this type of project not from the point of view of installing a tool, but as part of an approach to structuring sales efficiency.

The tool supports the processes, the organisation and the employees in their efforts to improve sales efficiency. This approach is first and foremost an opportunity for the company to refocus and reflect on its operating methods.

Workorganisation therefore plays a vital role, and the tool should only be implemented at a later stage. My first piece of advice would therefore be to take the time to think about the sales approach and draw up a set of specifications covering the essentials of your thinking.

Tip 2: Choose the right CRM

Once you've thought through your sales efficiency, you need to choose the right tool. This may sound obvious, but unfortunately it's not as simple as it seems. How do you choose from the plethora of CRM products on offer? And which CRM will be capable of adapting to your needs today, but also of supporting you over the long term?

Most of the tools on the market are built around one or more of these three blocks: marketing, sales and customer service. The problem with these solutions is that they are often static and incapable of adapting to needs that, by their very nature, are evolving or to the specific characteristics of certain types of organisation (associations, e-commerce, etc.).

This is one of the reasons why we built Cirrus Shield as the equivalent of Lego™ software. The solution is parameterised with the mouse and has a library of ready-to-use tools.

Tip 3: Don't neglect the change management effort

The number 1 reason for CRM project failure is lack of user adoption. Managers and senior management obviously have a role to play in leading and supporting the adoption of tools and new operating methods, but there is also a problem with many solutions on the market: they are too complicated to use.

With Cirrus Shield, we have taken the decision to simplify our screens and minimise the number of fields to be filled in. Our solution is also natively integrated with several other tools: emailing tool, e-commerce platform, etc. The idea here is to make the user experience as fluid as possible, while at the same time providing complete information.

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