“The vital signs were all good, but the patient died.” Sounds like a strange statement, but it’s happening metaphorically in sales organizations all over the world.
Salespeople follow a smart playbook. They have white papers and case studies to support each stage in the sales process. Management can go into the CRM, track deals, and optimize processes.
Yet there’s a danger lurking underneath. The lifeblood of your system—the customer, prospect and product data that feed your sales strategy—is deteriorating.
Katie Bullard, in this Sales Hacker blog, made the connection after when she was diagnosed with a blood clot—a Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT). She noticed that healthy data and healthy blood have two things in common.
1) It is fresh and circulating. Blood stasis, or stagnation, is one of the most common characteristics of people with chronic ill-health. Sales data decays at a rate of 30-40% every year. If you don’t dedicate time and effort to keep it up to date, it can slowly but surely lead to system failure.
2) It is comprehensive. Good red blood cell counts without good white blood cell counts isn’t all that helpful. Sales needs comprehensive data on companies and contacts – everything from basic, publicly available information to insights on installed technologies, planned projects, and organizational structure.
Healthy data enters your system through your CRM. Your salespeople absolutely must keep it up to date. Yet for most sales people, data entry is only slightly less annoying than getting their fingers pricked for a blood test.
Unless of course you give them Rollio. The Rollio app uses artificial intelligence to turn conversational language into structured CRM data. They simply tell salesforce.com what happened and your data is up to date.
Which is good for your system and their fingers.
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