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February 7, 2000

The Hard Sell: Getting Salespeople To Buy Into CRM
By Jeff Sweat

ront-office software can change the way salespeople sell-but only if they use it. And there's the rub: Some sales professionals are wary of new applications, worried that they'll hamper their selling style or divulge too much about how they work.

Such attitudes can be changed if managers show sales staffs just how effective customer-relationship-management tools can be and provide good training, says Rick Reese, manager of sales training at USG Corp., a Chicago manufacturer of building supplies with more than 300 salespeople. CRM, Reese says, "isn't intended as a Big Brother tool."

One way IT organizations can promote acceptance is by including salespeople in the design process, Reese adds. USG's IT department has made nearly 700 modifications to its Pivotal Relationship CRM package in response to requests from the sales staff.

Salespeople are most interested in features that make their jobs easier and help them close a deal. Among the CRM functions that promise assistance are lead qualification, proposal generation, interactive briefing, pricing and configuration, integration to shipping information, and links to personal digital assistants.

Byron Augustine, a project manager with Del Webb Corp., says the Phoenix home builder built "carrots" into its SalesLogix implementation to entice its sales force to use it. One feature reports the temperature of a prospective customer's location-useful when trying to convince someone in the north to buy a home in sunny Arizona. "I can see it's 37 degrees where you are," the salesperson can say. "It's 78 down here."

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