Project Approach to Change Sales Management System

Reading Habr, I see many excellent articles written from a position of a specialist. Much less published articles describing the experience of management at the junction of "people" and it. In my last article I described my experience in preparing data for analytical CRM. Based on the content of comments to it, during the New Year holidays, I had the idea that the Habr readers might be interested in an article about why a tool like analytical CRM could be needed and what it could give to a specific manager.

Description of the situation

In 2011, I decided to try myself as a development director in a company engaged in the wholesale of auto parts.



I had the task to increase sales by at least one third during the year. So I put myself in the "valley of death."

I had 3 options:

• let it be as it is;
• do micromanagement;
• focus on improving sales management processes.

At the same time, I understood that the typical approach of “manual control” of relations between managers and clients will not lead me to success. I needed a tool to allow:

• track performance of tasks;
• keep statistics;
• effectively keep the balance of efforts of employees between tasks to sell, knock out receivables and maintain good personal contact with customers.

Blunders made in this area would either lead to a fall in sales or to an increase in accounts receivable. I did not want to plunge into the routine, solving urgent problems and forming the inevitable hemorrhoids of the consequences of short-term decisions. Such an approach would lead me to focus on anything but results.

In general, the work assumed the presence of a sufficiently large list of control objects:

• customer relations;
• range;
• brands;
• staff.

I decided to start with customer relations. At the same time, from the point of view of lean production, in order to get the result, it was important for me to save my time and staff time. After all, the business processes of sales in the company, in fact, was a continuous production. I decided to make the transition from situational management to standard schemes, scripts that provide the necessary and sufficient results. Or at least inject into the heads of employees the thought about it. I needed to implement the project of transition from spontaneous sales management to meaningful management.

All information about clients at the time of my exit to work, as expected, was scattered and lost in the bins of assigned employees.

I didn’t want to constantly collect data about clients and their potential from numerous tables, notes, notebooks, and then spend considerable time discussing and promising employees to double-check, to gather the necessary information again.

Also, I was not happy with the prospect of being engaged exclusively in micromanagement. I assumed that such an approach would not bring me significant results.

The specificity of the business was that the market was clear to the company. The composition and structure of the client base were known. The number of regular customers was more than one hundred per manager. Virtually every customer had a procurement schedule. The task was to increase its share in customer purchases.

Project planning

For myself, I decided to create 3 documents: the project charter, the project schedule, the project budget.

Charter of the project

Project Justification

The desire to build an effective and automated sales management system.

Measurable project objectives and relevant success criteria

• Increase sales for the year by more than 30%. Criterion - data shipments.
• CRM implementation. The criterion is the ability to use information about the history of customer relations for making management decisions.
• Finalized project documentation. Criterion - working papers created during the project implementation are collected in electronic form.

Project assumptions / risks

• Ordinary performers do not want to change anything, they are not interested in optimizing business processes. At a minimum, they do not want to learn new things, they are afraid of the process of change.
• The reluctance of employees to learn new things is often caused not so much by their laziness as by the fact that the result of the usual actions will fail if significant changes are introduced.
• If a person handles few tasks for clients, you need to achieve a change in his behavior and only then require work in CRM.
• The process of entering data into CRM should be simple, it should be only the necessary information for the work. If it is perceived as a tool for regular spam and forced data collection, it will cause nothing but annoyance.

Project Restrictions

• Complete the implementation in 6-9 months.
• The total budget of the fund s / n should not increase by more than 10% of the increase in revenue.
• The amount of costs for CRM should not exceed 100 tr.
• When choosing a system, you need to make the lion's share of the effort yourself, since the end user of the system is my staff and me.
• The speed of work in the new conditions will increase to approximately the same level, no earlier than 3-4 months after the start of changes.
• To educate / buy a seller is expensive / long, cheaper to reduce the number of his potential errors.

Project's budget

The budget for the project was 100 tr, the costs were planned in the 2-3 quarter.

Budget Expenditures

• Buy crm
• Crm refinement
• Costs of additional motivation of employees

Project Schedule

For myself, I formed the following plan of action for the year:

Identify key indicators of sales efficiency (sales revenue, distribution quality, number of new customers)	January 2011
Select the measurements and components of these indicators in the context of customers, product range and managers	January 2011
Collect, consolidate and analyze sales information for the last 3 years (in terms of clients, product range, managers)	January-February 2011
Identify priority customers and determine the criteria for quality work with them	February 2011
Build a monitoring system indicators (analytical CRM)	February - March 2011
To organize work on the operational management of employees (setting goals, assistance in organizing work, motivation, control)	January - April 2011
Carry out systematic work to improve performance	March - December 2011
Automate customer relationship management system by implementing CRM	April - July 2011

At the forefront, I set a goal - sales, decomposed into sales by managers, customers, assortment, brands, rather than specific templates in the form of instructions and regulations. Since my focus would shift from the result to the control of behavior.

Attention managers, I focused on weekly sales. Summing up the weekly results, we discussed what could have been done better. I created an environment in which, having collected statistics, it would be possible to see which elements of behavior are effective and, thus, concentrate only on what brings results (how often to communicate with the client, determine what is really valuable for the client, etc. .).

For work, I formed a total of five updated standards:

• shipment regulations;
• regulations for work with accounts receivable;
• product presentation script;
• cross-sales script;
• script work with objections.

Required Tools

I needed a tool to maintain discipline, which would allow me to engage in direct duties, and not to correct the mistakes of managers.

It was necessary to automate work with the contact database, calls, fix customer’s points of refusal from specific offers, understand the characteristics of customer segments, build a reminder system for sellers. This was important because customer information was duplicated, and managers did not record changes, in other words, it was impossible to tell how much their understanding of customer needs was true.

I wanted to develop relationships with customers, stimulating sales with marketing campaigns to expand the list of purchased items. I needed a tool for analyzing the experience of customer interaction with the company, allowing us to remember and understand the entire history of communication with the customer, work with complaints, personalize offers.

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Go / No-Go Decision

A month after coming to work, it became obvious to me that the usual approach to sales would not bring a qualitative change in the state of affairs - sales were essentially incoming. Employees themselves could not give an answer to the question of how it is possible to influence the purchases of customers.

The micromanagement approach was also worthless - there is no point in managing an inefficient routine.

As for the process approach, it is good when the external environment is stable and understandable. I also had to act in new conditions. I didn’t want to cause personnel resistance by blocking the “not exactly there” direction.

For myself, I realized that my original idea has the right to life - you need to select segments of consumers, define an assortment matrix for them, direct the efforts of employees to fulfill the plan for each client. And to manage this, CRM is needed.

Project start

A working group was formed, consisting of a business analyst, director of development (that is, me), head of IT department.

The analysis and evaluation of existing business sales processes (transaction, shipment, pre-sale, work with accounts receivable, etc.) was carried out, reference books and customer information forms were unified, and customer data were consolidated.

Analytical CRM Development

I cleared and consolidated the initial data about clients in the Deductor program. I experimented with different types of analysis in relation to customers and the range. As a result, I determined for myself the typical customer segments and the product line for them. Then I realized what data I lack for completeness of the model. My next step was to test the developed hypotheses. I talked to some clients on my own and then formulated tasks for the employees.

A little later, a predictive model was created in Deductor, on the basis of which sales plans were set for priority customers.

System selection and setup

The analysis of market offers and the choice of CRM system was carried out. Based on the average cost of licenses 10-15 tr. it was decided to stop at open source and spend the budget on its refinement. None of the paid CRM, in my subjective opinion, did not allow to take into account the specifics of the wholesale company.

The vtiger, sugarcrm and openerp were shortlisted.

For me, when evaluating CRM, the following parameters were important:

• localization;
• simplicity of the interface (convenience of use by sellers);
• functional logic;
• the ability to customize the most CRM;
• the cost of hours per completion;
• having a user community.

As a result, vtiger crm 5.3 was chosen.

The idea of ​​improvements was simple. It was necessary for CRM to accumulate information about customers for decision-making, to be able to assign decisions for a group of clients / group of users, to record the execution of decisions made and, accordingly, the relationships between them were present for generating analytical reports. Forms of assigning tasks to customers should have been tied to the schedule of shipments.

By fundamentally new CRM features are:

• the form of work with the schedule of shipments to customers;
• form of work with the schedule of contacts with customers;
• the implementation form of the plan for clients (for filling this form, input data from 1C, processed in the Deductor) was used.

The remaining improvements were local in nature. By the way, about 70% of the modifications required intervention in the program code.

Training, preparation and launch of the system

A lot of time we took away the transfer of information to the system. Often, employees simply could not describe their clients fully enough in writing. The greatest difficulties arose in completing the questionnaire "customer portrait".

There were also a lot of questions about customer plans. However, after intensive collaboration and visits to customers, employees recognized that the numbers were real. Additional help in expanding the product line became sales representatives. Their task was to collect relevant information about the range of customers and targeted product presentations.

The process of learning how to work in the system did not take much time - we had developed a program for training managers and a CRM FAQ.

From the very beginning, I obliged the staff to use vtiger, and further stopped any attempts to refuse to use it. First, we conducted training, then I showed the nuances. Later on, he set a strict standard for completeness and deadline for entering information. The rules for working with clients were simple - if the actual value did not meet the plan by more than 20%, and no objective reasons were recorded in CRM, the manager’s shipments did not go to his overall plan.

results

The main result - in 2011, revenue grew by 38%.

"Sawdust":

• A unified system was introduced that automates sales business processes (maintaining information on customers, monitoring the implementation of sales plans, automating the work of sales representatives, etc.).
• All business processes of sales became transparent. For work on the customer’s entire life cycle (potential, discrete, loyal), criteria for quality work were developed. The system made it possible to track which actions of the employees lead to the result and which not.
• Clients ceased to depend on managers, in the event of a particular person’s illness, his planned contacts passed to another manager. The statistics system allowed us to more evenly distribute the work among managers, their quality of work began to increase.
• The schedule embedded in the system did not allow to forget about the purpose of the contact. Its integration into the client profile allowed for updating status information.
• The frequency of customer orders has increased, the average order amount has increased.
• Reducing the time to search for information allowed managers to engage in the promotion of priority products / brands, which led to pre-sales.
• I got rid of the need to reduce data from 1c to reporting to excel.
• By putting temporary restrictions on entering information (the employee must report on the results of work for the week before 14:00 on Friday), I received timely monitoring of work for the week and the opportunity to promptly discuss with employees what exactly leads us to success.