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CRM Systems Put Fundamentals Back Into Accountability, Sales
 Accountability. The word can send shivers down the spines of salespeople and sales managers alike.
Salespeople hear the word and immediately assume that their strategies aren’t up to snuff or that their sales manager will strap them with new quotas or standards.
For sales managers, accountability conjures up images of having to micromanage their sales team’s every move — right down to each phone call and e-mail — something most would rather avoid because they don’t want to be labeled as villains or stifle their sales agents’ initiative or creativity.
For those who can embrace accountability as a positive step forward, however, there are numerous advantages to developing a close relationship between salespeople and sales managers across the life of a development’s sales cycle.
Sales managers, for instance, will benefit from having an enhanced awareness of sales and sales center activity, while salespeople will benefit from the advice of experienced managers who are more attuned to what the salespeople face each day and who can offer guidance on how to address objections, mitigate expectations and close deals.
Accountability is really a win-win for all involved.
CRM Sytems Manage Time, Make Accountability Easier
By its very nature, sales team accountability requires aggressive and active tracking of each sales lead as well as contact between the sales team and each lead. The best way to track and manage the leads is through a robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
“CRM software helps create a plan to prioritize your follow-ups,” said Carolyn Gladwell, vice president for marketing and sales at CamWest Development, a home builder in the Pacific Northwest, who noted that her company improved its sales after implementing a CRM solution for its 30 independent sales agents.
Successful agents work within a plan that enables them to use their time effectively, she said. “Every agent is extremely busy, and as I tell them, a CRM system provides them with an amazing tool that visually lets them know who they should contact each day and how best to contact them. Our agents are eating it up,” Gladwell said.
The right CRM solution will serve an organization’s specific needs with dashboards designed to keep salespeople on track through follow-ups and communication and, for managers, reports that help them determine how their sales team is progressing with their follow-throughs.
With a CRM solution, a sales manager can develop an effective action plan with each individual salesperson built on their strengths, and that can show them what steps they need to take along the sales cycle to become more successful.
Without one, a sales team generally has to rely on spreadsheets or other ad-hoc, imperfect and incomplete “tracking” systems that are not as accurate or comprehensive as robust CRM systems.
Accountability Reinforces Sales Fundamentals
New home sales largely succeed or fail on how well they adhere to the fundamentals — good communication, strategic pricing and a quality product.
“Everyone talks about traffic and driving people to the model home, but ultimately, sales are not a function of traffic,” said Mike Lyon, a consultant and blogger on real estate sales strategies and marketing. “You have to have a good product, a good price and a good system in place. If you have two people walk into the sales center and you sell one home, that’s a 50% conversion rate. The real question is how you are engaging a customer, and we have more tools than ever before to do that.”
Incorporating accountability into a sales strategy isn’t about finding a magic formula that will enable your team to make additional sales with little to no extra work. It’s about using hard data to examine the fundamentals behind new home sales and answering basic questions.
When a new lead enters the system, does the assigned salesperson execute follow-up in a timely fashion?
What methods of communication work best for each individual lead? Does a particular prospect respond better to e-mails than phone calls?
How many leads were driven by the latest direct mail campaign and what did the sales team deliver on those leads?
Accountability through a robust CRM solution will enable sales managers and sales teams to work closely together to develop effective answers to these and other basic questions in order to optimize sales and update a sales strategy, if needed.
Accountability Reaches Across the Organization
A robust CRM solution will enable stronger strategies not just for the sales team but for all the departments in an organization that “touch” a prospect or customer.
For instance, a robust system enables a builder to keep track of every contacta salesperson, sales manager, construction supervisor, customer service representative or other employee has with a prospect and build a relationship with that person that extends far beyond contact signing.
“Our policy is that all communication with customers has to go through our CRM system,” said Michelle Mackay, vice president of marketing at WestStone Properties, a builder and developer in British Columbia and the central U.S. “It’s really all inclusive. Every person in our office has access to it, to a certain degree. It’s our single go-to communication center.”
Through the CRM system, WestStone Properties can develop a long-term relationship with a client that begins “the day we meet them through to the day they move in, which is important,” she said.
According to The Yankee Group, a consumer trends research organization headquartered in Boston, as much as 80% of sales leads go stale, are lost or are simply never followed up. For builders, that means as many as eight out of 10 inbound leads for a new home community — whether they are generated through the community’s Web site or sales center — do not receive the attention needed to convert them into home purchases and revenue.
More than anything else, a renewed sense of accountability among sales and marketing teams and their managers should shrink the gap between properly executed and fumbled leads.
Dave Clements is the CEO of Lasso Data Systems, a developer and marketer of innovative “on-demand" CRM software for the real estate industry. For more information, e-mail Clements, or visit the Lasso Data Systems Web site at www.lassodatasystems.com.
This article originally appeared on the NAHB Sales and Marketing Channel.
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