Time to Appoint a Maximizer “Cabinet”?
By Suzanne Burgess
Democracy rules. Accountability is in. Lack of responsibility is out.
To ensure your CRM delivers value to ’the people’, aka your customers, prospects, sales team and management team, you need to have a Maximizer leadership team in place. A team that will drive and deliver on your investment in the system.
Firstly you’ll need to elect your ‘Maximizer President’. The President is the person who ultimately benefits from big picture insights in the form of valuable reports and analytics generated. It might be the person who signs the cheque. It’s definitely the person who ultimately takes responsibility for implementation. The President usually doubles up as the business owner or the sales director/manager. He or she might not use Maximizer daily but gets regular reports and feedback from the Ministerial team.
Next, you’ll need to put in place a “Minister of Maximizer Administration and Security”. This person deals with Maximizer on a daily basis in terms of user-related training and general administration of the system. They may possibly also sort out technical issues or at least liaise with the support team for technical support and/or user training. This person needs to be trained at an administrative level in order to make simple changes like adding user-defined fields, changing drop-down menus, setting up templates and processes. This person also leads the team in terms of how to use the system and how the system works. He or she typically on-boards new Maximizer users and ensures that upgrades are smoothly implemented as well as taking on the responsibility of learning about new features.
You might possibly need a separate” Minister of Maximizer Security” depending on the size of your organisation and number of users that you have. This might be the person who locks down your databases, keeps an eye on users being added or deleted, bestows access rights and oversees overall database security.
Finally you will need to appoint a “Minister of Maximizer Data Input”. He or she – perhaps a senior sales support person or supervisor, is essentially your data integrity champion. Duties will include keeping a beady eye on the quality and completeness of the information going into the system by each user. And as you will no doubt agree, “rubbish in = rubbish out” and therefore this is one ministerial position that must be kept filled.
If you really want your “Country of Maximizer’ to work for your company and provide vital, accurate insights into your marketing campaigns, your prospect and customer database and your sales and customer service efforts, then you must put this proactive 3-person leadership team in place – and reappoint new Ministers when the old ones step down.
With a Maximizer leadership team always in place, you’ll find that you’ll get superior results from Maximizer. In a fast-paced sales world relying more and more on artificial intelligence and analytics, the more you take control of your CRM system, the higher your ROI.
Moving a sale along is all about creating a sense of urgency. This doesn’t bode well for those who have a fairly laid back approach to selling. Creating a sense of urgency is closely affiliated to correctly understanding the client’s needs. If you haven’t articulated the value of what it is you are selling, then the potential client won’t understand the potential loss that they incur by postponing their buying decision. The caveat is that although shortening your sales cycle is obviously in your best interests, it must genuinely be in your customer’s best interests too. Tread carefully.
Creating a sense of urgency with your own actions in order to close more sales more often is extremely beneficial.
As a team, analyse and discuss the past five major deals you’ve landed and see if there were any “pauses” in the sales cycle that could have been avoided.
For example: If part of your sales process includes giving a demonstration or making a site visit, did the salesperson arrange it efficiently or did a few weeks go by before the prospect was even contacted again to make the arrangements?
