In a webinar with Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools, and Mark Kopcha, CEO of Revegy, discussed the importance of relationship intelligence and the relationship map drive sales success.
How Does CRM Tackle the Relationship and What’s Missing?
CRM has been around for 30 years – it started as a combination of 3 different types of technology – marketing automation, sales force automation, and customer support. However, CRM is not tackling the relationship piece as it should.
In particular, relationship intelligence is missing from sales force automation. Sales reps generally enter their accounts into the CRM, which include a list of people, contact information, and maybe some notes and emails. However, this doesn’t tell you nearly enough about the account overall and fails to give you a visual understanding of what’s going on. This in no way facilitates the building and managing of relationships necessary to actually close deals.
Why Relationship Intelligence and Why Now?
Relationship intelligence is your path to customer intelligence. To drive sales success, sales teams must know and understand the people. It’s critical to leverage relationships to understand their business, what they’re trying to accomplish, what their goals are, and what challenges they face.
While Salesforce is architected to do transactional selling, it’s impossible to gain the relationship intelligence necessary within today’s complex accounts. On average, a sales rep is dealing with 20 – 25 people on the account. There may be 6 – 8 decision-makers in these deals.
As a result, sales reps are keeping track of hundreds of relationships. It’s imperative that you understand each relationship and the context of what each account is trying to do so you can be effective in driving value to those clients, and you need more than just a CRM to do this.
Since relationship management is key to closing deals, it’s clear that sales reps need purpose-built tools to gain the intelligence necessary to manage accounts and drive opportunities.
Leveraging Relationship Maps to Drive Strategic Selling
Visual relationship maps like Revegy’s help you gain a full understanding of the most important stakeholders, how they’re connected within the organization, and help your teams focus on execution tactics and activities to gain access and communicate value to the individuals influencing the budget and buying decisions. Visualizing this information with a relationship map, representing friends, foes, and third-party influencers are critical to helping your team identify gaps in relationships and build quality relationship development plans. Revegy’s Relationship Maps take the blinders off of megadeals, and allow sales teams to do the following:
- Quickly and easily map contacts from your CRM and visually connect the dots – from coaches and stakeholders to decision-makers and procurement, organizational charts are easily built with drag and drop functionality.
- Analyze scorecards to identify who is friend and who is a foe and the strength of the relationship.
- Determine the relationships that you need to grow and any political risks that may need to be neutralized.
- Avoid surprises that could arise from new players entering the sales cycle unexpectedly.
- Align sales tactics to the priorities, initiatives, and goals that matter most to each individual.
With relationship maps and an understanding of who matters, as well as the routes to power, you will be one big step closer to closing the gaps on those all-important megadeals and reaching your revenue targets.
