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Love Hate Relationships - Sales Tools
Jul. 24th, 2013 03:24 pmLike anybody who works in or has worked in Sales, I have something of a love-hate or even hate-hate relationship with CRM tools like Saleforce.
They're useful, I cannot deny that. You can't work a busy sales desk without some kind of device to track what you're doing and when you're doing it and email tasks and postit notes really don't cut the mustard when it comes to closing deals and tracking all the bits. Salesforce is excellent, but it's expensive and frankly insanely over engineered for a small company. It comes into it's own as a method for managers to keep an eye on what their sales team are doing, or rather not doing, so you can set quotas for calls made a week, how long opportunities can sit at a specific stage and so on. That's where the hate generally comes, especially if there are then arcane rules on commission payments based on what the CRM said. You also get weird stuff like sales people who do the equivalent of peeing on accounts to try and 'own' them.
Anyway, I've been looking for ages for a CRM that works the way I do and I've finally found one in Capsule CRM. It's not as feature rich as Salesforce but it really does work the way I work, which has made it an excellent tool for keeping track of things while I'm in an aggressive business development phase like I am at the moment.
Another tool that has been amazing, is Pivotal Tracker and it's really changed the way we deliver software internally. It's based on Agile theory, where you have a set of 3 columns in your to do list - the current work, the backlog and the icebox. As work items are identified they go into the Icebox as stories and get estimated, or broken down into smaller stories. You can tag the stories and keep track of epics - we currently have two long running epics... As items are estimated they're moved into the backlog where we prioritize them every Friday (or more frequently when we hit a set of deadlines as we did this morning). Then as work is started it moves into the current column while we're doing it. It also manages acceptance and delivery for us.
As you deliver you get a 'velocity' counter showing the number of 'points' you are doing a week. A point, in our experience, is usually about a half day work, so a 2 point story would be expected to take a day.
This lets it start to work out what we'll be able to get through in a given week and show us what of the backlog we can attack.
All in all, its been an amazing boost in productivity in the time we've been using it.
Anyway. Back to dialing for dollars.
They're useful, I cannot deny that. You can't work a busy sales desk without some kind of device to track what you're doing and when you're doing it and email tasks and postit notes really don't cut the mustard when it comes to closing deals and tracking all the bits. Salesforce is excellent, but it's expensive and frankly insanely over engineered for a small company. It comes into it's own as a method for managers to keep an eye on what their sales team are doing, or rather not doing, so you can set quotas for calls made a week, how long opportunities can sit at a specific stage and so on. That's where the hate generally comes, especially if there are then arcane rules on commission payments based on what the CRM said. You also get weird stuff like sales people who do the equivalent of peeing on accounts to try and 'own' them.
Anyway, I've been looking for ages for a CRM that works the way I do and I've finally found one in Capsule CRM. It's not as feature rich as Salesforce but it really does work the way I work, which has made it an excellent tool for keeping track of things while I'm in an aggressive business development phase like I am at the moment.
Another tool that has been amazing, is Pivotal Tracker and it's really changed the way we deliver software internally. It's based on Agile theory, where you have a set of 3 columns in your to do list - the current work, the backlog and the icebox. As work items are identified they go into the Icebox as stories and get estimated, or broken down into smaller stories. You can tag the stories and keep track of epics - we currently have two long running epics... As items are estimated they're moved into the backlog where we prioritize them every Friday (or more frequently when we hit a set of deadlines as we did this morning). Then as work is started it moves into the current column while we're doing it. It also manages acceptance and delivery for us.
As you deliver you get a 'velocity' counter showing the number of 'points' you are doing a week. A point, in our experience, is usually about a half day work, so a 2 point story would be expected to take a day.
This lets it start to work out what we'll be able to get through in a given week and show us what of the backlog we can attack.
All in all, its been an amazing boost in productivity in the time we've been using it.
Anyway. Back to dialing for dollars.
