Shhh...Records are talking                         

When you stand in front of a tree, you can see that he has no fruits, but when you climbed on a mountain, you can see that that the river's flow is not strong enough to bring the water to the tree.

When a manager is looking on a salesman's deal, he can see the information on this specific deal and learn from it.  Does he really? There were so many attributes that influenced this deal that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between a fact and a coincidence.

What if the manager will look on the last 10 deals that this specific salesman managed? What if he will look on the last 50 deals of this specific salesman? Can he gain new information on his employee? Can he really obtain a pattern?

Many managers are fully satisfied with seeing a pipeline. They are happy to see how existing deals are getting closed and how new deals are going in. This is great, but they are missing one of the most important benefits of the CRM – it memorizes everything. By using the CRM, one can already start answering questions like:

1.       Why do we keep losing deals with our main product?

2.       When should we start pushing our customer to close a deal?

3.       Why does Katy close deals only in the end of the year?

Already in the design phase of the CRM those questions need to be raised, so all the relevant information will be gathered during the sales cycles and reach to the point of analysis. After 4-5 sales cycles, once the data is already there, you simply start to learn from it.

One application that demonstrates this approach can be seen in the Salesforce appexchange here. This is a free application that analyzes history deals and gives new information on the related customer. With this app, you look on the past activities in order to learn how to make your future activities efficient and more customers oriented in order to win the next deal!