Does Age Matter?
If you are in this business long enough then you will see everything.
More and more often I have been sitting in the board room and been
surprised by the biggest issue some of my customers and prospective
customers are facing. Is it the economy? For many of them not yet. Is
is turnover? Well, in less than a robust economy people are much more
cautious about switching jobs. Well then, what is it? And the winner is
AGE! Yep, not the age of the sales reps and managers but the range of
ages among the teams who are tasked with using a CRM system.
So let's step back a few years...if for no other reason than I love telling this story. As the son of a pure sales person I remember the first time my dad came rolling in with a sleek looking IBM laptop. My brother and I were already somewhat geeks about computers but my pops looked absolutely terrified. He put the laptop on the desk in his office. There it sat day after day. Sometimes he would curse about it and I kept thinking "Wow, how could you be mad at something you never turned on?"
Now that I look back at the situation I can empathize with his plight. After literally decades of working at his craft and excelling in his field he was introduced to a new set of tools intended to improve his performance. The problem at hand is that he would certainly be able to continue with the status quo and not be impacted if he never engaged in using those tools. More importantly, the company was changing the way it did business and the option of developing proposals and submitting policy applications (insurance industry) would no longer be handled any other way.
The way it played out was similar to the way I see this issue handled by many companies today. My father and other senior producers struggled with the new procedures and found creative ways to still get their job done. Younger producers adjusted fairly easily and became accustomed to the new procedures using laptops instead of administrative personnel to produce their proposals and contracts. Eventually, the company found a way to leverage their older and younger employees skills or lack thereof.
So now it's time to bring this story full circle and discuss how it pertains to CRM. When you look at your teams of people that need each other and internal systems there are some critical questions to ask when you engage in launching a new set of tools like those provided by a CRM technology:
1. Why are you looking to deploy a new system? Synthesize your needs down two or three operational efficiencies that will improve performance.
2. What are the current skill sets of your users? Analyze the varying degree of ages of your teams and make sure your weakest members will be better off by any new technology deployment.
3. How will you train your troops? Categorize people by capability and not specifically by job role and create training plans that will get everyone to some common minimum level of ability in using the new system.
4. Is there more than one way to meet the minimum expectations? Often times hiring a sales administrator to assist older employees produces much better results.
5. Are you introducing new technologies with the new system? If you are adding things like wireless cards to laptops or CRM on a mobile device you may want to introduce these tools for users initially without the CRM application installed.
6. Where are your people when they need access? This is a big gotcha. Many companies deploy things like web based systems for people that are out on the road most of the time and in order to use the new tools they are extending their work day rather than shortening it.
These are a few of the best ways to evaluate your talent and their tools but the last step is the most important. After you deploy a set of tools be sure to develop a forum for feedback. Despite all of our best intentions it is best to sit down with your teams and hear from them where there is a disconnect or training has been less than optimal.
Remember, the goal of an efficient CRM is to create more customer facing time not to encumber your teams with new systems and processes that make their job more difficult.
So let's step back a few years...if for no other reason than I love telling this story. As the son of a pure sales person I remember the first time my dad came rolling in with a sleek looking IBM laptop. My brother and I were already somewhat geeks about computers but my pops looked absolutely terrified. He put the laptop on the desk in his office. There it sat day after day. Sometimes he would curse about it and I kept thinking "Wow, how could you be mad at something you never turned on?"
Now that I look back at the situation I can empathize with his plight. After literally decades of working at his craft and excelling in his field he was introduced to a new set of tools intended to improve his performance. The problem at hand is that he would certainly be able to continue with the status quo and not be impacted if he never engaged in using those tools. More importantly, the company was changing the way it did business and the option of developing proposals and submitting policy applications (insurance industry) would no longer be handled any other way.
The way it played out was similar to the way I see this issue handled by many companies today. My father and other senior producers struggled with the new procedures and found creative ways to still get their job done. Younger producers adjusted fairly easily and became accustomed to the new procedures using laptops instead of administrative personnel to produce their proposals and contracts. Eventually, the company found a way to leverage their older and younger employees skills or lack thereof.
So now it's time to bring this story full circle and discuss how it pertains to CRM. When you look at your teams of people that need each other and internal systems there are some critical questions to ask when you engage in launching a new set of tools like those provided by a CRM technology:
1. Why are you looking to deploy a new system? Synthesize your needs down two or three operational efficiencies that will improve performance.
2. What are the current skill sets of your users? Analyze the varying degree of ages of your teams and make sure your weakest members will be better off by any new technology deployment.
3. How will you train your troops? Categorize people by capability and not specifically by job role and create training plans that will get everyone to some common minimum level of ability in using the new system.
4. Is there more than one way to meet the minimum expectations? Often times hiring a sales administrator to assist older employees produces much better results.
5. Are you introducing new technologies with the new system? If you are adding things like wireless cards to laptops or CRM on a mobile device you may want to introduce these tools for users initially without the CRM application installed.
6. Where are your people when they need access? This is a big gotcha. Many companies deploy things like web based systems for people that are out on the road most of the time and in order to use the new tools they are extending their work day rather than shortening it.
These are a few of the best ways to evaluate your talent and their tools but the last step is the most important. After you deploy a set of tools be sure to develop a forum for feedback. Despite all of our best intentions it is best to sit down with your teams and hear from them where there is a disconnect or training has been less than optimal.
Remember, the goal of an efficient CRM is to create more customer facing time not to encumber your teams with new systems and processes that make their job more difficult.
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