What CRM Should Industrial Sales Teams Use?

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Danny and David sit down to discuss the increasing benefits of having your sales team use an industrial CRM, and which programs are the most popular.

Danny:

Hey, so for today’s episode, we’re going to talk about CRMs and which tool your industrial sales team needs to use. All right, so CRM, we’re going to talk about this. This is something that we’ve talked about a good little bit, and it comes up a lot, because it’s exciting and there’s a lot of companies right now that are going through this digital transformation piece, which we’ve talked about a lot: not just in the operations, but also in the front office piece, when it comes to sales and it comes to marketing…and a big, big, big part of that conversation is your CRM tool.

A lot of companies are still relying on a spreadsheet, or some antiquated system or something that doesn’t really talk well, and part of the problem is that with the new ways that we’re going to market with the new technologies, and the speed of information that we need, a lot of these systems need to catch up. And if you have one – if you don’t have one you need one – so, that’s kind of what we wanted to talk about today: if I have an industrial sales team, what CRM sales tool should I use? What do you think, David?

David:

Well, I think the first thing that we hear from the marketing side is, the sales team doesn’t want to use it. It’s tedious, it’s cumbersome. They think, “Hey, I need to be out there selling, not entering in a bunch of data.” So, I couldn’t agree more, and it feels like you’re slowing down when you think it should be helping you, so a lot of the tools now are making it even more easy to input that data, or input it for you, so when you’re looking at Salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot, they’re all great tools, and even when we look at our survey. We surveyed what, almost 200 industrial organizations, manufacturing organizations, and they said 34% of them are using Salesforce.

Danny:

Not a surprise there.

David:

Not surprised.

Danny:

Big 800 pound gorilla.

David:

Yep. Then we have 12% using Microsoft Dynamics, so I’d say maybe a couple of years ago I’d cringe, and be like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re using that. No wonder you don’t like your CRM,” but now you’re seeing a lot of improvements. I think they’re really trying to answer to the user that’s using it, and then you’re looking at, maybe a little guy that’s new, still publicly traded, but Hubspot is a free CRM. You kind of eliminate your excuse for your organization, so looking at those three robust options, you kind of don’t have an excuse to not use one.

Danny:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think especially, I think that one of the big shifts that we’re seeing in this will help justify that expense and making that shift is really getting a sense of looking at that customer journey and making it really easy to buy. I think that’s a… you’ve got a lot of competition. Maybe you’ve got a commodity as a product it’s very hard to be able to compete on price alone and typically that happens a lot. But one of the ways of being able to answer that is just looking at your sales process, looking at your customer service, dealing with the organization. Is that easy? Is it frictionless? Or is it full of friction?

David:

Right, and that’s where the marketing side of the organization. It’s, how can I get more data to be able to take action on?

Danny:

Right.

David:

And get the sales qualified leads in front of my sales team.

Danny:

Right.

David:

So, your CRM is really going to either help or hinder.

Danny:

Right.

David:

So when you can have form fields on your website that auto completes or when the person puts in their email address it can automatically fill in their website URL and the company name and maybe pull in public information like, the phone numbers and things like that okay? That to me is time saving, helps you qualify those leads way better, much faster. That’s what a CRM can do.

Danny:

Yeah.

David:

So put those tools at your sales team’s fingertips to sell better, versus “Where is this information? What’s their website again?” Things like that.

Danny:

Spending 30 minutes just doing that basic research on a company. One of the things that I love is that you hear about sales automation a lot. Sometimes, automation gets a little bit of a bad rep when it comes to sales and marketing because sometimes people think, “Oh, you set it and forget it, and that’s it.” No! Do not do that! But I think there are some really cool tools that a lot of companies… we’ve had a lot of conversations with manufacturers over the last several years and just sharing, like these simple little features and these really cool tools. People are just, their minds are blown. For example, the ability for you to be able to set a sales email, send it to a prospect, let’s say after a trades show. And if you’re following up, you want to send them sales deck or something. To be able to actually have analytics and data to be able to see that they opened that email, and see that they actually clicked through on there, that’s mind-blowing to people.

David:

Absolutely.

Danny:

Still, the reality of it is, it’s still new technology. But it’s super powerful. So instead of just sending that one email to somebody and you have no idea, “Did they open it? Did they look at it?” You’re getting that information right there and that’s going to help you from a sales standpoint to say “Okay, I’m not freaking out. Did they get it, or did they not get it? Okay, they got it. Ooh, they opened it one time. That’s great. Oh, they opened it 20 times! Maybe that means they forwarded it on. Okay, this is good. I’m going to wait before I pester them again.”

David:

So it’s giving you actionable data that helps you focus where you’re going to spend your time. So sales? It’s numbers. You’ve got to do a lot. Have the data work for you.

Danny:

Right.

David:

And it’s not just, “Oh, they opened my email, great,” it’s knowing based on that information, what am I going to do? What’s the next step? Well when they don’t reply to it, it’s being able to have that sequence set up so that three days from now they’re going to get another valuable email from you, which they are hopefully opening and sharing within the organization.

Danny:

Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, there’s no lack of CRMs out there. There’s a ton. I know we listed the top three based off a survey and there was a handful of other ones. I think Zoho is probably number 4 on that list. Then there’s a few others. No lack of them.

David:

There’s a big bucket of everything else. So when you’re that scattered it’s hard to pull anything value out of that.

Danny:

Right. So what would you say maybe – Some ideas around somebody that like, “Hey, we think we need this.” What are some ideas around evaluating which tool might work best?

David:

Well, a little while ago we had Cassie from Ad Victoriam on and she went into a lot of those questions you might ask. So it’s really, how does a CRM fit into your overall sales process? And that’s not just from inbound lead or an outbound lead coming in to where they buy, but even post-purchase. Through that entire life cycle because customer service can be involved and that can all be powered by the CRM. She goes into a lot of great detail, I think we can include that in the show notes. A much more detailed response.

Danny:

Absolutely.

David:

But it’s definitely – you’re looking at it touching every aspect of your working station.

Danny:

Yeah, and I think that’s the interesting thing in a way of looking at it. That instead of just being a silo tool, that’s just strictly used for let’s just call it outbound communication, from a sales standpoint, it really is – and depending on which ones you get definitely these top 3 can be lot more sophistication to them and they can be configured to really help support the whole business operation piece and that is sometimes where people they kind of misunderstand the value of it. I’ll give you a really good example, I’ve talked with a lot of companies in the past and you’re starting to see this a lot more is that they hold the ability to CPQ: “Configure price quote,” if you’re not familiar with that. So, a really fancy word for- I think you have a really good story about the – the BMW story.

David:

Yeah, So I got an email from BMW on their latest model they’re coming out with, and I have a certain affinity to BMWs.

Danny:

I like Audis, but anyways.

David:

So, it gave me this option, “Configure your custom BMW,” and okay, I’m probably not going to be able to afford it right now: a dream BMW, per se. But being able to build out that customization is super easy, and I’m doing it on my phone and then realizing “Hey, here’s a $180,000 vehicle that is absolutely gorgeous, I’m going to save that in my favorites folder for later.”

Danny:

Okay.

David:

Some goals.

Danny:

180, all right.

David:

Just 180. It’s not your Ferrari.

Danny:

Yeah no. I’d have a hard time spending- I don’t know. I’d probably buy a plane with that. Anyways, I don’t want to digress but sorry. Must’ve been a really nice BMW though.

David:

Oh, gorgeous. It was fast enough.

Danny:

Fast enough, okay, so it meets some certain criteria. Alright that’s good. Well, I think that’s – I feel it’s an interesting thing because obviously from a consumer standpoint, you’re seeing the same thing on a B2B purchase, and especially when you have purchases that are a lot more complex. It’s a great starting point to get a sense of… the ability to be able to – just like with the CRM – where you’re able to choose to customize a part or a tool or a machine that’s able to fit my specific use case.

There’s areas that, the engineers, the product teams have not even thought of yet that you’re like, “Well I have a specific thing and I can kind of build it on and kind of do my own thing,” I think is great and the ability to sort of own that data and that process inside of a CRM tool that they can talk back and forth is huge. I think a lot of companies, there’s a lot of… we’ve got the distributors, the dealers who are working with large equipment where you’re coming and you’ve got your order form, “Let me put this in and let see what it is, and I’ve got to submit it.” Maybe you do have a digital system. It’s all online somehow. But then, if it’s not connected through a central storage unit if you will.

David:

Paper is slow.

Danny:

Yeah, yeah.

David:

You’re dealing with paper, too many people have to touch it, there’s room for error.

Danny:

A lot of room for error.

David:

And then you’re still going to digitize it anyways.

Danny:

True.

David:

So what’s better? Star with paper?

Danny:

Right.

David:

Or have it on a cloud system that everyone can access within milliseconds of that data being in there.

Danny:

Exactly.

David:

And it’s even user-generated data.

Danny:

Well, the other piece too, is you have multiple entries, so if somebody is literally writing here, you mentioned that it’s prone to error, and somebody’s got to take that in and digitize it at that point, so you’re doing that step twice and who knows how many more other times. Which is going to increase the error rate, not to mention the speed aspect. So, it’s just one example of using this technology inside your ecosystem to be able to help really create a much better experience for your customer. To increase the speed of being able to do that which is going to really ultimately affect which we’ll talk a little bit later about reducing that sales cycle time.

David:

Is it three days to get a quote, or is it three minutes? You tell me which one is going to provide a much better experience.

Danny:

Right.

David:

I think three minutes.

Danny:

I think, to that point we talked with Xometry about a year ago and you’re seeing a lot of these different companies kind of pop up that are really thinking forward like that and if you think about that. If you’re not familiar with Xometry, they’re kind of like the AirBnB or the Uber of custom manufacturers. If you want to go get a quote, you can set up a free CAD file. If you want to do something in a small batch it’ll kick out a list, with the price and everything. You’re seeing more of that. And I think that is just helping to make it easier so that, what I need to get to my customer, I can get it better, faster, and hopefully cheaper. That’s really kind of where everything is going. I know we can probably go on and on and on about it. There’s some really really cool stuff that you can do with this.

David:

I think the biggest take away is, that the CRM is really going to help your organization versus hinder it. But you need that top down buy-in implementation.

Danny:

Right, Yeah. I agree 100% with that. I think the other piece too is maybe, dovetailing a little bit as far as tricks on how to get some of that buy in on the lower end from the salespeople’s point. Instead of it coming necessarily from a top down saying, “We have to do this,” because sometimes there’s this perception of, “Oh, we need the reporting, and you have to do this,” and the sales team’s like, “Are we freaking data entry people, or?” like, “What’s going on?” Well, no, let’s look at these tools that’s going to help make your job easier. So maybe instead of talking to these trade show people, you’ve all got to set up 50 email follow ups, well guess what, we can do that, or create one template it out and then fire it off to all of them instead of saying copy repeat whatever. Instead there’s a lot of tools that these CRMs have that really help to automate that process, just like we’re automating processes in the manufacturing plant on the floor.

David:

And when you’re automating it and using that process you’re tracking data. Not just, “Okay, did they open it or not,” but, “Did they take action after that?” And if they did, hey, that means the email you’re writing is very effective. Wouldn’t you like to know that out of the prospects that you’re sending an email to, let’s make up a number, 50% are then taking action? Or is it lower? Is 10% taking action? Well, I’d probably write a different email.

Danny:

Yeah. So, a lot of really great things we can do here. You know what we should do later? I might get in trouble for doing this, it’d be really cool if we had like comparison charts of the different CRMs, check boxes, and different things to be able to help build companies. I don’t know, maybe we’ll do that.

David:

They could work towards it.

Danny:

I’ll shut my mouth. Alright, that’s all we’ve got for you today. With this episode of IndustrialSage. Hope you liked it. Listen, if you have any questions, a particular topic of interest or concern or something that you’d love for us to address on the show, reach out, you can go to industrialsage.com/questions. If you’re listening on the podcast, we’d love a review, and if you’re not subscribed you need to go to industrialsage.com and sign up for all the newsletter alerts. We’ve got tons of content coming down the pipe that you don’t want to miss. So that’s all I’ve got for you today, I’m signing off, I’ll see you next week with another episode here on IndustrialSage.

 

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