Thinking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) from the sales team’s point of view has stimulated some interesting new possibilities.

I once oversaw the transition of a B2B CRM system from a locally installed brand name system to a market-leading cloud-based competitor.  The old system had limped along with inaccurate data, incomplete records and resentment by the sales team.  People saw it as something that could not be trusted, an overhead that  got in the way of sales and marketing.

We were not alone, as Ben Meredith points out in a recent post.

When we came to implement the  new system we had one primary principle: it had to work for the sales team.  This meant that it had to be exceptionally easy and attractive to use, relevant to their roles, with clear triggers for when and how it was to be updated. All other requirements were secondary.

The outcome? An almost seamless transition within six weeks and excellent adoption.

Results? Better accuracy of data, trustworthy analytics and sales forecasting. Better marketing, easier sales, improved customer relationships. Everything we wanted our CRM system to deliver.

These results happened only because we paid attention to the core challenge: whose job are we trying to make better?  For most CRM implementations, this will be the sales team. Get it right for them, and things will get better for the customer too.

Which is why I like the thinking of app developer LevelEleven. Their newly rebranded Compete app adds game elements to Salesforce.com to help drive sales team performance. Their real trick, of course, isn’t the app, but the psychology: good sales teams thrive on competition.

CRM as fun? That can’t be bad.