Are you sick of entering data into Microsoft CRM manually? How about dealing with inconsistent data that makes reporting difficult and time-consuming? Whether you are a business user or IT user, you are guaranteed to appreciate the power and flexibility of workflow within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Here are four easy ways to use workflow to automate tasks that support sales and customer service. By the end of this article, you will be able to automate your processes using Microsoft CRM and workflow.

1. Assign New Leads to the Appropriate Person or Queue

If you have multiple sales people to whom are assigned leads meeting specific criteria, then this is a handy way to use workflow. For example, let's say that your territories are defined by state, and the Joe is the sales person for all of New York state. Upon the creation of a new lead with a state of New York, the lead can be automatically assigned to Joe so that it appears in his My Leads view. Then an e-mail can be sent, again automatically, to both Joe and his manager notifying them of the new lead.

Do you assign leads by some other criteria, such as industry (e.g., equipment manufacturing) or region (e.g., Northeast)? Not a problem. As long as the data identifying the lead as an equipment manufacturer or as located within the Northeast is entered in CRM, workflow events can be triggered using this data.

Learning how to use a complex software package is usually a daunting task, and trying to learn all the ins and outs within the time limits of a free trial is even harder. Not only do you need to find out how the CRM software package works, but you need also to learn if you can apply it to the specific needs of your business.

For the inexperienced person, choosing the best Customer Relationship Management system can be a difficult. Does your business need an on demand solution, meaning a hosted, accessible over the Internet platform, or can your organization use a real run-on-Windows application.

The basic acronyms CRM (Customer Relations Management), ERP (Enterprise resource planning, integrating all data and processes of an organization into a unified system), SFA (Sales Force Automation, automated, time saving systems that help the sales people) can be intimidating, but you should know them. A simple Google search will usually tell you what the acronym means.

To make the best of it, you should stick to a few simple rules that can show you what systems are worth looking into and what packages should be avoided. Having these pointers will let you quickly find a system that will work for you.

First, you should make sure the product can be customized to fit your needs. There are many systems out there but most likely none of them will work for your business right out of the box.

To make sure a system can be customized, look for companies that sell multiple editions of their product, this usually means they have tailored their products to other customers and that they will be willing to meet your needs, and make the product work for you.

Every conversation I have with a CEO of a middle-sized company eventually touches on the same conundrum … ‘How in the world does a company of our size get traction in new markets with new clients?’ This challenge seems to rank right up there with problems of arranging sufficient financial resources and getting top people to commit to a small but growing company.

This is often a challenge that did not limit growth in the early stages. During that early growth, the contacts and reputation of the founders and key executives drove the ‘top line’. Most often the client base came to resemble a silo in a corn field … one client dominating the business mix surrounded by other smaller clients that represent stunted attempts at broadening the base.

To be sure, this start up strategy is one of the preferred ways forward during the initial phase. In fact it is an early indicator if the management team has any business starting the business at all. If they don’t have ready clients for their product of service, they should get them before going forward.

But why, once the early growth phase is over, is it so difficult to get business development going? Why do the business development slots look so much like revolving doors? And, why is it that growing a company from nil to ten or fifteen million in annual revenues often does not seem to prepare management to take it to thirty or fifty million?

Here are some suggestions that might serve to channel discussions towards productive areas.

One: The senior management (particularly the CEO) is not really committed to making the journey. This is more common that you might think. Corporate growth requires significant self-reinvention among key members of the senior team. Often they are not prepared to give up control or manage a larger operation. Some prefer ‘writing code’ or whatever the company’s principal business happens to be. But whatever their ‘rationale’, they don’t want to or can’t become managers. In this case, expenditures on business development can just be a waste of resources. Better save the money and buy the new car.

Are you on pace to accomplish your important sales and financial goals this year?

The truth is, a good majority of US Organizations have been unable to grow their businesses this year. They are not reaching their sales and financial goals and many have all but given up.

Is this you? Are you now looking to next year to be the year you shatter previous productivity, sales and revenue records?

Regardless of whether you are on pace to meet your goals or not this year, it's a great idea to start preparing for your best year ever; but you will need to prepare.

You've surly realized, it takes much more than just setting a goal to accomplish it. The mere act of putting the goal on paper, sharing it with your managers and giving the extra effort to accomplish the goal is really secondary to the preparation required.

Before you begin to work toward an objective, you must insure all of the past barriers that stood in the way of prior goal accomplishment are eliminated. If they aren't, the unfortunate fact is, you'll fail to meet the objective once again… for the same reasons as before.

Sales failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. Sales stagnation, territory shrinkage and lost market share doesn’t happen overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking, poor planning and poor choices. To put it more simply, failure to grow sales is nothing more than mistakes in judgment, complacency or the attitude of being in a comfort zone repeated every day.

Now why would a sales person make these kinds of errors in judgment day after day? The answer is because they don’t even realize it or even if they do he or she does not think that it matters.

On their own, our daily acts do not seem that important. A minor oversight, a poor decision, or a wasted hour generally doesn't result in an instant and measurable loss of sales. More often than not, there is no immediate consequence to our sales efforts. Maybe a missed opportunity or a lost order is the result but unless it’s a major deal the situation is generally not significant enough to create a “personal ability reality check.”

If you have not bothered to make a cold call, if you have not bothered to prospect for new account development in the past ninety days, this lack of discipline may not seem to have any immediate impact on your sales life. And since nothing drastic happened to you after the first ninety days, you repeat this error in judgment for another ninety days, and on and on it goes. Why, because there doesn’t seem to be a major consequence. And herein lies the great danger. Far worse than having little focus on prospecting or new account development is not even realizing that it matters!

Two of the biggest issues facing the industry today are recruitment of sales personnel and retention. Problems in this area may not be due to bad hires or low unemployment rates. If they are related to bad hires then it means you don’t fire well. You are not holding people accountable. If that’s the case, it only stands to reason that you are probably overpaying a sizable portion of your sales force, as they are not performing as “A” players.

The first thing you must do is a gut-wrenching honest assessment of your personnel. This must be done both quantitatively and subjectively. Measurements must be in place. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.. Once you do have a sales system with measurement you must complete your personnel assessment. Upgrade your sales force to minimum acceptable standards. It would be exceptionally rare to find any distributor that didn’t have at least one salesperson that wasn’t performing up to expectations. “If you pull the gun, don’t be afraid to shoot.” Being fearful of sales consequences by terminating a salesperson is the lifeblood of mediocrity in a sales force

Why do I need a sales plan?

Sales planning is critical to sales success. Return on Time Invested (ROTI) should be key criteria that every salesperson should use when evaluating their account base. The biggest asset a salesperson has is their time. It is imperative that they manage this asset carefully. Time management is called the queen of the management sciences and the reason why they call it the queen of management sciences is that time management – needs to be “romanced” –salespeople need to go through a fundamental management course every 12- 24 months.

A 120 Day Sales Plan is a great first step. This plan is the company’s first attempt to build an integrated business plan. Start by evaluating your territory with respect to economic conditions, competitive pressures, opportunities, threats and key customer and vendor objectives. What is really needed is to step back from the trees so you can see the forest. Some quality thinking will give you your baseline and then you can set your own goals, as well as plan out the major actions to achieve them.

You will repeat this process later in the year. You should strive to be realistic and also stretch in setting your objectives. This means that your “gut feel” says there is an 80% chance that you will achieve 100% of your goal. The company is going to be making investments in resources and support so that a significant growth rate can be achieved. There will be some ramp up benefit during this planning window, so be open minded rather than optimistic or cynical.

Your actual performance should be tracked against your goal to help develop some planning and forecasting skills.

First you need to list your key objectives for the next 120 days. Next list the key action items that are required to achieve your plan. Each section item must have a brief task description, a tangible output (i.e. meeting held, quote submitted, credit approved, management visit made, return authorized etc.), a person named who is responsible for the output and a due date. Then interview your top 10 customers and work out your best estimate of their predicted sales and gross profit volumes. Finally, do this again except from a supplier perspective. It is not important to tie supplier volumes to specific customers. This forecast will be used for two purposes; To make sure that your inventory is adequate to support your efforts, and to see if any of the combined volumes are large enough to help negotiate a better purchase price. Build a sales and gross margin forecast of your top five vendors in terms of year to date gross profit volume. For planning purposes assume that volumes of all other vendors add up to your total customer forecast.

I think we’ve taken the “interpersonal” metaphor a little too far when it comes to analyzing customer satisfaction.

We speak in terms of customer “experiences,” a hippie sort of word, at best.

For instance, that person over at Mahoney Ford isn’t buying a car; he’s having a deep personal experience. Let’s detail every moment of truth, every possible instance of intimacy, and determine whether as a dealership we were a hit or a miss with him.

That’s just a little too fuzzy for me.

Also, we throw around the word “relationship” as if we’re talking about potential marital partners. Frankly, I don’t want to have a relationship with the bakery, or with the baker, for that matter. I just want a good, fresh loaf of bread, and an occasional remedy for my sweet tooth.

And multiply that sentiment for the word, “loyalty.”

Commercial relationships are about utility, functionality, trading value for value. In a word, they’re about money.

What most vendors are talking about when they say loyalty is a sort of psychological feeling of dependency that they hope to arouse in clients who will then continue to trade with them out of a vague feeling that they “owe a duty” to the vendor to do so.

I have to admit I did this once with a lawyer who was helping me negotiate a video contract. He blew it, offering the worst advice I ever got, and the deal slipped away.

Rather than face the fact that he was a genial incompetent, who happened to be a big booster of my alma mater, and therefore had an “in” with me, I kept working with him. Finally, I studied law myself and passed the bar out of self-protection!

What right-thinking consumer really says: “Gee, I’ve always bought my life insurance from Ted and even if his rates are nearly double that of another source, I must keep doing business with him. I’m a loyal client and I owe it to him and to his family!”

Oh, come on.

If you want to know how someone regards you, your products, and your service or services, there is a simple test:

Try to sell him something else, right now!

If he buys, you can infer he’s probably happy with how you did for him last time, or over the course of time. If he balks, has to check your competitor’s pricing “just to keep you honest,” then he’s probably less than thrilled.

To take a page from Forrest Gump’s playbook, we might say: Loyalty is as loyalty does.

What we’re after is repeat sales.

Loyalty isn’t the handshake.

It is the cash-in-hand that says, “Please sell me again, and again!”

Why do I need a sales plan?

Sales planning is critical to sales success. Return on Time Invested (ROTI) should be key criteria that every salesperson should use when evaluating their account base. The biggest asset a salesperson has is their time. It is imperative that they manage this asset carefully. Time management is called the queen of the management sciences and the reason why they call it the queen of management sciences is that time management – needs to be “romanced” –salespeople need to go through a fundamental management course every 12- 24 months.

A 120 Day Sales Plan is a great first step. This plan is the company’s first attempt to build an integrated business plan. Start by evaluating your territory with respect to economic conditions, competitive pressures, opportunities, threats and key customer and vendor objectives. What is really needed is to step back from the trees so you can see the forest. Some quality thinking will give you your baseline and then you can set your own goals, as well as plan out the major actions to achieve them.

You will repeat this process later in the year. You should strive to be realistic and also stretch in setting your objectives. This means that your “gut feel” says there is an 80% chance that you will achieve 100% of your goal. The company is going to be making investments in resources and support so that a significant growth rate can be achieved. There will be some ramp up benefit during this planning window, so be open minded rather than optimistic or cynical.

Your actual performance should be tracked against your goal to help develop some planning and forecasting skills.

First you need to list your key objectives for the next 120 days. Next list the key action items that are required to achieve your plan. Each section item must have a brief task description, a tangible output (i.e. meeting held, quote submitted, credit approved, management visit made, return authorized etc.), a person named who is responsible for the output and a due date. Then interview your top 10 customers and work out your best estimate of their predicted sales and gross profit volumes. Finally, do this again except from a supplier perspective. It is not important to tie supplier volumes to specific customers. This forecast will be used for two purposes; To make sure that your inventory is adequate to support your efforts, and to see if any of the combined volumes are large enough to help negotiate a better purchase price. Build a sales and gross margin forecast of your top five vendors in terms of year to date gross profit volume. For planning purposes assume that volumes of all other vendors add up to your total customer forecast.

• What will a sales plan do for me?

A sales plan systematically provides focus on specific territory objectives that are congruent with overall corporate objectives.

• Determine the following territory characteristics:

o Segmentation – forecast potential by product and by service

o Identify potential within new and existing accounts. Check marketing resources for new account development.

o Listen to your customers. Find the major pain that wakes them up at night. Take away the pain and become their distributor of choice.

o Promote the team-selling concept with inside sales and management. Make it part of your master territory plan. Become a team player yourself.

o Create these habits:

* Habit of Prospecting
* Habit of Planning
* Habit of Professionalism, Presentations, Appearance
* Habit of Goal Setting
* Habit of Record Keeping
* Habit of Time and Territory Management
* Habit of Self Development

o “A” players balance time

* Prospecting
* Account Development
* Maintenance

Before we continue, we need to list exactly what an “A” player is. An “A” player must have the following characteristics:

1. Appearance – personal, vehicle and sales material

2. Pride – in yourself, your company and your profession

3. Confidence – in yourself, your company and your product/service

4. Sincere and trustworthy

5. Desire to achieve – wants to help others get what they want and, in turn, earn a higher income

6. Excels in time and territory management

7. Does not ignore prospecting

8. Creates definitive, comprehensive, documented sales plans for all major accounts

9. Never visits a customer without a call plan

10. Seeks self development

11. Enjoys selling

12. Persistent

Every seller has been afflicted by the buyer who neither says yes nor offers an objection.

He is the fence-sitter, the person who seems almost biologically unable to arrive at a decision, no matter how much prompting you do.

So, how can you get a sale if he won’t at least give you an affirmative grunt?

It’s tough, unless you come to the situation armed with a very special type of close.

A close is a stylized way of producing agreement to your proposal. In recent articles, I mentioned two favorites: (1) The assumptive check-back or tie-down close; and (2) The choice close.

By way of review, the first one says: “So, let’s move forward and I know you’ll be pleased, Okay?”

Designed to get a quick “Okay” in return, this is a real winner, I can tell you from extensive experience.

The choice close offers, you guessed it, the option of one thing or another: “That Porsche is great in the red; or would you prefer the blue?”

You’re stacking the deck here, offering a choice between yes and yes.

But there are those souls who won’t take the bait whether you try to tie them down or offer a choice.

This is where the Power-Assumptive close enters the picture. If they won’t decide, then as the seller, you must do it for them.

Let’s say you’re setting an appointment and you offer a choice close such as this one: “The calendar indicates a good time to stop by and say hello will be Tuesday at 2, or will Wednesday work out better for you?”

They say, “Un, no those won’t work,” without offering a third option.

You need to step up and say: “Let’s just make it Friday.”

And by all means DON’T check back with an “Okay?”

They’ve proven themselves to be fence-sitters so they won’t budge from that one, we know this.

Just continue to confirm their address, “And I show you at 123 Peachtree in Atlanta, is that right?”

Here’s how it sounds, all put together: “Let’s just make it Friday, and I show you at 123 Peachtree, in Atlanta, is that right?”

I know, it seems like you tied them down on the address, but the real persuasion came when you took charge and made the decision for them.

If they don’t like it, believe me, they’ll tell you, but then, at least you have them talking, giving you yet another opportunity to close!

I grew up in a really great little town by the name of Dallas, GA, a rural community 32 miles northwest of Atlanta. I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in economic times that were far less robust than they are today. Many of the folks who lived in what we called the "out in the country" were farmers who had to work 12 to 14 hours a day to barely scratch out a living. In those days, many farmers didn't own a car or truck, so it was not unusual for them to ride into Dallas on a farm tractor or in a wagon hitched to a workhorse to pick up provisions for the coming week.

To give you more of an idea of what economic conditions were like back then, the minimum wage was well under $1 per hour. A worker would toil an eight-to-ten-hour day in the local cotton mill for $40 to $50 a week. Yet in my hometown, in communities "out in the country" and in other communities around the country, there were individuals who were did extremely well. They bucked the economic trend.

Isn't it like that in your community: there are business owners who are starving to death, but there are also those who seem to always do well regardless of economic conditions.

I'm reminded of a famous quote from Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton. One particular year when a recession was predicted by virtually everyone in the news media, Mr. Sam commented to a reporter: "If there's a recession coming, I've decided that I won't participate."

Walton is also well known for another applicable quote: "High expectations are the key to everything."

Every entrepreneur I ever read about seemed to rank "high expectations" way up there when commenting on how they achieved such lofty levels of success. When I started Lee Resources in November, 1987, I remember sitting down and writing a BIG number on the bottom line of my profit plan for 1988. It was more than double the amount I earned in my last year as a corporate officer in my former company.

It even scared me a bit staring at such a BIG bottom line number, but I put my fear aside and moved on to the next step: planning how many billing days I needed to sell and how much I had to generate in product sales to make the profit plan come true.

The final step was coming up with what marketing activities I would implement to sell the billing days I needed to meet my income goal. It was actually a fun process. Then came the hard part: implementing my plan, which required a lot of personal discipline.

At the end of 1988, I exceeded my income goal by about 20%. Wow! I thought. This planning stuff really works. That experience gave me the confidence I needed to convince my clients to follow a similar profit planning process.

Now, 2007 is just around the corner and I am still following the same process.

How about you? What are your expectations for 2007?

Have you developed a game plan?

If a slowdown is predicted for your market, are you going to participate or are you going to buck the trend and figure out how to get a larger share of your market?

Step #1: Begin by writing down the amount you want your business to earn in 2007.

Step #2: Ask your salespeople to list each existing customer and each prospect on a spreadsheet and predict how much they believe they will sell in 2007.

Step#3: When planning operating expenses, begin by listing each of your people vertically on a spreadsheet. In the next column, list how much they earn right now and in the next column, how much you plan pay each employee in 2007, and for the ones you plan to give a raise in pay, plug in the new level of pay in the month the raise will go into effect.

Step #4: Review operating expenses from 2006 and estimate how much you plan to spend in each expense category in 2007.

Step #5: Now back in to gross margin. In other words, if you know how much you are planning to earn, how much you're planning to sell and how much you're planning to spend, how gross margin will you have to have to make the plan come true.

Step #6: Hammer out a marketing plan that will give your sales force the support it needs to achieve the company's sales goal.

Yes, there is something magic about high expectations. And frankly, I don't totally understand it, but when you think big, bigger things happen to you than you think small.

I believe one of the biggest deterrents to success in life is down deep inside not believing you deserve success. Or that you are destined to struggle financially. Or that double digit profit margins are for other business owners and managers, but not for you.

I can speak with confidence about this planning process from firsthand experience.

I guess that's why David Schwartz entitled his famous book, The Magic of Thinking Big.

Do you know what most people that apply for sales jobs do before they go in for a sales interview? They research the most common sales interview questions and have their answers scripted ahead of time. This is a smart thing to do. Salespeople should prepare as well as they can for any given situation, including sales interviews.

But do you want to hire a scripted salesperson? Do you want someone selling your companies products and services that is good at memorizing and reciting scripts or would you rather hire someone that can think fast and come up with solutions to problems on the spot?

If your selection process involves making hiring decisions based solely on job interviews then you may be hiring the wrong people. Salespeople should be personable, intelligent, and persuasive. You can never see these personality traits in an interview setting.

So, what should you do? Try the following 2-step process:

1. Instead of a sales interview at your office, take the candidate out to meet clients or on a sales call. Brief her on the background of the prospect that you visit ahead of time. Then meet the prospect or client and watch her sell. What better way is there to view a job candidate’s sales skills than to observe her in action?
2. Follow the sales call with a relaxed lunch or dinner to observe the job candidate's social skills. You want to hire someone that is personable for a sales job because people buy from people that they like. Going to a restaurant allows you to experience your job candidate's social skills first hand in her dealings with you, the restaurant staff, and the other guests. Don’t hire someone that is not pleasant and polite to waiters or strangers at nearby tables.

Sales interviews are worthless. Following this 2-step process when hiring salespeople will give you a better indication as to their sales skills than a scripted interview will.

Sooner or later, you will have to walk away from a prospect or a client relationship that is no longer worth your time, energy, corporate resources or willingness to continue. What are the characteristics that could contribute to this decision? Here are a few to think about:

1. The potential for additional business just isn’t there.

2. The time, energy or corporate resources to keep this sale or relationship active are no longer a good investment of your sales time, or your organization’s resources.

3. The prospect/customer continues to try to squeeze more out of you.

4. The relationship is no longer win/win.

5. The competition will do ‘anything’ (things that are not reasonable or ethical) to get the business away from you because they are desperate or unethical. Your client, as a result expects you to match the competition’s offer. Beware!

6. You have lost control of the sales process.

7. Everything you try just doesn’t get the prospect/customer to respond to you.

8. Your intuition or gut tells you to ‘walk away’ from this one.

9. The prospect’s/client’s only interest is in price and they are not concerned about service, quality, or your ability to help them solve problems or grow their business.

10. They lie to you or misrepresent facts.

11. They delegate the buying process to the bottom of the food chain where no one has the authority to make the buying decision.

12. They take more of your time and energy than the sale/relationship/margins warrant.

There are other reasons, but most will fall into the previous 12.

Here are a few questions to consider:

1. Are you failing to walk away from any business now you feel you should? Why?

2. Are you not walking away from some business for inconsistent reasons?

3. Do you have a walk-away philosophy or strategy?

4. Do you have a successful sales strategy that you use consistently to keep the sales process alive and well when the prospect or client forces you into a walk away position?

Keep in mind that selling is about making sales, not walking away from opportunities because you have too quickly made an emotional decision or judgment call based on the wrong reasons. I am not advising giving up too soon, not using creative sales appeals, or terminating the sales process because you may be over your head. I am, however, suggesting that you have a walk-away philosophy and strategy that you can use as a template when the value of current business or potential business is in question. If you want more information on this critical topic, attend my advanced sales seminar in Charlotte in September. You’ll learn more in two days about how to sell more than in any other seminar available today. I guarantee it!