Executive Summary:

A global Medical Device company with operations (affiliates) in 50+ countries faced challenges in CRM adoption and effective sales funnel management, resulting in fragmented and unreliable sales forecasts. A comprehensive program was designed and implemented to improve CRM adoption, drive better sales behaviors, and enhance transparency and managerial coaching around opportunity management. As a result, the company experienced significant improvements in CRM adoption, funnel believability, and forecasting accuracy.

Problem:

The company faced issues with CRM adoption across its global operations, including:

1. Inaccurate and incomplete sales funnels, with deals missing crucial information.
2. Lack of visibility into the sales cycle, as reps would often only input deals when the customer requested a quote.
3. Poor management of contacts, with many reps not inputting contact information into the CRM.

Approach:

The project followed a phased approach, involving:

1. Conducting adoption audits to assess key metrics and identify areas of low adoption.
2. Creating a behavior change plan, including training and coaching for sales team members.
3. Implementing metrics to measure effectiveness, identify problem areas, and hold users accountable.
4. Developing “nudge” programs with customized communications to ensure funnel accuracy.
5. Gamifying the program to score reps, managers, and affiliates on CRM adoption.

Results:

The program led to the following improvements:

1. Increased CRM adoption across all countries, making sales funnels more believable, healthy, and larger.
2. Improved visibility into the sales cycle, with reps entering deals sooner.
3. Enhanced win-loss metric tracking, as reps began to record lost deals.
4. Better contact management, with reps encouraged to input contacts into the CRM.

Secondary Benefits:

The program saved the ROI on the CRM solution, which was on track to fail and deliver fragmented results after the program’s implementation 2yrs prior.

Sustaining Improvements:

The program is still ongoing and has been expanded several times. It has been automated and runs with a small support staff of 3 people, continuing to drive improvements across the globe for over 1,500 sales personnel. 

Conclusion:

The business case demonstrates that a systematic, data-driven approach to improving CRM adoption can lead to significant enhancements in sales funnel management, forecasting accuracy, and overall return on investment for a global company. The sustained improvements achieved through this p