As it happens, I was privileged to attend a talk by Patrick Renvoise, author of “Neuromarketing, Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer’s Brain” just yesterday.   It was one of the most eye opening presentations I’ve seen in years!

We’ve all heard about Pain.  Sales trainers have been teaching us to ask open ended questions of customers in order to uncover their Pain for years.  In fact, I teach users of our customer relationship management system to create fields with drop downs for sales people to quickly enter the answers to these Pain questions so they’ll be easily accessible and can be used to segment your market.

Patrick’s presentation on Neuromarketing highlighted a few things that are news to me or at least provide a deeper understanding of the purchase decision process -

• Customers usually don’t really know their Pain
• For this reason, when asked, they will often provide misleading answers, unintentionally
• Most decisions, even about complex business solutions, are made based on instincts that are millions of years old like fear, hunger, etc.

Identifying the “buy button” in your customer’s brain is about connecting with those very primitive instincts.  I’m not a scientist and was impressed with how thoroughly Patrick has boiled this complex theory down to a relatively simple process that the average business person can follow.

As with all things marketing, the hard part is deciding which buy button you’re going to try and press for your customers.

In complex B2B selling situations, a solution may be able to press more than one buy button and each influencer in the decision may respond to those messages differently.  So what is a sales person to do?

Can your online CRM help?  I think it might!

What if messages sent via email to your customers were tailored based on what we know about them?  What if the sales person was provided with scripts of questions to ask or even specific ways to describe the solution designed to press the buttons of the person they’re talking with?

Automating these things is not too difficult given enough information from which to choose the button to focus on.  In fact, the sales person could be armed with a key question to start the conversation with that tells them which button their aiming for.

I think the difficulty is that leveraging this type of capability requires that the business has gone through the process of identifying these buy buttons and crafting messages, presentations, etc. to press them.  Most haven’t.

Can that process be automated?  Perhaps…

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I had an experience like that today.  This customer, we’ll call her Nicky, just joined her company as Director of Sales.  Prior to her arrival, there has been NO sales tracking, contact management, CRM or marketing to speak of.

Nicky’s fought these fights before and she’s got big plans for her new organization.  I love working with people like Nicky!

She knows the value of basic contact management, sales activity tracking and pipeline management.  She also knows that putting some straight forward and management direct marketing in place will help her nurture clients as there is a lot of repeat business in her world.

Its not uncommon that SalesNexus customer have these requirements.  What’s uncommon about Nicky is that she’s not overwhelmed by all the choices, decisions and minutia associated with achieving all of these goals AND she’s not crazy enough to try and do it all at once.

The conversation I had with Nicky was really just blind luck on my part.  Nicky’s business has seasonal patterns and the big sales push of the year is going on right now.  She’s smart enough not to let implementing technology take her eye off that ball.

But right now she’s using an excel sheet to manage the sales pipeline.  Remember, there is no contact management or CRM at all.

Normally, new SalesNexus clients want to get it all in place ASAP.  That means we discuss the type of contact management system they are using now or at least what data they’ll want imported into a new database, then we immediately dive into adding custom fields to tailor the contact management database to the client’s unique needs.  Then we start creating reports that summarize the key metrics in their business and finally build marketing campaigns.

Believe me, an implementation project like this can be a real bear to manage with all of the decisions associated to be made by the client who is still not conversant with the technology.

So Nicky says “Listen Craig, I need a basic contact management database to facilitate data sharing during our sales push.  During that time I’ll start experimenting with tracking sales pipeline in the contact management system.  When October rolls around, I’ll know the system pretty well and THEN I’ll have the time and knowledge I need to decide how to the contact management system should be customized for my business.  Then we can create some reports to track sales activity and the pipeline and then finally, start building marketing campaigns.”

So I say “Wow!  Thank you.  You just made my life a lot easier.  I’m going to love working with you!”

So there is it folks, the road map to successful implementation of a new Contact Management, CRM or Sales and Marketing Automation system:

1. Import your basic contact data into the contact management system and encourage logging of notes and activities.
2. Lets some time pass.  Experiment with queries, reports, etc.  Get to know the system.
3. Then huddle everyone up and decide what specific fields you want to add to the database that are uniquely relevant to your business.
4. Build a report that ties sales activity to sales pipeline – the idea here is that if a sales rep is showing a sales opp at 90% for this month for a huge dollar amount but, he hasn’t completed the key fields in the contact management system and has only had one call or meeting with the customer, you know some thing’s fishy.
5. Then start building marketing campaigns that target the niches you can carve out of the contact management database using the unique fields you’ve added.

I know it seems obvious.  Problem is most customers want it all ASAP so they can realize the ROI that they’re hoping for from their investment in contact management.

I’m going to work on helping customers find the right pace.  Thanks again Nicky!

Related posts:

1. “Contact Management Ain’t Easy, Its Essential”
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3. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!