Technology Isn’t a Sales Strategy

If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ve probably heard me bring up a company by the name of High-Yield Methods (https://www.h-ym.com) and its founder, Dick Lee.

Dick’s been a top-level business consultant for three decades now, but he’s also an insightful blogger on CustomerThink.com, a voracious researcher, and possessor of a wicked sense of humor.

In his “Another Inconvenient Truth About Lead Management” whitepaper, Dick bemoans that far too many CRM software vendors tell their prospects that CRM will magically take care of their bad lead management and sales processes. His precise words were, I believe, “Yeah right. And Santa Claus still comes down our chimney every year.”

In other words: Don’t buy technology to solve a problem it has no chance of solving.

Purchasing technology is not a “strategy.” Technology doesn’t hire employees, or mentor sales reps. It doesn’t naturally improve poor leadership, analyze market trends, or make any of the million-and-one daily decisions that form a company’s direction, ethos and culture. It doesn’t magically motivate reps to do lead nurturing or make important prospecting calls, and it certainly doesn’t create compelling content and customer-centric sales presentations that serve prospect’s needs. Buying a sales automation system to fix bad processes is akin to buying a Corvette because you’re always 10 minutes late to work.

The bottom line: if your underlying sales strategy is garbage, the result of sales automation technology is generally little more than the production of more efficiently derived garbage.

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