Setting Expectations

Setting expectations…

As you begin the adoption of Tour de Force and your CRM strategies, everyone having the same expectations is important. After all, achieving success requires setting goals, measuring the performance against these goals, and ultimately, accomplishing these goals. In setting your goals with Tour de Force, setting reasonable expectations on the timeline for achieving your goals is equally important. Understand that the adoption of Tour de Force is an evolutionary process that requires the time, patience, and
commitment of sales management, as well as the sales team.

The very first thing to understand is that the adoption of a CRM strategy is NOT a bottom up initiative. Adoption of CRM and Tour de Force is a top down initiative. Adoption of a CRM strategy requires that the senior sales management own the processes, understand the processes, manage the processes, and most importantly, hold people accountable to follow the processes. If senior sales management is not committed to the processes,
and is not willing to hold their sales team accountable to the processes, the project fails. The MRH Technology Group
consultants can help you define the processes, as well as configure Tour de Force to manage the processes. However, senior sales management must hold the sales team accountable for using Tour de Force and to follow the processes.

In setting the expectations of your Tour de Force implementation project, understanding that the members of your team learns and adopts at very different rates is important. In general, you can expect the following three categories of users after the Go Live Phase:

• Power Users – Following the Go Live User Training milestone, companies typically have 30-40% of the sales team that hit the ground running and quickly see the value of Tour de Force. In a very short period of time, Tour de Force becomes a mission critical application to these users. These individuals need to be identified early in the project so these users can provide assistance to other team members and be used as examples of best practices within the organization.

• Adopters – The next group of users are the Adopters. Clients typically have 30-40% of the sales team that
leave the training and begin using Tour de Force “as required”. These users typically see Tour de Force
as another tool to perform their job and to enter data so that management gets the information that
is needed for reporting and coaching purposes.

• Resistors – Every company has sales people that resist change. Typically, 20-40% of your team falls into this
category. These people have the attitude that, “I’ve been successful for 10 years doing it my way, why
should I change now”. These people may be technically challenged, or do not see the value of computers and
software. These users often are the users that have been successful at selling, but not efficient at selling.
Knowing that these types of users exists going into the project and having a plan on how to hold these users
accountable to your defined sales process is crucial to a successful implementation of Tour de Force.