You’ve got a better product, provide better service, you’ve a fantastic reputation and strong customer reference-ability. You’re even the most competitive price wise. And yet, your competitors, with their dodgy home-grown website from the mid-90s, lack of experience in your industry and inflated price list still manage to beat you to some of those deals. What’s going on?

1. Are you over-complicating your product/service/solution?
   I’ve got to hold my hands up on this one….I’m guilty. I like words, and writing, and explaining things. And because I’m pretty passionate about hosted Microsoft CRM sometimes I get a little bit carried away. Microsoft CRM can do so much, but it’s all too easy to forget that sometimes all the prospect wants initially are the basics.

   The good news is that with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Workflow, we’ve designed a workflow to automatically email ideas and ‘top tips’ to prospects who are trialling our hosted Microsoft CRM and Beyond Demand service every few days. I’ve nick-named it the ‘little and often’ workflow.

   Carol sums it up really neatly: “Take your longest copy blocks and pare them down to this: What will it do for the customer? What is the benefit for them. Then follow up with what’s different about it.”

2. Are you not describing enough?!
   Apologies if you’ve just finished reading point #1, de-capped the red pen, and you were about to get started chopping up that 100 page brochure.

   But…perhaps you’re not educating your prospects enough about just how great you are. Do you introduce the right topics early enough in your sales cycle?

   A common complaint I hear a lot from prospects is that keeping everyone up-to-date with relevant and timely sales literature is a nightmare, especially if you’ve got sales guys in the field or in multiple offices.

   Microsoft CRM has some great Sales Literature tools that can help you establish a central repository for your electronic brochures and sales collateral. You can also get CRM to automatically send it out at certain stages of the sale too. Maybe it would help if you tracked how effective certain brochures were with different type of prospect?

3. Too many choices.
   Ah yes. This old chestnut. Finding a balance between giving your customers a healthy selection and scaring them off with too many options is tricky. And it’s not just a challenge small businesses face either.

   If I had a pound for every printing/telecoms/manufacturing business I spoke with that had an overcomplicated product catalogue, I’d be pretty wealthy. In fact, rather than blogging about CRM I think I’d probably be sitting on my super yacht somewhere in the Med sipping expensive cocktails.

   This is a really difficult conversation to have with a business owner sometimes, but I always wonder, how much simpler a business is to run, and of course, buy from, when the product line up is straight forward, clear and easy to follow.

   I’d urge any business owner to take a good look at their product catalogue before going anywhere near CRM. If you’ve already got CRM, try and use the reporting tools available, to see just how many variations of your base product you’ve actually ever sold.

4. Lack of credibility
   This is an interesting one. Carol writes about credibility in terms of advertising your memberships and accreditations, publishing customer testimonials, and displaying awards. These are, of course, invaluable. I also think that a good CRM system can help you to present a slick, deadly and accurate sales process that can build credibility with your prospect during the sales process too.

   Have you ever inadvertently ‘neglected’ or ‘dropped’ a sales lead or opportunity? Can you keep track accurately of all of your opportunities and their associated stages / status throughout your organisation?

   If you’ve answered ‘No’ to either of those questions, take a quick look at a CRM system, or even have a play with Outlook tasks and reminders. Keeping records and reminders is time-consuming and tedious, but CRM can help take the pain out of those menial tasks.

5. Is anyone there?!
   Do you make it easy for your customers to communicate with you via your website?

   I think most people in business these days know about how a website can help with a sale or to generate leads. Sometimes prospects tell me that their websites don’t really generate that many new-biz leads for them. Here are a couple of ideas to help.

   Integrate your ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Get in Touch’ form directly with your CRM system, and have this kick off the sales process as soon as your prospect presses the ‘Send’ button. This is really easy to do, and it’s an ‘out of the box’ feature for customers ofIncrease hosted Microsoft CRM.
   
   Put a ‘Live Chat’ button on your website. You may think that Instant Messaging over the ‘net is something more suited to teenagers in their bedrooms chatting about their latest bike-shed conquests, but research has shown that real-time web based dialog between customer and sales rep is really successful for B2B sales, especially if you are selling something fairly complex or technical. There are some great tools out there like WhosOn (who, incidentally we’re currently working with to integrate into Microsoft CRM), Liveperson andBoldChat, and they’re all really quick to set up and very reasonably priced.

6. Incentives to act, and calls to action
   Carol wraps up with this great idea. Sometimes all it takes to swing the deal from your competitors is a clear, defined deadline or a time based offer.

   Using some basic marketing automation features of any good CRM system means that you can automatically communicate your latest offers or promotions to your customers with just a few clicks. Microsoft CRM’s got a great ‘Quick Campaign’ tool for doing just this, if you haven’t seen these yet book a test drive and take a look.

   One pitfall to avoid however, is discounting. You’ve probably heard the smug saying “live by price, die by price”. As irritating as it is to hear from an ‘outsider’ it’s worth bearing in mind.

So, as we drift into October (85 shopping days left everyone!) maybe you can use some of these ideas to fine tune your sales operation in your business. Give that Sales Prevention Officer the ‘flick’, and prepare to blow the doors off your competition this autumn.