Unpopular opinion, but storing sales project information in a general “company card” inside your CRM renders it practically useless. Salespeople are used to company cards, so they think they need them. They want to be able to log in and see everything all at once.
But in complex sales, seeing everything all at once is not the most effective way to manage a sales relationship. For each company in your contacts, your sales team may be managing multiple sales projects, multiple opportunities, and multiple stakeholders, all of whom are related to different projects in different ways.
When you dump all of that information into a single container, it’s a bit like dumping a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle out on the table and then trying to fit it all together without a reference image. It provides a lot of information, but without context, meaning is lost.
Consider computer language. At its most basic level, computer language contains two simple pieces of information: 1 and 0. Out of context, a 1 and a 0 is just… a 1 and a 0. But, when contextualized and placed in order, this information can quite literally paint a picture. Or run an AI data center. Without the context, a 1 or a 0 means very little. With the context, it means a great deal.
To see this in human terms, imagine someone tells you that you have a spot on your face, without any additional context. Are they referring to a freckle? A piece of food? If they’re a stranger, are they just poking fun at you? If they’re a friend, are they trying to prevent embarrassment? If they’re your doctor… are they seeing a bruise, suggesting a benign growth, or something worse?
What if they don’t even give you a full sentence, just the word “spot”? Now the information is even more meaningless.
When a salesperson logs in to the CRM and looks at a company card packed full of information, the information doesn’t help them understand the situation’s context, it only gives them puzzle pieces that they have to sort. In some cases, they may have the necessary context in their head to do so quickly, and other times they may have to choose between reconstructing or taking a guess. In many cases, they’ll miss important aspects of the context, and that lack of context leads to missed steps and less effective execution.
Instead of a single company card, what salespeople really need is contextual information, organized in a way that helps them to effectively and efficiently take action on a project. They need to see how well-qualified a prospect is, to know when to add it into the pipeline.They need to see where a particular sales project is in the context of your sales process, in terms of the prospect’s readiness, and in terms of the salesperson’s other priorities. Also, they need to see where each stakeholder is in relation to the others, and where they each are in the process. And they need to see what the next right step is.
Salespeople (and buyers) need contextual information, organized to effectively and efficiently take action.
In a tool like Membrain, the information in the CRM doesn’t operate like an info dump or a collection of puzzle pieces. The workflows provide contextual frameworks that enable your salespeople to see exactly where each stakeholder and each sales project is situated, and what the next steps are to move it forward. They can also see where their highest priorities are that day, so they can use their time wisely.
When information is stored like this, it also enables collaboration between sales teams and across customer success and other teams. Everyone can see what they need to see and what it means. They can see what others on the team have already handled, they can view recent conversations in context, and they can make smart decisions about what to do next.
In complex sales, effective salespeople learn to zoom in and zoom out on a project. They need to be able to zoom in, for instance, on a particular stakeholder’s concerns. And they need to be able to zoom back out to the prospect company’s priorities. This zooming in and zooming out makes it possible for the salespeople to build a shared mental model for the solution and build consensus among stakeholders.
When you take a proposal to a company where the stakeholders share a coherent mental model of the solution, are clear about how it will solve their most pressing individual problems, and understand how your company can help… that’s a proposal with a high likelihood of acceptance.
I’m curious, what do you think are the biggest blind spots in most salespeople’s ability to understand context? What are you doing to help your salespeople build meaning out of sales information?
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
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