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    You made your Hydra, here's how to unmake it

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    You know this scenario. You wanted to enable your sales team, so you purchased a CRM from a trusted vendor that promised you everything.

    After signing the contract, you had to pay through the nose for “customizations” that took forever. You then discovered that to do the things you thought the software would already do, you needed to buy extra “plugins.” You purchased the plugins and paid a developer to make sure they integrated correctly.

    But now something else in the software isn’t working correctly because the plugins interfere with its functioning. So you get a developer to fix that problem.

    Then a change in your sales process means you need to make changes in the software, so now your development team is working on that, too.

    And every time you make a change or fix a problem, two new problems crop up in its place.

    Pretty soon, your software, its customizations, and plugins constitute 80% or more of your sales organization’s budget, and it’s not even doing the job you bought it for. Your people might even be actively working against it. You feel like you bought a tool to help you fish, but instead, it’s become a many-headed monster that you just can’t defeat.

    That’s the Hydra problem, which I’ve written about in detail here.

    The good news: You don’t have to fight the Hydra anymore. You have a better option.

    How to sail away and leave the Hydra behind

    Too many companies are fighting the Hydra and gradually sinking their ships. Don’t be that way.

    Abandon the Hydra fight. Abandon the monster. Get Membrain.
    George Brontén

    Instead of cutting off more heads and fighting the new heads that spring up in their place, you have the option to simply sail away from the problem and catch more and bigger fish than ever before, in wide open blue seas.

    How?

    Abandon the fight. Abandon the monster. Abandon Salesforce or whatever old, overly complex, one-size-fits-all-with-expensive-modifications CRM you’re currently using. And choose a streamlined, purpose-built B2B Sales Enablement CRM.

    Choose a streamlined, purpose-built enablement platform

    In place of your big, heavy, highly modified sea monster of a CRM, choose a streamlined sales enablement CRM that is purpose-built to enable your b2b sales teams to sell better. It should already have the built-in capability (no plugins or custom programming necessary) to do the following:

    • Guide salespeople through a milestone-based, dynamic sales process
    • Provide beautiful, intuitive workflows that salespeople want to use
    • Enable skills development and reinforcement through in-context embedded sales training content
    • Reinforce best practice behaviors and activities with checklists and milestone criteria
    • Serve up the right sales collateral for the right person, at the right time
    • Incorporate separate workflows for prospecting, opportunity management, and account-planning processes
    • Provide dashboards that enable comparisons across teams, territories, goals, and time, as well as simple tools for analyzing and identifying coaching opportunities
    • Enable effective performance management across teams and territories and a coaching cockpit™ for sales managers to do a better job coaching their teams
    • Include integrated win/loss analysis tools that help you improve strategy and execution
    • Support simple and effective strategy and execution iteration without the need for custom coding
    • A price model that doesn’t rip you off, with a lite version for non-quota-carrying staff

    Sailing Away to 25% Growth in One Year: Skender Construction’s Story

    Skender Construction is an award-winning, full-service general contractor with more than 200 employees and offices in Chicago and San Francisco. Companies rely on Skender to efficiently and effectively manage construction projects of all shapes, sizes, and complexities across multiple sectors. They are consistently recognized for their business innovation, growth, and commitment to their employees.

    Skender’s sales team operates in disparate locations on opposite sides of the United States. Traditional CRM was failing these teams, providing no way to maintain consistency and communication throughout the sales process.

    Worse, it had become a Hydra. Skender’s innovative, dynamic sales process, commitment to growth, and the fast pace of their industry required frequent updates to the process. With their traditional CRM, each change required the employment of programmers to update their database, which led to increasing complexity and… you know the rest of that story.

    As part of a strategic sales effectiveness initiative, Skender worked with sales development expert Brian Kavicky and switched to Membrain. The strategy and training by Brian combined with the support of Membrain, made their sales process easy to understand and follow, eliminated complicated workarounds, was intuitive and actionable, and enabled effective knowledge and relationship transfer. Their salespeople loved it so much that adoption was easy and complete.

    But what they loved most of all was the 25% annual growth they experienced the very first year. Of course, just in part because of Membrain, but an important part according to Skender:

    “Everyone’s in the boat, and we all have an oar, and we’re all going the same direction,” says Brett Opie, VP of Sales for Skender. “We’re killing it.”

    Killing it, partly because they’re no longer trying to kill an un-killable Hydra.

    Why you should (or maybe shouldn’t) choose Membrain, too

    If you’re operating in a b2b sales environment where HOW you sell matters, Membrain is your lifeline to clear, Hydra-free, blue oceans–and better fishing.

    But maybe Membrain isn’t for you. We don’t pretend to try to serve everyone. We are here only for companies that want to enable process-driven, highly effective and predictable sales performance in a complex b2b sales environment.

    If that’s you, it’s time to leave fighting the Hydra to your competitors. Contact us today to see how Membrain does everything you need in one beautiful, intuitive, streamlined solution.

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    George Brontén
    Published July 3, 2019
    By George Brontén

    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.

    Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn