Today’s sales operations professionals have a wealth of solutions they can use to raise sales productivity.  However, getting the most out of these solutions — often referred to as “Sales 2.0” tools — can be a challenge.  Despite being touted as “plug and play,” they can easily languish in the early stages of implementation and deliver few of their promised benefits.

Why don’t these solutions achieve the widespread adoption that is key to their success?  Is it because their potential merits are over-billed?  Is it because people didn’t receive the proper training?  Although these are reasons often cited when sales productivity tools fail, a more common cause is that companies often implement solutions without first documenting and refining the processes they are seeking to automate.

For example, a marketing automation solution that is implemented without a sound lead-scoring strategy can easily hurt productivity by sending poorly qualified leads to the sales organization.  Similarly, introducing a customer intelligence tool will do little to improve dialog with customers if sales professionals don’t exercise good call-planning practices.  Even something as common as a CRM deployment can fail to deliver accurate forecasts unless there is a set of consistent sales-stage definitions that all the members of a sales team understand and adhere to.

Whatever sales productivity solution you are implementing, be it suspect identification, prospect nurturing, proposal generation, compensation administration, CRM, sales enablement, etc., these threats can be kept in check by sweating the process details up front.  Clearly documenting current processes and then refining them as needed is the only way to ensure their successful automation.  The goal here is not to fit your processes to the tool, but to make sure that they’re well designed, consistent, and properly aligned with the tool’s capabilities.

Process refinement is an iterative task that often requires crossing organizational boundaries to achieve optimal results.  With this in mind, the formation of an interdepartmental steering committee is a best practice.  Well-moderated meetings by such a committee can reveal issues that were either unrecognized or unspoken and address them before automation begins.  Including representation from sales can also secure their support right from the start.

Here are some discussion questions that can help you use these meetings to build a plan for successful solution implementation:

1. What is the problem we’re trying to solve?  What’s it costing us?
2. How much time does the current way of doing things take?  Why?
3. What information needs to be accessed?  What integration with other systems is required?
4. How are exceptions handled?
5. Where might manual processes be required?
6. What are the user requirements with respect to mobile usage?  User interface?  Reporting?
7. What behavior change will be necessary?  How do we encourage adoption of new behaviors (e.g., update position descriptions, assign MBOs)?
8. What cultural factors might slow adoption?  How do we address them?
9. How are other departments involved in this process?  What do we need from them?  What do they need from us?
10. What management reports are needed?  How can we embed their use within other processes (e.g., team meetings) so that solution adoption is reinforced?
11. Do we need phased implementation plan?
12. What are some early successes we can target?
13. What are the training requirements?  How will it be administered?  What about remote workers?
14. What ongoing governance is needed to assure process adherence and data integrity?
15. How can we measure outcomes?  Where do we expect to reduce costs, increase revenue, or improve efficiency?

As questions are answered and consensus gained, the resulting plan should be carefully documented.  It will be a vital guide for the new behaviors that automation will require and help the implementation team configure the tool so that it achieves rapid results and widespread adoption.  While this may sound like a lot of work, taking the time to document and refine processes prior to implementation will ensure your sales productivity tool investment produces measurable and significant returns.

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