Sales team collaboration

I studied business logistics, called supply chain now, at Penn State. I remember the diagrams of a seamless universe of suppliers, customers, with the manufacturer placed right in the center. Data flowed from the customer to the manufacturer and to all partners that needed this data. The diagram was great. Cost and time was ripped out of the buy side and sell side supply chain ant the profit pie was bigger for all participants. For CRM and sales software this seamless collaboration is not happening.

The cost and training overhead of CRM is preventing this. Take a business unit of a manufacturing company. This company sells solely thru Distribution partners. This distribution network is built with 600 distributors. There may be a layer of regional sales people that interact with the distributors in their patch. The regionals support the distys on larger deals and pass leads to the disty of their choice.

To tie in the distributors using typical CRM is cost prohibitive. First, you need at least 600 more CRM licenses ant 700USD per year. Second, you need to train the distys to go into the tool and use it. This is the hardest taske. Many times the disty is far larger than the manufacturer and will not use another sales tool.

A company can swerve by the first roadblock, cost, by using a free CRM with no software fees. But the training and adoption hill is still not climbed. Powerful online sales tools are available that solve the sales supply chain problem by smoothly routing and gathering data from large sales channels.