We started Helpie with a simple belief – we cannot build a great sales organisation by just obsessing with control and supervision, we need to make our sales reps better at selling.
It’s the old General versus Soldier debate.
Wars are not unidimensional exercises. They need budget, strategy, tactics, action and measurement. Yes, all five.
No matter how great the general’s war room strategy is, battles are won on the battlefield. By the soldiers. That’s why the training each soldier receives, the gear and weapon he carries and his physical and mental fitness when a battle is raging, combine to make him perform to his fullest. And make it worth the general’s while to see the results on a dashboard in the war room.
It’s a bit like that in Sales. Our sales reps, whom we hire with care, need our sales strategy, support, training and incentives. But they also need the latest tools to succeed everyday in the field. If they don’t take the right actions to succeed, the dashboard we look at won’t mean much.
We are building Helpie to be that tool.
But isn’t that what CRMs are for? Perhaps.
Unfortunately, most CRMs have emerged to be a top down system, the General’s dashboard if you will, focusing on pipeline visibility, reporting and monitoring and not so much on making the rep better at understanding, engaging and selling. The generals love it, the soldiers don’t, because CRMs often reduce the soldier into a data entry guy. No wonder the generals have to kick and scream and use carrot and stick, to get the reps to enter the data into the CRM. We have seen this time and again in every CRM using company. CRM isn’t just joyful.
As might be obvious by now, we are taking the opposite approach. That’s why we have two kinds of sales reps [and companies] in mind in designing Helpie – a. those who don’t have a CRM and manage their customer engagement life via tools like Excel, phone, google calendar, paper diary and notebook, perhaps a note or to-do app and b. those who are CRM fatigued.
Will Helpie replace the CRM?
No. It may actually make the investment in CRM worth it.
Will sales soldiers like Helpie? Fingers crossed, for now.