A rather low tech breakthrough and the implications for CRM technology…

There was an interesting article on the BBC site – and elsewhere I’m sure – which highlighted a breakthrough in significantly reducing the amounts of deaths and complications resulting from surgery. The breakthrough was not as you might suppose a technology related one, but the simple introduction of a check-list. Apparently the check-list drawn up by the Harvard School of Public health on behalf of the World Health Organisation covers areas such as: Do we have the right patient? Are we operating on the correct body part? Have we left any items within the patient that perhaps shouldn’t be there?

Interestingly this introduction of this low/no tech device has proved highly successful. A study in the Lancet indicated that prior to the check-list there was a 64% probability that one of the procedures would be forgotten, and results of a pilot in eight countries showed a substantial decrease in complications and deaths.

So if highly trained surgeons and their teams operating in a ‘mission critical’ fashion in what you would suppose would be a highly process driven environment could make basic errors, then it does raise the question as to how we are faring in the rather less process driven world of sales and marketing. If surgeons, and probably more pertinently their patients, can substantially benefit from the introduction of a check-list could this have implications for how we market and sell?

I know from my own experience that one relatively unsophisticated, but highly effective application of CRM technology, is to help salespeople and their managers better navigate the sales cycle by providing what is in effect a check-list of things that the salesperson should be asking or aware of. For example, how does the sales opportunity fit with defined qualification criteria? what’s the decision making process? what’s the decision time-line? Who’s involved in making the decision? what’s the compelling event, have we passed out contracts to the legal department for review? etc etc. We found that even highly capable and experienced salespeople overlooked basic information which would give them better control of the sales and a higher likelihood of success.

But that’s just one area – how many other areas of our front office endeavours could be beneficially check-listed? From some of the howlers in scrambled email marketing campaigns of which I’ve been a regular beneficiary, I’d suggest there are quite a few marketing managers that wished they’d consulted a check-list before they pressed the send button. Perhaps the nub here is that if you systemise processes effectively there’s substantial scope to improve what you do, and I believe that CRM technology has a much bigger role to play in this respect than people generally appreciate.

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