Very early this Monday morning, I was driving out of Vermont, headed back to the NH beach.  

• 38 degrees out by the barn when I left at 4:30
• Frost on the pumpkin...and everything else 
• Cold enough to hear the crunch as I walked across the field
• Even the Vette warned "possible ice" on its heads-up display
• And a gray, whitish fog thick enough to bounce the high beams 

It was the fog that concerned me most.  The Vette really wanted to run on the snaky little S turns and narrow banks that can only be found in Vermont.  Yet, no matter how hard I stared ahead, how many times I blinked and rubbed my eyes, and no matter how hard I hoped that the fog would lift, and the outlook would improve, the reality that pushed back at me was this wall of continuing thick, impenetrable gray that kept me blocked in, slowed down and frustrated.

I've discovered over the summer, that the Vette's electronics are pretty good.  Not quite up to the top of the line Japanese cars, but there's all of the normal GPS and navigation systems plus On-Star and a variety of voice recognition commands that allow me to access Google, the Weather Channel and a variety of other apps. All very interesting, but there's nothing that would tell me if the fog would continue for miles, or just fluff away at the top of the next hill.

I then began to think about what else I could use in the car that would give me a more defined and more accurate view of what lies ahead.  With the exception of fog-piercing radar, which would be way cool, I came up with nothing else short of a driverless car.  Then my mind started to drift over to a comparison of what I was experiencing charging ahead in the Vette on a foggy Vermont twisty-turny, and what I too often see among some of our customers in board meetings when the head of sales presents his or her forecast for the balance of the quarter.   In some cases, even in very complex sales situations, I leave those meetings with great comfort since the forecasts are presented on the basis of analytics provided from the intersections of math, processes, tools and technologies that are fully CRM-integrated.  While in others, I step out of the board meeting totally lost in the fog and having to make my own guesses from their guesses which were based on the guesses of their salespeople, which came from the guesses of the wrong people at their prospective customer.  

Those of us who live deep in the furrows of Sales & Marketing 2.x-3.0 are always incorporating integrated apps into our CRM and CMS platforms in order to improve our forecastability, but more importantly, the productivity of our salespeople.  If this is an environment that you want to begin learning about, check out the July-August, 2012 edition of HBR to read a series of excellent articles about the revolution in sales processes and sales management.   

Once you get through digesting a few of these ideas, then you also need to understand that there is about to be another revolution in sales and selling processes during the next couple of years. 

Personally, in our own business, I and my managers could not conduct business without...

• Brainshark's entire Sales productivity platform
• Insight Squared's easy-to-use sales analytics 
• Hubspot's CMS suite which defines our entire marketing program
• Salesforce's Desktop & App Exchange which is the world we work in
• Docusign's simplicity
• Go-to-Meeting's instant collaboration

...and 8 or so other integrations that we use daily in order to pierce the fog and provide us with better visibility as to our sales forecasts, our customers' histories and notes, and a very succinct view of the future of our business.

Plus, we're always experimenting with more and more applications and platforms, which is why I really enjoyed reading the release this Monday from G2 that provided a market overview of suppliers at the Dreamforce conference, which has been in full swing this week.  Click HERE for a better view of the graphic below and a ranking of the Contenders-Leaders-High Performance-Niche players.

Given this exciting (but also, noisy) sales and marketing automation ecosystem of hundreds and hundreds of integrated tools, platforms and analytics, I cannot imagine attempting to work through the fog of what future sales forecasts would be for any company simply by "gut feel" or asking salespeople the question of..."What's your probability to close?"  

And yet, there are thousands and thousands of well-established, small and middle market companies who, even today, do not have working CRM systems, and they seemingly appear to operate just fine and are nicely profitable.  To drive this point home, a couple of weeks ago, I was giving a speech on the new world of sales and marketing to a group of disributors at their national convention.  These men and women represented...

• well established companies
• multi-generational owners
• great managers who really cared about their customers and employees

...and yet, in the entire audience, only three companies had working CRM platforms, plus no one used any marketing automation although there were a number of ongoing experiments in inbound marketing and social selling. 

The "So What?" of this observation is that although these companies appeared to be "doing just fine", the time that these business owners take every day trying to pierce through the fog without integrated CMS and CRM platforms is very counterproductive.   This is not to say that they are bad businesses-quite the opposite. The majority of these businesses are growing and profitable.  At the same time, it begs questions that we should all pose with our teams at next week's sales review as we prepare to finalize our 2015 business plans. 

• What could we adopt in our CRM use that would improve our sales productivity not by 5%, but by 20% by the end of 2015?
• In a world of 10,000 plus sales apps that directly integrate into SFDC and MS CRM, what specific tools could we be using that would improve the time availability of our sales team by 10% by June of next year?
• Where can we invest training time (which might be considerable) and a small amount of money to improve our daily use of our CRM so that we all become fully certified users by April and not just continue to be the casual note takers that we are today?

As you take a look at the platforms and tools defined in the graphic above, part of your job as a manager is to explore different solutions and opportunities that, of course, provide your company with higher revenues and profits.  But, of greater importance, you need to insure that your salespeople have at their fingertips the processes, the technologies, and the tools that provide them with the ability to be both highly efficient and effective with their prospects and customers.