When deciding how to approach your CRM implementation, applying the GOST (goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics) model can aid in directing your actions.
Using this model will clarify how and, more importantly, why you are implementing CRM.
What Is GOST?
If you are unfamiliar with the GOST model, here is a quick primer on each element:
Goals: A high-level description of the outcomes you wish to achieve — not just for your individual teams but also for the overall direction of your business.
Objectives: These are specific, measurable outcomes that define your business goal.
Strategies: The approaches you will take to achieve your goals.
Tactics: Tactics are the tools you use in pursuing an objective associated with a strategy.
We will take you through examples of applying this model to a CRM implementation next.
What’s Your Goal?
On the face of it, you may be thinking, “My goal is to implement CRM.” But the truth is, no organization implements CRM just to be able to say they have it. You most likely purchased CRM to enable a broader goal, such as increasing sales.
But increasing sales isn’t the whole picture. Why does your company want to increase sales? To increase revenue. It looks and sounds obvious when we spell it out, but spelling things out is the point of using the GOST model.
So, the goal is to increase revenue.
Creating Measurable Objectives
To keep this example simple, we will only define a single objective. In a real-world application, however, you may define several objectives to achieve your stated goal of increasing revenue.
The most crucial aspect of creating an objective is that it is measurable. For example, to increase revenue, one objective might be to call more leads. But that’s not enough because “call more leads” is not measurable. To make your objective measurable, it needs to be quantified.
If your sales reps are each averaging fifty calls per day, and you’ve calculated that they need to make an additional ten to fifteen calls per day to hit your revenue goals, then they need to average approximately 25% more calls per day. That’s a measurable, quantified objective.
The objective is to increase call volume by 25% per rep.
Thinking Strategically
So far, we know that the goal is to increase revenue, and we need to increase each sales rep’s daily call volume by 25%. How are we going to make that happen? One strategy would be for your sales manager to stand behind each rep for part of the day and bark at them, hoping it inspires them to work faster.
That’s probably not a good strategy, but it is a strategy.
Another strategy might be to streamline your sales process so that your reps spend less time hunting for prospects and more time on the phone making calls.
The strategy is to streamline the sales process.
Deploying Your Tactics
Tactics are where the rubber meets the road. Your tactics are the tools you deploy to enable your strategy and objectives.
We need to increase each sales rep’s daily call volume in our example. To do that, we’ve decided to try to streamline the sales process to free our reps from time-consuming tasks and repurpose that time for calls.
Guess what? CRM is an excellent tool for doing that very thing. What a coincidence, right? Of course, deploying a CRM system isn’t the only tactic you’ll need to use to accomplish your objective. What’s important here is that you have a clear picture of why you are implementing a CRM system.
So, to complete our GOST example, one of our tactics is to implement a CRM system.
Putting It All Together
What’s great about using the GOST framework is that it’s applicable regardless of where you are on the company org chart.
If you’re a sales manager who has been tasked with increasing your organization’s sales volume, you could take this very example into your boss’s office tomorrow and say something to the effect of:
“To increase revenue, we need to increase each of our rep’s call volume by 25% daily. The best way to do that is by streamlining the current sales process to reduce friction and time spent on non-call tasks. One of the best tools to do that is a CRM system.”
Many organizations make the mistake of buying a CRM system and then deciding which problems they want it to solve after the fact. That’s a recipe for a bad CRM implementation.
You can hit the ground running with your CRM implementation by first defining your GOST — goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics.
That way, you will not just be implementing CRM technology but an entire business plan with well-defined strategies that your people can action.
