SPECIAL FEATURE
package components and getting out of
it what they want. With any big group of
people, it’s just going to take time to implement.
SalesNexus not only has training sessions every day live and on the web, they
also have recorded training sessions that
allows someone within a couple of days to
be brought up to speed. When Craig started SalesNexus, he had the background of
having managed salespeople long enough
to realize that they are generally a very tortured lot of people. Craig commented, “On
the one hand, they’re really the engine of
the whole economy. You know the saying,
‘Nothing happens until you sell something.’
We all rely on them but at the same time
they have had a very bad reputation.”
Craig says he found this out in the industry back when oil was $10 a barrel and
there were a lot of lay offs. When salespeople were hired back then, the majority
were laid off geologists. They felt that being a salesperson was a big step down even
though in most cases they were making a
lot more money. Just socially, it was a step
down. “I always felt that this was wrong,”
remarked Craig. “Salespeople are important and they should know it. I wanted to
enable them to do their jobs more efficiently and shift their focus from numbers.”
That’s why Craig worked so hard to develop
something that would make it easier for
the salesperson to connect to the customer; to really help them by automating that
part of the business that is a numbers game
so they could focus their time listening to
their customers needs and being able to
deliver something of value.
“CRM -- or customer relationship management -- is kind of like the center, the
core. Around that are lead generation,
lead nurturing, and email marketing which
allows you to connect with those leads
through process automation. When the
customer is done with one campaign, they
automatically go to a different campaign,”
Craig explains, “and the sales team can be
alerted to call the prospect when they’re
showing interest by clicking on the right
things in the emails. The best part is that
a lot of busy work is eliminated as well and
everything is documented in real time.”
Craig added, “When people say they are
looking for a CRM, they really mean they
are looking for one place to go. They want
to know what happened last with Mr. or
Mrs. Customer.”
Growing up in Houston, Craig attended Cy-Fair High School. He then went on
to Texas A&M where he got his degree in
electrical engineering. He worked for a
year with NASA. “It was kind of cool,” Craig
stated, “because this was when they were
shooting the shuttles up all the time, but I
hated the bureaucracy.” Craig got his first
sales job “and never looked back.”
Craig says he initially worked with a partner based here in Houston but they had a
lot of developers in Vietnam. “We found
that differences in physical location, language, and everything else made things
more difficult.”
Today, Craig has two full time developers and a support team. Kendra Banton
runs the whole customer support group.
They do all the new client implementation.