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Sales
Force Automation: Smoothing Out the Bumps in theRoad
* EACH MONTH, we interview an experienced professional on a topic of interest to salespeople and sales managers. This month's guest interviewee is Terry Booton, President of Advanced Marketing Instruction. Q. Can you give us an example of a time when you were able to make an existing sales automation system work better than it had been working? A. One of my recent clients was a major software company that marketed directly to businesses. Within their organization, theyd installed a particular type of sales management software that was supposed to give salespeople access to leads, account data, and information about each contact's status within the sales process. It all sounded fine in theory, but the problem was that the salespeople weren~t really using the software to drive the sales process. Q. Why do you think that was? A. There were three main reasons. One was that salespeople were being asked to do a great deal of data entry, and that didn't endear them to the idea of using the system. The second reason was that management wanted reliable forecasts - but these were impossible to put together, because of a lack of data integrity and data consistency. The word 'prospect," for instance, had various different meanings to different people; no naming conventions had been established, so everyone was using different criteria to describe account status, and there was no way to distinguish qualified leads from other contacts. Third, because salespeople were on the road, they had to synchronize their data with their main offices - but since the software had never been properly configured, this took far, far too long. Salespeople were spending 30 to 45 minutes instead of two minutes to get their data to and from the office, and a lot of them were giving up. Who could blame them? So thanks to those three problems, the system had pretty much failed. Q. Is that kind of configuration problem a common one? A. Very common. By the way, there's another common reason sales automation systems fail, though it wasn't the case here. Often, companies buy software that is completely inadequate to what they should be trying to accomplish with their sales force, and then try to make the organization fit the software. In this case, even though management hadn't done as much research on matching the software to the situation as they could have, knew I could make their existing system work in their selling environment. Q. How did you do that? A. The big challenge was that salespeople were spending as much time as they should have been in discussions with qualified prospects. They were slogging through lots of unqualified leads that they didn’t have enough information about. They were spending a considerable time tracking down information. And they were being asked to use a system that had not been properly set up - a system that lacked integrity. So I sat down with the top management of the company and told them that I thought we'd need to change a few things internal before we could make the best possible use of their salespeople's time. Q What did you suggest? A. I told them that the leads needed to be qualified by the people in the marketing department. In other words, instead of simply passing along a name, address, and telephone number, the marketing people needed to be responsible for identifying a lot more relevant information. Before we came on the scene, there had been no requirements defined, no design planning sessions, and no implementation plan developed! As a result of that, marketing people were simply dumping all their leads in with the qualified leads, making the system very unstable. When we were finished, the salespeople knew more about the size of the company, the involvement of top people in relevant purchasing decisions, and the recent activity that affected the likelihood to buy. That meant that the marketing people spent a little more time developing leads for the salespeople - but it also meant that the salespeople spent virtually no time keying in background information, which wasn’t what they'd been hired to do in the first place. They had been hired to meet with likely prospects and close them. And that's exactly what they ended up doing. Once they started using the system to track the best leads, rather than enter all the leads, they bought into it. Q What about those forecasts management was after. A. As part of the work we did, we were able to identify a specific series of steps in the sales process that the salespeople could use to categorize prospective customers. As a lead reached a certain point in the process, we were able to identify a percentage ranking 30%, 50%, 70%, whatever -that described the likelihood of the prospect closing within a certain period. Once we got the salespeople to start using the system in this way. The reps no longer had to do forecasts; these were now automatic. It was easy for management to pull up the forecasting information it wanted for a given time frame. Automating the sales force -- and accelerating sales cycle -- after a rocky start Q. What was the overall reception to the work you did on fine-tuning the system? A. Very positive,
because our results were excellent - and measurable. We reconfigured the
software so Q Any final thoughts? A. Just that
most companies don't choose their software carefully enough, and don't
take into account
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By
Terry Booton, President