Kevin Rickson
Senior Director E-Business Suite Marketing
Oracle Corporation
shirley.straface@oracle.com
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Q: Why is Integrated Selling Imperative for Sales Success?
Selling products and services in today's economy has become a complex process. It usually involves multiple sales channels, team-selling situations, outside partners, global customers, and widely distributed inventories. Some companies try to manage their sales efforts by implementing a diverse range of automation products-one for field sales automation; another for service management; and others for Web stores, call centers, reporting, and inventory management. In global organizations, companies typically duplicate all these products in each country of involvement, adding dramatically to the overall complexity of an enterprise.
The result of this patchwork approach is that sales reps aren't given the information they need to be effective. Instead, they face the customer with incomplete, inaccurate information and make errors such as:
- Promising immediate delivery to a customer, not knowing that the item is on back order
- Contacting a customer with new
product information, unaware that the customer is still waiting for a previous service problem to be addressed
- Spending time cultivating a customer relationship, unaware that the customer is in collections
- Not recognizing the strategic importance of a customer, who has a small individual account but belongs to a global, parent organization that represents high value to the enterprise
Members of the sales team-including strategic partners-need to be fully armed with this type of customer information. Tracking these sales requires an integrated sales application that seamlessly links all customer data, product information, sales tools, pricing schedules, financial background information, inventory status, delivery schedules, and more. There should be seamless access to any required information, whether it is in the front office or in the back office such as manufacturing, inventory management, human resources, or project management.
To manage
this flow of information, organizations should implement integrated sales applications for all sales channels. These applications should include field sales, Web sales, partner sales, interaction center sales (telesales), sales intelligence, and incentive compensation. Each should provide multi-lingual, multi-currency support for global enterprises; enable and support team-selling situations; and simplify system administration for IT departments.
With this integrated approach, all information pertaining to customers, their sales histories, and the sales teams associated with each customer is stored centrally, using the same customer model and the same software architecture as the rest of the organization. Any authorized sales person working in any sales channel can access and report on it. The end result of such an integrated approach is an enterprise singular view of its customers; and returns immediate benefits at lower cost for selling success.
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