Search Our Catalog of Articles

  
 
New Generation of Internet Tools Empowering the Sales Force

Making CRM, SFA applications meaningful
 
Not too long ago, sales-force-automation and customer-contact-management software promised to revolutionize sales management and turn a pursuit that usually was accompanied by functional fuzziness into a finely tuned operation that could be professionally and quantitatively managed, sort of like accounting. Continuously fed by real-time information provided by the software on leads, meetings, proposals and follow-ups, sales executives would be able to analyze and orchestrate the progress and movements of their far-flung networks from the comfort of their office PCs, as easily as a teenager sits behind a terminal and manipulates a video game.
 
Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way. The reality is that, all too often, the implementation of sales-force-automation (SFA), customer-relationship-management (CRM) and customer-contact-management software falls short of expectations in the corporate setting. Simply put, they failed to win over the sales representative in the field. Thus, many millions of precious dollars have gone down corporate drains in pursuit of programs that didn't work for the managers who were intended to benefit and certainly did nothing for reps.
 
At least the recognition of this problem has begun to lead sales executives back to the heart of the matter: When it comes to omnibus management systems, what matters most in the sales game is the reaction of representatives in the field - not how their managers regard the system. In a discipline that depends on motivation, dedication, independence, a results focus and, often, spurts of creativity and hyper-achievement by its practitioners, such overhauls must play well with them. And in that crucial arena, many companies have come up way short when it comes to selecting and deploying their SFA and CRM programs.
 
The reason is simple: Rank-and-file sales reps often perceive this software as making their jobs more difficult without offering much of a corresponding benefit. They're the ones who must generate and transmit the extra data to management. And then the information often is used to create tighter accountability and place greater demands on reps by their managers. In the meantime, while almost all SFA and CRM systems provide useful features that help sales reps track, organize and access all the bits and pieces of information surrounding their contacts with customers and prospects, that's simply not enough for many reps. Most of them have long since been using contact managers on their own such as Microsoft Outlook, Act, and Janna, and - in the convenient confines of their own laptops and their own lead-tracking systems - they work just fine.
 
So what's a manager to do? One answer lies in a new generation of Internet-based information sources that offer top-quality data on customers and potential customers for sales professionals. It meets them where their needs are. And when such programs - including Hoovers.com, zapdata.com, Onesource.com and Digitalwork.com -- are linked dynamically with a top-flight SFA or CRM program, they can create tremendous synergies that benefit sales managers as well as reps and, in turn, the entire corporate sales process. A new wellspring of reliable customer-intelligence information then feeds and enhances an SFA or CRM program and delivers decision-driving data to the people who need it, at whatever level they are, when they need it and where they need it.
 
What kinds of information are we talking about here? Boatloads, some of it sucked up from the Internet, but even more of it generated by the proprietary access enjoyed only by the data-compiling company. zapdata.com, for example, gets its reams of fresh "firmographic" data from 26 different compilers, who in turn garner their information from thousands of their own sources worldwide. The providers include such brand-name information sources as Harris InfoSource, Harte-Hanks and Cahners Publishing. Even if this information otherwise would be available to sales representatives or their managers, the cost of pursuing and purchasing the thousands of resulting leads would be prohibitive. And in the meantime, as any sales rep worth his or her salt will tell you, the number of unqualified, dead-end leads they receive just seems to multiply. They get them from trade shows, from Web sites, from a company's tele-qualifying staff that provides less-than-thorough screening - from a wide variety of sources, and each futile lead simply adds to the rep's frustrations.
 
Let's say a rep has just moved to a new territory, metro Boston, and needs to understand as thoroughly and as quickly as possible where the prospects are in that market. He sells 401k-administration programs to medium-sized and large corporations in high-tech and other sorts of manufacturing industries. So he grabs the Boston telephone book and begins his search looking for manufacturers in the area. It's nearly pointless? First of all, Yellow Pages typically are better search vehicles for consumers than business-to-business sales reps. Though manufacturers may be categorized roughly by category of product, the listings provide only general phone numbers, without the name of a true contract who can get you in the door. They don't indicate anything about the size of a company or number of employees. And they certainly don't tell this rep the information that is most relevant to his task, which includes whether a company even has a 401(k) plan, how large it is, when it's up for renewal, and so on. But that is exactly the kind of data that is available through these new services, and it turns many, many unqualified leads into highly qualified, top-priority leads - or helps the rep eliminate them and stop wasting his or her time on wild goose chases.
 
Just as important though, is that these services don't just provide raw data - they help reps convert a cornucopia of relevant information into something even better: workable intelligence. For one thing, they make it painlessly accessible via the Internet, providing every rep as well as every manager access to new leads - and in bunches as small as 10 or 15 at a time, making them more digestible and more efficiently handled than the occasional major dump of hundreds of new prospects that may come from the top down in the rep's organization. So if he or she has just finished following up on the 11 leads from last week's trade show, but it is another two weeks yet until corporate marketing plans on sending out a direct-mail piece that can be expected to roust up some more leads, the rep can gain secure access to one of these new-breed programs on the Internet, pursue the 25 best leads that are presented - and be confident that the intelligence on each prospect is completely fresh because it is continuously updated by the service.
 
Moreover, these programs present a win-win-win situation: Reps have a bigger quantity and much higher quality of leads; the rep's pursuit of those leads is continuously fed into a compatible SFA or CRM software program, for the benefit of managers who want to track performance and communicate with their reps in the field; and the corporation gains because both its sales executives and its sales representatives are benefiting from and are motivated by the rewards of an integrated sales-management system that not only tracks performance but also enhances it.
 
These new programs aren't a panacea for what has ailed sales-management software. As long as sales reps, their managers and customers are human, no sales-tracking and -management system ever will offer that! But by equipping reps with the best and most up-to-date information possible on leads, and by integrating his activities with the rest of the sales-management process, such programs can make a big difference in the field. And that's where marketplace battles are won and lost.
 
About the Author
Douglas C. Borchard, co-founder of iMarket, Inc., serves as leader of zapdata.com, and in this capacity will manage this new business unit. At iMarket, Borchard most recently held the position of vice president of product planning and development. Prior to co-founding iMarket in 1991, he worked as group product manager for Lotus MarketPlace at Lotus Development Corp. There he was responsible for product definition, market strategy, and customer support and fulfillment. Before joining Lotus, he was a consultant to the electronic information industry with Bain and Company, where he provided strategic consulting to leading providers of business and consumer marketing information. He also worked as a product marketing manager at Apollo Computer. Before joining Apollo, Borchard managed a refugee camp in the Sudan. He holds a master's degree in business administration from Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar, and a bachelor's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.