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set revenue goals. Two metrics you can use to measure the success of your sales organization are cost of sales and revenue. Your sales managers should be compensated based on these two metrics; this ensures that the managers work both to control the costs associated with selling and to drive revenue. Support Systems, Processes, and Technologies Technology is central to good selling and good sales management; this chapter has touched on many sales and management processes, most enabled by technology. As you begin to form your sales organization, a crucial question will be: What technology do I need? The software that you choose will be distinct based on your firms current technology, the structure and size of your sales and marketing organizations, your unique sales process, and, most importantly, how your sales and client service professionals actually work. Choosing the right technology is important and at times difficult. Kevin Hoffberg, of Decision-Quality, LLC, states, For the most part, technology for sales organizations is a miserable failure. 14 This failure primarily results from a lack of understanding about how people work. Organizations often purchase and implement technology solutions to improve productivity or streamline processes without understanding what sales and client services professionals do on a day-to-day basis. If you have done the work suggested in previous chapters, you have a good understanding of your sales process; you have worked to integrate your sales, marketing, and consulting professionals; and you know a bit about how your people work. This is the first step in ensuring a successful technology implementation. To help you further along the technology journey, this section marks a path through the layered world of technology to help you evaluate your options. Layer 1: Create access. Of prime importance is your professionals ability to communicate and to communicate remotely. Thus, the first technology layer enables access-access to clients and colleagues. To facilitate communication, every firm should have e-mail. After this rudimentary step, the communications challenges mount. Sales professionals, who spend much of their time out of the office, need the ability to remotely access, send, and receive e-mail; do text messaging; and make telephone calls. For any size firm, remote access technology, such as the Blackberry, is rapidly becoming a cost of entry. Your firm must invest in this technology if you want your sales professionals to be available and responsive to clients and prospects. Over time, you might consider providing your sales professionals with laptops or PDAs that enable remote access to documents or hardware with Wi-Fi access. It is important that sales managers investigate the latest technologies. Sales professionals will be hungry for communication technology that improves their access to clients, colleagues, and their work, and they will actively use it. Layer 2: Find ways to share. This layer is collaboration. Every professional services firm needs to share information in a way that allows sales and client service professionals to access collective wisdom and knowledge. This collaboration helps professionals to mine data, build client service teams, and create more compelling sales presentations. But, how do I collaborate? Before you can answer these questions, you need to examine how people work. How do they work? Most likely, both your professionals and salespeople spend most of their time using office automation/desktop tools such as MS-Outlook, MS-Word, MS-Excel, and MS-PowerPoint. After all, these professionals are in the business of communicating and building documents. Now, management decides that the firm needs to share information and monitor customer and pipeline data and asks sales and client service professionals to jump to another console to input numbers. This approach will not work- there will be resistance. In a call center environment, you can configure a CRM tool, such as Siebel, so that the call center sales professionals can do all of their work within that system. But, if you work for FTI, an advertising firm, a law firm, or any other professional services firm, you will be hard pressed to get your professionals to jump from Outlook or PowerPoint to another console. They just wont go there. So, what is the solution? There is no simple answer; however, there are some guidelines and tips that you can follow. The decision about what technology you need is driven by complexity. Access is the first and most critical layer, and after that comes sharing. Dependent on the size of your sales organization, your sales process, and your go-to-market touchpoints, your technology needs will be different. When your firm is small, collaborating will be relatively easy. You can simply share information via meetings and simple e-mails saying, Has anybody got...? or Does anybody know...? As your firm grows and you have multiple client access points, you will want to evaluate an Application Service Provider (ASP) hosted solution, such as Microsoft CRM or Salesforce.com. These solutions interface with MS-Outlook, so your sales professionals can continue to work primarily within the e-mail system. However, as your firm grows even bigger, you will want to consider working with an outside consultant to implement a CRM tool. Implementing a complex technology solution often sparks a firmwide culture war-after all, technology changes the way people work and impacts the very nature of the way you conduct business. To navigate this tension and this process, it is helpful to have a customer relationship expert at your side. Exhibit 4.9 summarizes software solutions designed to facilitate the sales and customer relationship management process and provides information to guide your initial software evaluation.
Exhibit 4.9 Software Solutions for Customer Relationship Management 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 [ 44 ] 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 |