Sales Intelligence - Intelligence Sells

Do your Sales People Prepare for Smarter Selling?

2009-09-14T15:52:00.001+01:00

Do your Sales People Prepare for Smarter Selling?

80% of our Sales People work hard, but the successful ones work SMART.

How do you ensure that all of your sales people work smart? To be honest, it has never been easy to get all of our sales people doing the same things. In most cases you will have one or two exceptional sales people, several average ones and a couple of poor ones.

It just seems to be the way.

Do we find out what our best sales people are doing and share it as best practice?

In most cases we probably do, but the trouble is most smart sales people don’t really like sharing the whole truth to their success because they like to stay one step ahead.

You have probably heard the story of the salesman who was the best in his industry and sold more shatterproof glass than any other sales person in the land. When he was asked what his secret was at an annual conference he reluctantly revealed that he would smash the glass with a hammer and then ask; how much glass would you like to order sir?

Every sales person in the company thereafter was given a hammer as a tool to sell more glass, and sell more glass they did, sales were up 60%, but at the next annual conference the same salesman was still top of the company. When he was asked why?? He revealed that he gave the hammer to his prospect and allowed them to smash the glass before taking their order.

A smart salesman will rarely reveal the whole truth behind his or her success; it is just in their nature.

You are unlikely to get the same performance from all of you sales people. But if you give them a hammer you will increase sales and get a more consistent performance.

The new hammer for sales successes is Sales Intelligence or (SI). I’m sure is a term that you have heard of.

The business of the future will use Sales Intelligence the ones that don’t may get left behind.

What is Sales Intelligence?

Sales Intelligence Systems (SI) is often referred to as the infrastructure that enables your business to grow and increase profits. Your business already has this valuable information locked away in your transaction data. That very data is your Sales Intelligence.

When you hear the term Sales Intelligence or SI people are usually referring to a Sales Intelligence system, this is the engine that helps you interpreted that valuable data in to very usable sales information.

Well what Sales Intelligence does your company have? Your company already knows

* which customers you’ve sold to
* Where those customers are
* Who their contacts are.
* You also know what products they bought
* When they bought them.
* How much you sold
* How much profit you made.
* How many they bought
* How your products are grouped
* What outstanding orders you have

You may also know if your customers are a member of a group and what industry they are in.

Having this information is important, but using this information is essential. Sales Intelligence Systems trawl through this data and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities as well as highlighting customer drift, they then send this information to your sales people in the form of alerts, i.e.

This customer has bought product A and not Product B – Find out why?

This customer has not bought core product from us this week – Find out why?

This customer is in ***** industry and has not bought this linked product – Find out why?

This customer is up on spend but down on margin – Find out why?

The secret to sales success is Sales Intelligence. Give your sales people the tools they need to succeed.

How do you increase sales in an economic downturn?

2009-03-31T14:14:00.011+01:00

Most companies I talk to are still in a state of shock! How did this recession come on so fast? What is the best tactic to protect and improve our position?

For many businesses, the days of effortlessly relying on a steady and secure sales income appear to have gone, and with a shrinking pie, it has never been more important to protect and increase market share.
As some businesses are battling to stay alive, still others are trying to avoid slipping backwards by just holding on to what they have. The temptation to cut corners and costs appeals to far too many, and many have tarnished their businesses as a result.

While it is true that the overriding principle of business is to make a profit, different companies opt for different solutions; but it is always vital to ensure that your actions are positive, that they have a positive effect on your staff, your business and your results.

There are many ways to deal with this unprecedented and difficult climate, but the most important thing is to ensure you take the right action for your business.

Some common decisions:

• Make redundancies in the sales team.
• Focus on selling higher margin products.
• Cut costs in the marketing budget.
• Optimise the distribution operation.
• Remove higher salaries from the business.
• Focus on maximising sales within the existing customer base.

Many factors need to be taken into consideration, but without continuing to optimize customers and sales, any cost cutting and other often drastic actions could cease to be effective or fail to deliver the desired results.

Don't be fooled into thinking that some of your favourite and long term customers will always buy from you. Did you know that if you are in wholesale, manufacturing or distribution, on average your "Loyal" customer will be buying from 4.5 other suppliers and buying products they should be buying from you.

Customers love to cherry pick, especially in this climate.
It is believed that the cost of new sales is nearly 8 times more expensive than to keep and look after existing customers.

The answer is not only to ensure that you look after your existing customers but that you also identify the potential additional sales within your existing customer base.

To do this your sales people need actionable information - not just gut feel and a good memory. The types of information your sales reps need to be looking at may seem somewhat obvious i.e. who's buying product A but not product B? Why has this customer stopped buying a core product from us? Who's not bought so far this month? Where can I sell higher margin product?
But how easy is this information to get at? If you have hundreds of customers and thousands of products and your sales reps don't have a degree in I.T or database management, then I would suggest it's not easy at all!

Your business relies on its IT infrastructure to ensure accurate accounting for stock, monies and for invoice production. What Financial Director or Controller could live without it? Technology and the accountant are seen as complementary. I would bet there's not an accountant in the land who could live without a spreadsheet.

We spend tens of thousands of pounds supporting the financial side our business but seem to loose focus when it comes to our sales force which for many businesses is possibly their most expensive resource.
Fortunately the time and money spent on your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system means that you can double the benefits through use of intelligent information. Your sales people could now have the knowledge needed to increase sales.

So what now? What are the choices?

Do you let your sales people spend valuable selling time trawling through data looking for sales opportunities, or do you let them out on the road, or hit the phones blind? Obviously few would do either through choice. This choice is simply the inevitable consequence of having to deal with a huge volume of data. But managing data is what computers are so good at, so it makes sense to look for a way to use IT to improve the working life of the salesperson by removing this need to compromise.

Sales intelligence (S.I)

Successful sales depend on identifying the right opportunities and delivering the right package. A sales intelligence solution will automate the extraction of this knowledge and deliver it to your sales people.

Sales intelligence software monitors and analyses the buying patterns of customers by drawing data from your existing accounts and enterprise software. Irregularities and other trends in customer spending will then trigger alerts that then translate into instant, actionable sales leads delivered straight to the relevant sales representatives.

The result is a more productive sales team, an increased share of customer spend, higher profitability, improved customer retention and increased marketing response.

Companies that have implemented sales intelligence solutions regularly report a return on investment of 20 to 30 percent.

Looking at what IT can do for sales is not "rocket science" and it does not involve re-engineering your business. It's simply a question of optimizing the investments you have already made to provide salespeople with the tools they need to venture beyond their normal boundaries and become high achievers and to help your business not only survive but to prosper through the tough times.

Structured Selling – A White Paper.

2009-01-26T14:15:00.013Z

Structured Selling – A White Paper.

Find out how a structured sales process will optimize the results and productivity of your current sales team.

Sales management is often described as the ultimately accountable job – and for good reason. Every sales manager has a constant challenge, i.e. how to lead, focus, support, monitor and incentivise, their sales team. Often, such a team comprises a group of individuals with disparate skills and experience and a common problem is encountered when staffs have been in their respective roles for some time. Familiarity can lead to people operating through habit.

“I know what my customers want”

“After 10 years, you get to know what’s selling”

“I’ve been doing this for so long; I could do it in my sleep”

Such statements can often be heard when people confuse experience with success. The simple truth is that markets are dynamic and there is never room for complacency. However, the solution is straightforward. The relentless rise of the major supermarket chains offer an insight into how attention to detail and the leveraging of available data, as generated by their everyday transaction processing, enables them to analyse opportunities quickly and efficiently. This concept is not limited to large corporations and any company will benefit from adopting a structured sales process.

‘Pick the low hanging fruit’

Rather than seek a silver bullet, a new market, killer product or the elusive ‘Super Salesman’, it is far more productive to optimize what you already have and generate more business through effectively identifying and converting the opportunities ‘staring you on the face’.

As a manager with a leading retail chain, I was personally involved in the implementation of a ground breaking sales process within the Group, which had a profound impact on the entire marketplace. The result of this initiative was that we saw under-performing sales people, many of whom had never delivered significant results, achieve consistently high, long term sales figures.

It is a great example, to show what can be achieved, to compare the two largest independent mobile phone retailer in the UK, Car Phone Warehouse (CPW)and Phones 4U (P4U).

In March 2005 P4U invested in implementing a structured sales process, which they called ‘Sales Process 1’ or SP1. As the name implies, the objective of the exercise was to ensure that all sales related staff were given a methodical system by which to work, designed to ensure that all sales opportunities were identified, optimized and converted. Nothing was left to chance and the system was engineered to ensure that every sales person could deliver maximum results regardless of their experience. Nine months later, P4U had increased revenue and service connections by 15% and were achieving a similar turnover to CPW with less than 5 times the amount of retail outlets.

As at 30th mar 06, CPW had 1778 stores, generating £2.35 billion in revenue, with 21% market share. At the same time, P4U had 353 stores, generating £2.12 Billion in revenue with 20% market share.

By 2006 P4U had implemented its third generation sales process, codenamed ‘Pitch for Business’. By refining its processes and procedures, P4U has sought to improve its success rates and convert more business, not just through the opening of more branches and hiring more staff but by optimizing its resources.

tURNOVER * £2.12 billion	TURNOVER £ 2.35 Billion
PROFIT EBITDA £161 MILLION	PROFIT EBITDA £173 MILLION
STORES 353	STORES 1,778
MARKET SHARE 20%	MARKET SHARE 21%
CE* Won the JDPower award 2 yrs	CS* No awards in 2005

TURNOVER* = (This figure excludes Caudwell communications as it was up for sale at the time) (£405 million)
CE* = Customer Excellence (P4u say the term customer service is the minimum tolerance, excellence is the goal)
CS* = Customer Service
EBITDA = (Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) EBITA (Earnings before interest, tax and amortisation).
All of the figures stated in this document are from the companies own websites and press releases and refer to the companies own financial years P4U = Jan 2005 to Dec 2005 and CPW financial year Apr 2005 to Mar 2006

Phones 4 u have rolled this model out across the estate and are showing that you can get some massive results just by having a structured selling process and making use of the resources you already have.

This goes to show it’s not how big you are or how big you want to be or even how big your budget is. It’s how you best use the resources at your disposal.

Here is an article on John Caudwell and his sale of Phones 4u.

I’ll Have what John Caudwell is having

by Charles Orton-Jones

It’s the phone call every entrepreneur dreams of. For John Caudwell it comes ten minutes into our photo shoot.

We’re in his flat – a bijou, sparsely furnished pad overlooking Chelsea Harbour. Yesterday Caudwell sold his company to two private equity firms, ending a gruelling 12-month sale process. This is his first day of freedom. Yet Caudwell doesn’t look elated. In fact, he looks eerily subdued. He’s quietly following the photographer’s orders. “Lean back, smile, look left, keep still…”

Abruptly a rock ‘n’ roll ring tone fills the air. “Hold on a minute lads,” says Caudwell, flipping open his Motorola Razr. “I’ll just take this. Won’t be a minute.” Our photographer gives him a quick thumbs up and uses the time out to switch lenses. Caudwell whispers “hello” and listens intently. Slowly he starts to light up. “Duncan. Yes... It’s in? What, all of it? That’s great. It’s in! I’ll have to go, Duncan, I’m having my photo taken. Bye.”

His face is beaming. Something’s clearly happened.

“Good news, John?”

“The money’s just hit my account.”

Ker-CHING! That’s £1.24bn landing with a bump in his bank account. No Englishman’s ever received a bigger cheque. And on a personal note, the phone call marks the end of Caudwell’s 20-year odyssey. His reign of terror in the mobile world is over. In a flash he’s been transmogrified from tycoon into Britain’s richest unemployed citizen.

Caudwell plays the moment coolly. He stares into space for ten seconds. Chuckles to himself. And then, as if nothing had happened, resumes posing for the camera. Only when the photographer announces the shoot is over can the inquisition start. So tell us, John. What does it feel like to trouser a billion quid in one go?

“Relieved more than anything else. Just relieved that the sale process is over, rather than joy. I built this business for over 20 years. That’s 20 years of my life. “None of the growth was acquisition, it was all pure organic growth. To sell the business, and to sell it through the most incredibly difficult process you could imagine, leaves you relieved but not elated.” The man once nicknamed the Staffordshire bull-terrier looks decidedly melancholy. “There’s a sense of loss as well. I drove past one of my shops today – no, sorry – I drove past one of their shops today and I wondered how the sales were performing and I had to correct myself. It isn’t mine now. It doesn’t belong to me.”

He says his diary, for the first time ever, is empty. “I’m aiming for semi-retirement. I want to try and see what it’s like to have free time.”

The warrior
No one deserves a happy ending more than Caudwell. The Daily Telegraph once commented that a West End musical could be made of his life, and sure enough, the plot line is theatrically rags to riches. After a childhood he terms “reasonably challenging”, he spent ten years working at a Michelin tyre factory. He was a late bloomer in entrepreneurship. After trying his hand at a few ventures, including running a corner shop and selling cars, aged 34 he discovered mobile phones.

It took him eight months to shift his first consignment of 26 brick-sized Motorola phones, which retailed for £1,500 each. “When I started I knew nothing about retail. Nothing!” He proved a fast learner, and a year later, in 1988, he and his brother sold £1m worth of phones.

Year after year the Caudwell Group grew. There were no poor years. He diversified into phone repair, accessories distribution, logistics and even recruitment. A ruthless taskmaster, Caudwell insisted on every division being anorexically lean. Email, famously, was banned (“It’s insidious, a cancer,” he wailed to Real Business back in 2004). Under-performing managers were eliminated, including Phones4u’s managing director Anthony Catterson only two years after he’d won the top prize at the company’s annual awards ceremony. Irresistibly, the Caudwell Group overtook all its rivals – including its bête noir, Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse.

“Over the years we’ve had various competitors,” recalls Caudwell with relish. “But Carphone was the one we wanted to beat. Why? Because they were the best.” Victory arrived only recently. “Three years ago we were the number four or five mobile retailer in the UK. Now we are number one. The most important measurement is contract phones per store, and we significantly, and I can almost say massively, outsell Carphone now. That to me, coupled with the customer excellence we’ve indoctrinated into people, tells me that we are clearly number one. And I probably wouldn’t have sold if we weren’t number one.”

The matrix
The sale means that Caudwell’s got around £2bn in cash. He received £400m from the sale of customer care unit Singlepoint to Vodafone in 2003, and earlier this year sold his fixed-line business to Pipex for £40m.

Reflecting on his success, he says his proudest achievement was turning around the group’s reputation for customer service. For years Phones4u had been mocked for its surly staff. Caudwell dreamt up a masterplan to crack the problem – with spectacular results.

“Three years ago we didn’t have customer excellence. We had customer satisfaction. But I wanted customers who said, ‘Wow! That’s a great place to shop.’ So I developed a customer excellence matrix.

“We would assess the whole business at a macro level, then area directors, then shop managers, down to individual sales people. We’d do a mystery shop and score each shop out of 100. We’d look at the complaints the shop got and express the complaints per salesman, per store and per director as a percentage. We did a customer satisfaction survey and we’d chat with customers too. Talk to your customers and they’ll say things they won’t put on forms. They’ll pour their hearts out.

“We looked at 14-day customer returns. I believe that if you have a 14-day return, in the majority of cases there is something wrong with the sale process – or why is the customer bringing the phone back? All of these numbers would go into a matrix. I made sure the first time we did the matrix the score would be 50 out of 100, as it is the relativity that’s important.

“The customer excellence percentages were factored into everybody’s pay, from sales to the MD. So if someone was on 100 per cent bonus, if they performed badly, their whole bonus would disappear. This way the whole firm was focused on customer excellence. After the scheme was introduced we spent more time talking about customer excellence in the board room than anything else.”

The effect was stunning. “After two years the firm’s score was at 85 per cent. A lot of mystery shops would come back at 100 per cent: a perfect performance.” Naturally this elaborate methodology was dreamt up by Caudwell himself. “I don’t copy anyone else. I just did it. It was unique.” But just as he’s starting to crow, his mobile rings. It’s Craig Bennett, the man who served as his FD for 17 years. Caudwell’s face lights up again.

“Yours is in too? It’s great, isn’t it?” Soon he rings off. “He’s just got his money too,” reports Caudwell. “Craig’s a brilliant guy, grafted morning, noon and night. He’s only 43 and now he’s got a few tens of millions in the bank.”

Management the Caudwell way
Bennett was Caudwell’s most trusted advisor. He joined when there was only a handful of employees, and, with five per cent, was the only person other than Caudwell’s brother Brian to be awarded equity. His job was to help Caudwell extend his mantra of “simplicity” into the accounts department.

“The really big challenge throughout my business career was making sure the financial directors reported things back to me in a prudent way, not leaving the balance sheet exposed.

“For instance – if we bought office equipment, instead of a straight line write-off of 25 per cent over the four years, I would say, immediately as it comes out of the showroom, it is worth half of what you bought it for. I’d want it written off in that month’s P&L. I’d then want it written down in the subsequent 12 months to next to zero. So what I’d want, always, is my management accounts to represent the real track in value. Not representing an Inland Revenue valuation.”

When it came to running the stores, Caudwell didn’t need much help. His technique, as with the customer excellence matrix, was to rely on his own ingenuity. His approach to badly-performing stores was typical.

“I’d go on my bike and see the store,” says cycling-fanatic Caudwell. “I learnt a huge amount by finding out in person why a store was performing badly.”

To motivate his staff, Caudwell realised there’s no substitute for monetary rewards. On one occasion he produced four suitcases each stuffed with £250,000 and waved them around in front of 600 sales staff. He also promised to give £1m to 25 senior managers and to divide £10m among 400 staff if they hit their targets. “It was a showbizzy way of telling them the rewards are there if they perform properly,” he recalls bashfully.

Another Caudwell innovation was prompt sheets. Instead of letting his staff waffle on to customers, he wrote a script for them. “The only problem with that format is that it can get a bit wooden. So the next stage is to inject a little personality. Follow the form, but do it in your own way and the customer has no reason to go anywhere else.”

When he realised staff could do with a little training, he took the direct route and founded a training school, at Yarnfield in Staffordshire. All new staff would be indoctrinated over five days. “My daughter’s just done the course,” he says with pride. “She went into a store last week and sold six contracts, which is pretty good. It shows the system works.”

And you can be sure all those management gems are his own. “I’ve never read a sales book in my life,” Caudwell boasts. “Or a management book.”

He’s unlikely to add to the genre, though. Instead he’s planning to devote his time to the children’s charity he set up in 2000. He’s also hoping to spend more time with his family. Anything, it seems, apart from start another business. “I don’t need another billion,” he declares. His rivals – Charles Dunstone in particular – will be delighted to hear that this ferocious competitor has left the boardroom for good.

A CRM solution isn't going to help sales people sell.

2008-10-28T16:26:00.000Z

A CRM solution isn't going to help sales people sell.
All companies rely on sales for their business on one level or another and are having to come to terms with the fact that buying is changing. The main reason for this is the web: The vast amount of information available within just a few mouse clicks means the roles traditionally assumed by salespeople and customers are changing. The sales process is no longer dominated by the presentation of facts and figures about a product, and there's no point in claiming to offer the best price on the market when the competition's web site is contradicting you in the next window.

Because modern IT has brought about changes to buying--and attitudes to buying--software developers have been addressing the part of the bargain that a commercial organization really ought to have some control over: selling. This has led to the formation of a growing industry built loosely around customer relationship management software (CRM). But relying on CRM is fundamentally the wrong approach if what you really want to do is achieve more sales.

What's CRM for?
The trouble with using CRM to boost sales is that it's not really what it's designed for. What CRM essentially boils down to, instead, is making the buying process easier. Automation is introduced at every possible stage, from the moment the customer logs on, or picks up the phone, to the credit card transaction and the delivery of the goods; databases are configured to give sales staff up-to-date, relevant information about customers' account histories; direct mail campaigns are intelligently designed to hit the right doormats more of the time. All of these are valid contributions to the marketing mix, but none has a substantial bearing on sales performance.

Too many companies have implemented CRM in response to a tougher selling climate, but effectively they're focusing on automated buying rather than investing in improving their existing sales process. That's fine if you're sure your customers will be calling you but not much use if you need to go out and generate opportunities. Small wonder, then, that CRM companies struggle to demonstrate a genuine ROI and talk instead of fundamental changes in attitude and healthier, customer-focused business practices. If it's a boost in sales you want, CRM is not enough.The fact is that, although buying has undeniably changed, people do still need--perhaps even like--to be sold to. You can bolt on a CRM "solution" to help you make sense of your other enterprise applications, but it's not going to help you close a deal. For this, there is no substitute for good old-fashioned sales techniques.

A role for technology
so does that mean that IT has no part to play? On the contrary: technology is an inescapable part of today's sales process--what salespeople could live without their mobile phones, for instance? Technology, though, needs to be used appropriately. No amount of technology is going to turn a poor salesperson into a great one. But there are ways of using IT to turn an ordinary salesperson into a player.

Consider the following scenario. You run a successful stationery distribution company. You have a product book of some 20,000 lines and a customer base numbering around 3,000. You have an outbound sales team of six representatives. The success of your company depends on the performance of these half-dozen individuals, but how do you know that they are reaching their full potential?

To succeed, your sales force must not only have an in-depth knowledge of their product lines, they must also be fully aware of the opportunities and threats within their existing and potential customer base. The jargon for this is "product and situational fluency," and it's a lot to grasp for one individual. The very best sales performers succeed because they can achieve this dual fluency, but for the majority it's a struggle, and there are inevitably compromises.

One route is to become a product specialist, adept at identifying cross selling opportunities but with a tendency to focus on a narrow selection of favorite customers and to miss the bigger picture. At the other end of the scale are those who devote themselves to knowing the market inside out and can tell you exactly who's buying what from whom but, through lack of sufficient product expertise, may miss subtle sales opportunities when they're actually sitting down in front of the customer.

For most this choice is simply the inevitable consequence of having to deal with a huge volume of data. But managing data is what computers are so good at, so it makes sense to look for a way to use IT to improve the working life of the salesperson by removing this need to compromise.

Sales intelligence
Successful sales depend on identifying the right opportunities and delivering the right package. All the information needed to find these opportunities and make the right deals is somewhere within your company's databases. A sales intelligence solution will automate the extraction of this knowledge and deliver it to the sales troops.

Sales intelligence software monitors and analyzes the buying patterns of customers by drawing data from existing accounts and enterprise software. Irregularities, and other trends in customer spending, trigger alerts that translate into sales leads delivered straight to the relevant sales representatives. The result is an increased share of customer spend, higher profitability, improved customer retention and increased marketing response. Companies that have implemented sales intelligence solutions regularly report a return on investment of 20 to 30 percent. What CRM vendor can boast that?

Looking at what IT can do for sales is not "rocket science" and it does not involve re-engineering your business. It's simply a question of promoting situational fluency and providing salespeople with the tools they need to venture beyond their normal boundaries and become high achievers.

The late American newspaper columnist Ann Landers once said, "Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them." Sales intelligence software will unmask sales opportunities so the sales person can concentrate on simply closing the deals.

Business : Why is CRM "not" delivering on it's potential?

2008-08-21T14:08:00.007+01:00

Why is CRM "not" delivering on it's potential?
By Adam Williams

How CRM should work?
Salespeople and other users enter what they perceive to be relevant customer information, leads, account updates, last visits, notes on conversations and interests etc…
Other information is added by management, marketing and support so as to maintain full visibility of all activity for a particular account or customer.
With all this valuable information up to date the sales person has better visibility and is better able to make informed decisions on how to approach customers prior to each call, therefore the sales person makes better sales.

How CRM often works?
Some Salespeople leave their laptops in their car or at home, they probably use their experience and knowledge to do what they've always done. The marketing team enters some valuable/vital information into the CRM system, the salesperson doesn't pick it up because they don't have their laptop with them, the valuable piece of information the salesperson was unaware of has just cost the company a customer because they have gone elsewhere. The Sales manager finds out that the salesperson hasn't been using the CRM system and they have a heated conversation, the salesperson starts using the system for the rest of that week. And so the cycle begins again.

What's the problem?
In short the answer is: "The salesperson".
There are a few major facts about salespeople that the designers of CRM products forgot.
The most obvious of these are:

• Sales people are usually only interested in things that deliver results "NOW". So to spend weeks or maybe months entering tiny and seemingly useless bits of information in order to build a bigger picture for use in the future seems to them to be a waste of time.

• Sales people usually have daily targets and often are unable to look at the bigger picture. Yes they are concerned about the future but the pressures of a daily target means that the focus is usually "here", "now" and "today"

• Sales reps usually feel that they can be as effective if not more effective without using the system. In other words, the benefits of CRM don't seem significantly greater than the investment of time and effort required to use a CRM system every day.

So where is the value in CRM?
If the salespeople don't use it or the quality of the information is poor or incomplete or there just isn't enough of it, then there is little value in it at all.

So where should the value be?
CRM can be a very valuable tool for salespeople if you can get them to use it properly, but most salespeople won't use something unless they can see an immediate benefit.
The problem is not with CRM, the problem is often the way it is implemented, if it were incorporated in the sales process it could be very effective. So if we are honest there are two problems, problem 1 - the salesperson, problem 2 - the implementation.
So the value in CRM is in the implementation, because that is the only part we can do anything about. Incorporate the technology into a strong sales process and the salesman will follow suit.

An element of CRM in anyone's business could be a huge advantage but the most valuable thing to have in sales is a structured selling process with the right tools to sell

Sales people need to go back to basics

2008-06-04T16:34:00.003+01:00

New Research shows many sales are lost through basic mistakes

UK sales managers should be taking a leaf out of Alan Sugar's book and carpeting their sales force over basic mistakes which could be losing them millions, according to new research 80% of respondents to a survey from Vecta software, said that sales people regularly jeopardized the sale by not understanding their business, with almost as many citing the sales person's inability to listen or even get basic company details correct as a major reason for not buying

Meanwhile, in more than 50% of cases those surveyed claimed that the sale was lost simply because the sales person failed to ask the right questions.

Respondents also listed a catalogue of gaffes which would have any self respecting sales professional heading straight for the exit.

These ranged from repeatedly being called by the wrong name to, in one case, a salesman attempting to sell an engineering solution to a bank! More bizarre examples of sales blunders include a sales person who's packed-lunch had spilt into his briefcase, who proceeded to hand out materials covered in salad dressing, and a salesman who turned up to a meeting in an old pair of carpet slippers, (the ones he apparently used for driving).

Some survey respondents even took drastic measures to avoid yet another pointless sales meeting.

One such story involved a hopeless but persistent salesman, who had a habit of turning up unannounced, being shown into an office only to be greeted by and eight foot inflatable penguin, with the owner of the office addressing him on speaker phone.

On the whole, the most common experiences tend to revolve around a combination of sales people who are always under prepared and those who simply will not listen and 'oversell' due to missing vital verbal cues.

"The reality is that, in sales, you have a small window of time to persuade your prospective, or existing customer that they should buy what you are offering and it is a very delicate process".

"These are busy people who are inundated by sales calls, so there is seldom a second chance, which is why it is vital that you have the most up to date sales intelligence on that customer's business at your fingertips so you can ask the relevant and pertinent questions that will lead to more sales" "Sales intelligence is the missing link between the sales person and the customer as it delivers timely, critical information about customer buying patterns that translate into real sales opportunities".

"The ability to identify cross and up-sell opportunities, whilst recognising potential problems, such as drifting customers, early will ultimately create a more professional and respected salesforce".

Intelligence Sells

2008-06-02T16:40:00.001+01:00

Intelligence Sells

In an increasingly competitive business environment, maintaining margins and increasing turnover becomes more difficult each year. Front-line sales executives have ultimate responsibility for bringing in more revenue – the buck stops with them. During the late 1990s there was a great deal of hype around CRM technology, to which many companies turned to in response to a tougher selling environment. CRM vendors made lofty claims about increased sales and improved customer retention, but it was almost impossible for them to meet the inflated expectations of their customers.

A decade on, Gartner analysts correctly predicted that by 2005, 75 percent of CRM projects will have failed to deliver measurable ROI in most industries. One might argue that the ROI lies in enhanced customer service or improved processes in other areas of the business, but try telling that to your CFO. The only meaningful ROI is increased sales and improved margins.

CRM solutions promise increased sales through Sales Force Automation (SFA). This is essentially the bit of CRM designed to support the sales function. The software gives sales representatives access to contacts, appointments and notes. They are effectively a way of capturing soft information about customers: names; addresses; whether or not they play golf.

It’s a useful tool that allows your sales reps to organise their day and jog their memory about what happened at the last meeting but ultimately it doesn’t do very much more than Microsoft Outlook. In addition to contact management, SFA also provides opportunity management tools that allow sales teams to manage lengthy, complex sales cycles by tracking the status of deals. This is fine if your sales executive only has to worry about a couple of product lines or three major accounts but what if he/she is dealing with thousands of products and hundreds of accounts?

The sales person who goes out and sees lots of different customers and talks about lots of different products doesn’t need to know the inside leg measurement of all of his prospects and doesn’t track the status of sales cycles. What he needs to know in order to start a meaningful sales conversation and identify sales opportunities is what the customer bought last time, what they didn’t buy and whether there are any changes in spend.

It is through this failure of SFA to deliver factual information about customer history and buying patterns that CRM fails to address the fundamental business issues of most manufacturing, distribution and wholesale companies. Many companies in this sector have businesses that are based on repeat sales into highly competitive and price sensitive markets.

In a bid to hold on to existing customers and milk them for all they are worth these companies have adopted a number of different strategies, including merger and acquisition, which has resulted in a steady shrinkage of the marketplace.

Many have weathered consolidation storms and tough recessions but customer loyalty in these industries is low and not dependent on product or service differentiation. Thanks to the Internet, customers can cherry-pick from multiple suppliers and shop around for the best price 24 hours a day.

In order to stay ahead of the competition manufacturing, distribution and wholesale businesses need dynamic solutions designed to take control of the sales function by enabling sales people to sell more on every call. While SFA software supports the process of managing sales people it does not support sales people in the act of selling. What sales people need are sales intelligence tools that generate leads by automatically identifying new sales opportunities within their existing customer base, therefore improving sales effectiveness.

Sales intelligence software makes sales professionals more successful by giving them instant access to vital information about customer buying patterns and account status, helping them sell more effectively at every sales appointment. To the sales executive, a good sales intelligence solution should become as essential as a mobile telephone or a diary. Sales intelligence applications should also enable sales and marketing managers to analyse customers’ buying patterns and develop strategic promotional campaigns or notify sales people in the field of sales opportunities within their accounts.

Unlike SFA, sales intelligence solutions deliver measurable business benefits in two key areas: they provide management with an insight into customer, product and sales trends so they can modify sales strategy and processes to make sales teams more successful, and they proactively inform sales people of sales issues and deliver sale opportunities so they can sell more effectively and intelligently.

They enable businesses to achieve an increased share of customer spending, higher profitability per order and increased returns on marketing efforts. By using sales intelligence solutions, sales professionals can make better decisions and more informed calls based on more meaningful insight of their sales history data. It also gives more power and control to sales managers, allowing them to understand the reasons behind under or achievement and take appropriate action.

The results speak from themselves. At bathroom fittings manufacturer Deva Taps sales have grown by as much as 66 percent in some regions since the company implemented sales intelligence. At electronics accessories distributor Hama PVAC Ltd, one of the key drivers for investing in sales intelligence was the need to improve profit margins by changing the business mix to more own-brand products sales.

Using VECTA software one member of the team who was selling a 60/40 mix in favour of OEM products has changed the mix to 60/40 in favour of own-brand products, which has an instant impact on margin growth. And at Ridley Quiney, a distributor of wholesale packaging and janitorial products, each member of the sales team is achieving a 20 percent average increase in revenue since the company deployed its sales intelligence solution.

These companies – and many more like them – have woken up to the fact that in order to make more money you have to give your sales executives the tools they need to go out and sell. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that time spent feeding lots of subjective information into a CRM system is time that would be better spent selling. To misquote John F. Kennedy: Ask not what your sales team can do for you but what you can do for your sales team. There are solutions out there that will enable your sales team to sell more but you won’t find them under the banner of CRM.

Gartner Says CRM and Security Software Markets Will Grow

2008-05-13T15:40:00.000+01:00

Gartner Says CRM and Security Software Markets Will Grow

Whenever there is an economic slowdown, not every sector of the IT space sees decreased spending. Some areas seem to be immune to calls from the boardroom to cut spending because these technologies help the company retain customers, provide better or cheaper products or services, or even boost sales. And so it seems to be with both customer relationship management (CRM) and security software sales, according to the analysts at Gartner.

CRM is, of course, a decade-old extension of ERP systems that aims to keep better track of customers and allow companies to up-sell and cross-sell products and services to their customers--to wring more money and therefore profits out of their existing customers because it is ten times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep one (or so the saying goes). Gartner says that CRM software spending globally hit $7.8 billion in 2007 and are projected to rise by 14.2 percent to $8.9 billion this year. Gartner's economic models already have cooler IT spending growth built in, and the company is currently forecasting 3.3 percent overall IT spending growth worldwide in 2008. (See \r\nMost CIOs Say 2008 IT Budgets Are Stable, So Far for more on that general trend.) And based on current projections, Gartner is projecting that CRM software sales will continue to be robust through 2012, when Gartner says that it will hit $13.3 billion.

The North American market is the biggest part of the CRM market, accounting for $4.3 billion in CRM sales in 2007, or 55.1 percent of the global market, and spending is accelerating somewhat. In 2012, Gartner reckons that North American companies will spend $7.8 billion, or 58.6 percent of the total spending, on CRM wares. Sales in Europe, by contrast, were $2.6 billion in 2007 and will only grow to $3.9 billion in 2012. As a percentage of the total CRM market, Europe is declining (although in absolute terms, CRM spending will rise by 50 percent in the five years between 2007 and 2012). For all the talk about the explosion in IT sales in China and India, a lot of the companies in these areas do not interface with users, but are manufacturers that make products for other wholesalers and retailers--and as such, CRM is not as critical (or at least seems not to be based on spending). Gartner is projecting that CRM spending in the Asia/Pacific region was $410 million in 2007, and will more than double to $840 million by 2012. Gartner said that software as a service (SaaS) would play an increasingly key role in the CRM space, but did not elaborate on how much money SaaS implementations of CRM software would generate. (You have to pay for that data.)

While CRM software is not necessarily critical for all companies in modern economies, the ubiquitousness of Internet technologies in systems and networks and the Windows platform on the desktop means security software is important for everyone. And that is why spending on security software is high and going higher. According to Gartner, security software of all types accounted for $9.4 billion in spending globally in 2007, and is projected to rise by 11.2 percent to $10.5 billion in 2008. Looking out to the five-year span that ends in 2012, Gartner says that it anticipates security software spending to hit $13.1 billion.

"Security spending is driven by a variety of pressing concerns, the most immediate of which is the need to 'keep the bad guys out' through defensive measures, such as next-generation firewalls," says Ruggero Contu, the principal research analyst at Gartner who tracks security software. "However, the 'let the good guys in' discipline, such as identity and access management, is where business benefits and return on investment can be more clearly shown."

What are your thoughts?

What salesperson could live without his mobile phone?

2008-05-13T15:17:00.003+01:00

The Rebirth of a Salesperson

Salespeople need sales intelligence tools designed to both support the sales function and enable them to sell more on every call.

Technology is an inescapable part of today's sales process--what salesperson could live without his mobile phone, for instance? No amount of technology is going to turn a poor salesperson into a great one, but there are ways of using IT to turn an ordinary salesperson into a star player. What salesperson need are sales intelligence tools designed to support the sales function and enable them to sell more on every call.

Consider the following scenario: You run a successful distribution company. You have some 25,000 products and a customer base numbering around 5,000. You have six sales representatives. The success of your company depends on the performance of these half-dozen individuals, but how do you know that they are reaching their full potential?
To succeed, your salesmen must not only have an in-depth knowledge of the product portfolio, they must also be fully aware of the opportunities and threats within their existing and potential customer base. The jargon for this is product and situational fluency. It's a lot to grasp for one individual--perhaps too much. The very best sales performers succeed because they can achieve this dual fluency, but for the majority it's a struggle, and there are inevitably compromises.
One option is to become a product specialist, adept at identifying cross-selling opportunities but with a tendency to focus on a narrow selection of favourite customers and miss the bigger picture. At the other end of the scale are those who devote themselves to knowing the market inside out. They can tell you exactly who's buying what from whom but, through lack of product expertise, miss subtle sales opportunities when they're actually in front of the customer.

There is no shame in going down either of these routes. For most it is simply the inevitable consequence of having to deal with a huge volume of data. But as managing data is what computers are so good at, it makes sense to look for a way to use IT to improve the working life of the salesperson by removing this need to compromise.
Successful sales depend on identifying the right opportunities and delivering the right package. All the information needed to find these opportunities and make the right deals is somewhere within your company's databases. Sales intelligence software is designed to automate the extraction of this knowledge and deliver it to the sales troops. It generates leads by automatically identifying new sales opportunities within an existing customer base, therefore improving sales effectiveness.
Sales intelligence software monitors and analyses the buying patterns of customers by drawing data from existing accounts and enterprise software. Irregularities, and other trends in customer spending, trigger alerts that translate into sales leads delivered straight to the sales force. The result is increased share of customer spend, higher profitability per order, and improved customer retention.
Sales intelligence is not rocket science and it does not involve re-engineering your business. It's simply a question of promoting situational fluency and encouraging reluctant salesperson to look beyond their comfortable, familiar set of customers.

So I ask you now; "What sales person could live without Sales Intelligence?"

Vecta-SaaS

2008-05-13T13:22:00.006+01:00

About us

Sales Intelligence Software

Vecta is designed for Manufacturers, Wholesalers and Distributors.

VECTA proactively delivers real insight into your customers' buying patterns and your sales team will immediately see the benefits. Increasing the value of every sale, and therefore their own results, it's a tool they will actively seek to use. By providing total visibility of the sales issues and opportunities, it arms your entire sales team with the tools it needs to improve its effectiveness, and beat its targets.

As well as being invaluable to the sales team, VECTA is an integrated solution for the entire sales and marketing function of your operation. It provides both management and executives with access to the information they need to be more successful. And unlike CRM and traditional BI tools, implementing and supporting. VECTA is simple and will not burden your IT resources. VECTA is easy to use, and your entire company will be up and running within days.

Some of our customers include: Screwfix Direct, Antalis and FPS.