Presentation Transcript:

1. managing a complex sales process
2. basic sales funnel
3. leads -> sales funnel -> orders
4. complex customer needs => complex sales process
5. a typical process
   1. requirements
   2. map solutions
   3. budget costs
   4. configure solution
   5. proposal
   6. order
6. complex sales process => workflow model
7. workflow model
   1. milestones – progress indicators – work hand-over points – business rules
   2. roles – organization structure – responsibilities – capabilities
   3. templates – fill-in forms – document formats – validation rules
8. example of workflow model mapping milestones, roles and templates
9. workflow model =>shared workspace
10. shared workspace
    1. people  - business entities  - contact details – responsibilities
    2. information  - requirements – solutions – budgets – time lines
    3. activity log – appointments – tasks – notes
    4. documents - proposals - diagrams - data files
    5. progress reports – milestones completed - key hand-over info - who & when
11. sharedworkspace => prioritized reports
12. prioritized reports
    1. alerts – when we are stuck – alerts for appointments and tasks – alerts for stuck leads – alerts for unattended customers
    2. funnel – where are we stuck? – idle leads – no sales activity – inactive leads – no progress – inactive customers – no open projects
    3. metrics – why we are stuck? – velocity – how long are we taking ? – volume – how many leads are we handling? – conversion – success and failure
13. On2Biz
    1. workflow models - milestones - roles - templates
    1. shared workspace - information - people – activity – progress – documents
    2. prioritized reports  - alerts - funnel - metrics
14. Sample screen shots
15. screenshot: shared workspace
16. lead = project (screen shots for a single lead or project)
17. screenshot: people - business entities – contact details
18. screenshot: information - requirements – solutions  - budgets – time lines
19. screenshot: activity log - appointments – tasks – notes
20. screenshot: progress - milestones completed – key hand-over info – who & when
21. screenshot: documents - proposals – diagrams – data files
22. screenshots of prioritized reports
23. screenshot: alerts – alerts for appointments and tasks – alerts for stuck leads – alerts for unattended customers – email alert – sms alert
24. screenshot: funnel - idle leads – no sales activity – inactive leads – no progress – inactive customers – no open projects
25. screenshot: metrics – velocity – how long are we taking ? – volume – how many leads are we handling? – conversion – success and failure
26. what next?
27. 1. quick start ! – sign-up for a free account – fill in workflow model sheet – start tracking your workflow
    2. consulting – interviews with all stake-holders – advanced customization guide – custom workflow model
    3. implementation – custom workflow implementation – training sessions – on-going support
28. contact us !

Related posts:

1. Using the sales pipeline report for key performance indicators
2. Managing Business by Remote Control
3. How effective is your sales process?

CJ Warstler, Director – Sr. Consultant, Sales Performance International Inc. helps answer this question very effectively in his post titled: “What does an ideal sales pipeline look like?” on their Solution Selling™ Blog.

He identifies the following three factors that determine the ideal pipeline:

• Sales Cycle Complexity (Quality)
  Complex sales cycles have more number of milestones in the sales cycle. When calculating the ideal pipeline, one needs to know the ideal number of opportunities at each stage or milestone in the sales cycle.
• Days in Stage (Speed)
  The longer it takes to close opportunities, the more the number of opportunities you need in your pipeline to achieve the target sales in a given period. The estimated average time taken at each milestone in the sales cycle is used to calculate the ideal pipeline.
• Yield Probability (Volume)
  As an opportunity moves from one milestone to another, the probability of closure keeps improving. The probability at each stage is used to calculate the ideal pipeline.

The following table illustrates the sample buyer’s process and the corresponding sales process, along with the two process parameters – the time required, and the probability of closure at each milestone:

The sum of the time required at each milestone then gives us the average sales cycle time, which in the above example is 120 days.

In addition to the sales process, the following information is used in the calculation:

• The sales target or Goal – for example, suppose this is 1.8 million
• The time remaining to achieve the goal – for example, suppose we are at the beginning of the year, so we have 365 days left

Then the ideal pipeline value at each stage is calculated using the following formula:

(Goal x (Average Sales Cycle / Time Remaining to Goal) x (Average Days in Stage / Total Days in Average Cycle)) / %Yield in Stage = Ideal Amount for Stage

So for the above example, we would get the following ideal pipeline:

The total pipeline value here is less than the total goal, because this is the pipeline at the beginning of the year. Assuming that new opportunities keep entering the pipeline as older opportunities flow out of the pipeline at the same rate, the pipeline over the entire year will achieve the required goal.

See the excellent explanation of this provided by Tim Sullivan in the comments on the blog.

All in all, a very well explained and simple way to ensure that the pipeline is kept at the optimal size.

Related posts:

1. Using the sales pipeline report for key performance indicators
2. Calculating the projected value of an opportunity
3. Sales Cycle Time – a critical metric for measuring performance

Rahul Jain, a highly successful business coach who has worked with several CEOs to help them effectively scale their businesses, asks some tough questions that helps a business owner evaluate their effectiveness in achieving business results:

• Is your business growing at the rate you wish it to grow?
• Are you and your business making the kind of money that you wish to make from the business?
• Do you still find time to do things you enjoy doing or your business is taking away all your time, leaving no free time?
• Do you spend most of your time working IN your business or are you working ON your business. (Are you spending most of your time solving the same every-day problems or are you investing your time uncovering new ways to grow your business.)
• Do you spend most of your time dealing with emergencies and fire fighting?
• Are you enjoying and having fun running your business or is it a cause for constant stress
• Are your employees working for you or are you working for them?
• Are you in control of your business, taking your business where you want it to go, or is the business driving you?
• Do you have self-sustaining systems in place that manage your business even in your absence?

Most business owners and manager may easily identify their situation with the above. But being caught in the trap of micromanagement, the solutions seems far from easy.

Nahid Casazza, another business coach who effectively combines her background in psychology and business expertise explains the root cause of micromanagement:

…micromanaging behavior is driven by the positive characteristics of conscientiousness, diligence, and responsibility; it’s just that they have been taken to an extreme. People often confuse themselves with the quality of the work they produce. As long as they can control the quality of their work, they are ok, but as soon as they have to depend on others for results, they are faced with the fear of representing sloppy or substandard output. Since putting out less than excellent work is SO personally humiliating, they need constant reassurance that the team is performing.

One way to escape this trap of micromanagement is to create a process documentation system that captures everything that is going on in your business and allows you to keep track of it from the outside.

Like Rahul says:

Documenting and setting up the required systems, -moving the business from people dependency to systems dependency. (It also ensures that when an employee leaves the organization, another person can quickly fit into the place, because of the systems.) A step by step program to take any function in your business and turn it into a scalable, replicable, reliable process, complete with checklists and full documentation so that anyone in your company can do it just as well, by following directions. (Putting it on Auto Pilot) having the business ‘work’…even when you’re not there, resulting in the biggest freedom which you have always dreamed of- the freedom of time.

Sounds simple. But implementing systems is by no means easy. As any business owner or manager who has tried to implement any business tracking software can verify, the biggest problem in maintaining a system is to get people to enter data in it.

The difficulty lies in the decision of how much data to capture. If you ask a manager to decide what to capture, you will tend to get an answer close to “everything”. From a manager’s perspective, the more data the better. And most software systems aim to please the manager by providing more features meaning more data to enter. This inevitably leads to a situation where over 90% of software implementation projects fail.

The approach that works is to provide systems that capture the progress of the business process automatically, without requiring people to separately enter any data. This can be achieved by providing a customized template that acts as a checklist for all tasks that are to be performed, and the person who finishes the task merely has to check off the tasks completed. The system should then automatically register the person who completed the task, the time spent, the next steps required etc. based on a pre-determined logic.

Process template - a simple checklist to track the progress of a business case

The adjoining sample screenshot is part of a process template designed for a subscription based software business. The template shared on the web and is available to all persons working on the specific business case, project or order. The process is broken down into milestones, where each milestone could have an associated set of questions that need to be answered or sub-tasks that need to be performed. The person responsible has to merely check off the tasks completed.

The system then automatically tracks the progress of all business cases, projects or orders and provides a summary to the manager. The following are two sample reports that the manager can see:

Live feed of ongoing business activity

The first screenshot is of a live feed of all ongoing business activity. This report picks up all live business cases, and lists all ongoing activity including milestones completed, messages exchanged, documents prepared or tasks completed.

This report is available for viewing from anywhere via the web, and is useful for the business owner to remotely track the business process. All activities are directly linked to the corresponding business case or project, allowing the manager to view the complete context of the specific activity.

Process Pipeline Report

The second screenshot is a performance summary report. This shows the pipeline of all business cases or orders, and tracks the velocity of movement of cases through the list of milestones in the process template.

This report provides a valuable feedback to the business owner or manager to identify possible bottlenecks or stumbling blocks. Any order that is not moving ahead in the milestones is highlighted, allowing the manager to investigate by simply clicking on the inactive projects and drilling down from the report to the list of projects and then to the individual project.

This simple strategy promises to provide the business owner or manager an effective tool to help manage the business by remote control, thereby creating more time to work on strategy to grow the business.

Related posts:

1. Managing a Complex Sales Process
2. Case Study: Insurance and Financial Products Sales
3. Why do you need a CRM or Sales Force Management System?

The secret behind effective sales management is simple: manage activities and measure results. Sounds simple but the misunderstanding lies in the fact that the link between activities and results is very short in demand fulfillment functions (entering customer orders today means shipping more orders today and tomorrow). However, that link for demand creation is much longer and tedious. It involves strategic selling, building relationship equity and the creation of tier level penetration strategies (relationships take months or longer to deliver revenue). In demand creation , attempting to manage results is like watering a plant after it has died from dehydration because the current results were determined by activities performed months in the past. The only way to create an effective sales program is to define the activities that will drive results and then manage those activities. This concept will also create discipline on the part of sales management on the back side of the performance loop.

On2Biz is a great tool to manage sales activity. Click here to sign up for a free account and find out how.

Related posts:

1. Why do you need a CRM or Sales Force Management System?
2. How effective is your sales process?
3. Lead Management: What is a lead and how to qualify leads?

The new method being implemented in On2Biz for calculating the projected or weighted value of an opportunity in the sales pipeline uses three components:

Weighted Opportunity Value = Effective Opportunity Value x Customer Grading Factor / Pipeline Velocity Factor

Effective Opportunity Value

The first component is the Effective Opportunity Value. This is calculated based on the value of the opportunity adjusted by the probability of closure. The probability is a configured standard at each milestone. However, the sales executive can over-ride it by an opportunity-specific probability.

Effective Opportunity Value = V x P
where:
V = Project Value
P = Probability of closure of the project assigned to the current milestone, or probability entered by the project manager

Customer Grade Factor

Customer grade factor assigns a higher weightage to an opportunity for higher grade customers – so as to reflect the projected customer lifetime value or customers with higher strategic importance

Customer Grading Factor = 1 + (C x f1)
where:
C = Customer grading factor (0 to 1) proportional to the expected customer life-time value
f1 = value between 0 and 1, used to adjust contribution of customer grade

Pipeline Velocity Factor

The pipeline velocity factor reduces the weightage for opportunities that are not moving at the stipulated velocity through the pipeline, measured by the delay beyond pre-defined lead times at each milestone.

Pipeline Velocity Factor = 1 + ((D/N) x f2)
where:
D = No. of Overdue days i.e. difference between Actual Lead time and Max Lead Time at current milestone
Actual Lead Time = time difference from project start date to current date
Max Lead Time at current milestone = Sum of stipulated lead times for each milestone up to the current milestone
N = Max Cycle Time i.e. Max Lead Time at last successful milestone.
f2 = value between 0 and 1, used to adjust contribution of pipeline velocity

The f1 and f2 are factors that can adjust the contribution of the Customer Grade Factor (CGF ) and Pipeline Velocity Factor (PVF) to the weighted value of opportunities. For example, if we feel that we want only 50% contribution from CGF, we can set f1 to be 0.5. Then for all opportunities. Similarly, if we want a higher contribution for the velocity, we can set f2 as say 0.75.

Milestone Configuration Parameters

For enabling On2Biz to calculate the above weighted value, we will need to do a one time configuration of assigning the following parameters to each milestone in the sales process:

1. Probability of Closure – value between 0 and 1 that represents the chances that the opportunity will close if it reaches this milestone
2. Maximum Lead Time – the maximum stipulated amount of time it will take (in days, hours, minutes) for any opportunity to arrive and stay at this milestone, beyond which it will either move ahead or get de-priotitized.

For example,

Customer Configuration Parameters

In On2Biz, each customer can be assigned a grade. The pre-configured customer grades are A,B,C,D. What we need to do is to set a grading factor for each grade. For e.g,
A=0.9, B=0.7, C=0.5, D=0.2.

Data to be captured for each opportunity

When we record a new opportunity project for a new customer, the minimum data we need to capture is the following:

1. Title or description
2. Projected or actual value
3. Milestone reached
4. Customer Grade (for new customers only)

Thereafter, the only data required to be updated is the milestone reached. On2Biz automatically tracks the date and time of completion of each milestone, thereby tracking the velocity of movement through the pipeline

As you can see from above, there is no additional effort required for every opportunity.
The above methodology will be implemented in On2Biz shortly. We will create a default configuration of the probability of closure and max lead times for milestones for all accounts. We will inform all users prior to release of this new version so that you can adjust the configuration according to your specific sales process.

Meanwhile, your feedback and comments are welcome.

Related posts:

1. The Ideal Sales Pipeline Value – solution selling expert’s view
2. Using the sales pipeline report for key performance indicators
3. Customer / Partner Relationship Management facilities in On2Biz

Across the tech vendor community, approximately 50% of marketing investment is allocated to demand generation and about one-third of that investment is ear-marked to directly support the sales force. New research from IDC shows that, for most vendors, this complex and expensive intersection of marketing and sales remains very much a “work in process.”

What are the main bottlenecks in managing this escalating cost of sales?
What are the best practices being followed? What systems and processes need to be put in place?

As the IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice points out and which resonates with our experience from the On2Biz community:

1. A consistent, global definition of a lead – We have seen with each business that begins to use On2Biz, that sales teams are often clueless on what a lead is. Some sales persons tend to consider every visiting card they collect as leads. While other more skeptical sales persons only register a lead when they are confident that the order will come through. This inconsistency in definition of what a lead is can only be corrected by a globally communicated definition of a lead, established as a standard company policy.
2. Lead Capture, Lead Qualification and Assignment to Sales – Leads could be captured from multiple sources. There needs to be a well defined qualification process, where certain minimum requirements for qualification are verified by the lead capturing team. Only qualified leads should be forwarded to the sales team. Bad quality leads wastes costly sales resources. And qualification done centrally keeps the leads qualification process under control.
3. Sales Performance Measurement – As we have discussed previously in various posts under “Sales Pipeline Management“, performance management is really the first step towards managing sales costs. In On2Biz implementations, we insist that our first users are managers and not sales persons. Unless managers are able to measure sales performance by using a clearly defined set of key performance indicators, sales effectiveness will never improve.

Carl quotes the recommendations offered in this study:

• CMOs must dedicate a lead management individual or team to develop and govern a marketing lead management process across the organization, ideally in collaboration with a similarly tasked sales lead manager. Senior management buy-in and support is required at process development, roll-out, and governance.
• Providing quality leads and establishing the ability to track leads will only be possible once marketers and other system users understand the need for a lead management process and its impact on the success of the marketing function. Many leading sales organizations tie use of their CRM system with compensation; it’s time for marketing to follow suit.
• Performance measurement in the lead generation process will enable marketing to quantify its true impact on the sales pipeline (e.g., marketing-generated and marketing-enhanced leads and deals) and lead velocity. This will also enable marketing to establish a direct feedback loop to improve its campaign effectiveness along the entire customer development lifecycle – from awareness through advocacy.

Related posts:

1. Lead Management: What is a lead and how to qualify leads?
2. Managing a Complex Sales Process
3. The Secret behind Effective Sales Management

Now armed with some of the feedback from users of On2Biz and further validated by a great post by Lori Grant on Smart Lemming, there is a new sales metric on the On2Biz block – Sales Cycle Time.

A recent article by Lori Grant titled “Sales Performance Analysis – The Vital Signs of Your Sales Cycle” on Smart Lemming which builds on an article by Kimberly L. McCall in Entrepreneur Magazine, lists out the following Key Performance Indicators for measuring sales effectiveness:

1. Know your close rate: knowing your close rate and the time it takes to move across the sales cycle is critical to forecasting and to understanding issues in the sales cycle. Track confirmed interest to demo, demo to proposal, onsite demo to contract, contract to signing, and signing to implementation.

2. Improve your qualified leads: whether it’s inside sales, website leads, or tradeshow leads, marketing should do all it can to improve qualified leads handed off to the sales team. Keep track of these leads as they move across the sales cycle, looking for need improvements in marketing tactics.

3. Keep your sales cycle short as possible: See item #1. Once you identify each step in the sales cycle, you’ll be able to problem-solve on why there’s a drag in one step versus another. This will allow you to determine if there’s a process problem, channel problem, or other issues that may lengthen your sales cycle.

4. Review sales rep performance: Set monthly, quarterly, and annual goals aligned with company goals. Each rep should have a clear understanding of their quota. They should have ample opportunities in their individual pipeline so they can achieve their close rate and sales quota. Sales managers or VPs of Sales should meet regularly with sale rep and sales team to review actual performance to goals. Discussions should ensue about problems and how sales management can help.

5. Understand your profit margin per sale: while you may know your profit margin, don’t forget about the cost of sending out your CEO or CTO to close the sale. Often, these key players are sent to prospective client to close the deal, but at an opportunity cost to the company. If the CEO’s on sales trips, then that’s one or many things that CEO can’t work on that’s vital for the company or running the business. Try to understand why the CEO or CTO is need.

6. Perform a regular sales audit: deep dives are invaluable; especially when budgets are set and you sales is budgeted into the budget as cash flow to cover company expenses. Monitoring key sales metric monthly and quarterly allows an executive team to prepare for any shortfalls and manage accordingly.

For reference, let us bring back a snap shot of the sales performance report from On2Biz

Let us see whether, and how On2Biz measures the above metrics:

1. Know your close rate		Covered by the Funnel conversion ratio. On2Biz tracks the conversion ratio from each milestone to the next, and the funnel shows a graphical view of the rate.
2. Improve your qualified leads		Covered by the Pipeline, Weighted Pipeline which track number of leads and also give an idea of weighted value of the leads
3. Keep your sales cycle short as possible		Aha! This has somehow slipped our attention so far – but not too long. On2Biz knows the time it takes to go from any milestone to the next. Hence, we can track the average time to progress from any milestone to the next. And of course, the total cycle time for successful conversion. But not stopping by merely calculating the time taken, On2Biz will go further and alert the sales person if any project is stuck at a milestone for more than the average time taken to proceed ahead from that milestone. This was pointed out by Kalpit of Netcore during a recent review meeting. Thanks Kalpit, and Lori.
4. Review sales rep performance		This refers to reviewing sales performance based on quotas or targets. In On2Biz, order values are tracked, and these can be compared to targets for the specific period. However, assigning targets to merely the order value is not enough. Each of the KPIs need to be assigned a target healthy range. If any metric is beyond this healthy range, managers can drill down and see exactly why the KPI is not up to expectations.
5. Understand your profit margin per sale		Though On2Biz tracks the bottom line value for each project (see this post), the performance report does not explicitly display the profit margins, though they are known. This has been on our development pipeline, but since very few current users are using this feature, we’ve kept it on a slow burner.
6. Perform a regular sales audit		This is not really a KPI, but an operational guide. In On2Biz, our first target users in a sales team are in fact managers and not sales persons. Whenever we setup a new On2Biz account for any business, we capture their sales pipeline data from a spreadsheet, and generate performance reports. The first users who are trained to use On2Biz are the managers, who start performance evaluations and control incentives by using the performance report. This automatically brings sales teams into the loop without requiring much coercion.

The ideas of using cycle time to measure the health of the process can and will be extended to all other processes that On2Biz covers, such as customer support, order tracking, collections etc. More on this coming son…

Related posts:

1. Using the sales pipeline report for key performance indicators
2. The Ideal Sales Pipeline Value – solution selling expert’s view
3. How effective is your sales process?

This article shows how the On2Biz pipeline report tracks various sales metrics that go far beyond the conventional target tracking to measure sales performance.

The pipeline report metrics

On2Biz automatically generates a sales pipeline report based on values entered in sales projects. Let us look at a sample pipeline report generated by On2Biz:

This is a pipeline for one month for a particular sales person. The metrics that are shown in the report above are:

1. Milestone – Milestones indicate the stage of sales in the sales process.

2. Pipeline – Pipeline indicates value and number of projects that are currently at various milestones.

The number of projects in the pipeline should be highest at the lead stage, and gradually reduce towards the bottom. In the example above, there are not enough projects at the beginning of the pipeline. This may hamper sales flow in the following period.

3. New – Indicates the number of new projects that have arrived at the corresponding milestone in the report period selected (1 month).

Each milestone should have some new projects each month. No new projects indicates that the sales process may be taking too long, or that there is not enough activity.

4. Inactive – Indicates the number of projects that are inactive for more than 1 week (or period specified in configuration) at the time the report is generated.

This column has two numbers shown as X / Y, where X are projects that are inactive due to lack of any sales activity, wyile Y are projects that may have activity, but have not shown any progress in milestones. Ideally, X should be low or zero, indicating enough sales activity is being carried out. Y indicates lack of progress.

5. Average Project Value – Indicates the average value of projects at the corresponding milestone.

The average value gives an indication of the size of orders that are being worked on. When comparing pipelines of sales persons, one can find out which sales persons are working on smaller value projects, but may have larger number of projects, and which sales persons are working on fewer, hopefully larger value projects.

6. Weighted Pipeline Value – Indicates the value of projects at the corresponding milestone, based on the probability of conversion.

The probability of conversion is automatically calculated by On2Biz, based on the history of conversion of the particular sales person, product category or sales team for which the pipeline report was generated. Ideally, the weighted value should be equally distributed in all the milestones, which ensures smooth sales flow. Lack of enough weighted value at any critical stage is an early warning for potential trouble to come.

7. Funnel – The funnel shows a cumulative performance of all projects in the selected category and period. It shows the total number of projects that have passed the corresponding milestone in the period for which the report was generated.

The shape of the funnel indicates the rate of conversion of projects along the different milestones. The funnel should be consistently tapering down, indicating healthy sales conversion.

8. Conversion Ratio – Indicates the rate at which projects are getting converted with respect to the total number of projects in the funnel.

The critical conversion ratios to watch are the top and bottom – conversion of leads to opportunities, and order conversion. If the conversion of leads to opportunities is not high enough, it indicates that the quality of leads being captured may not be good enough. Order conversion should be consistent, as per benchmarks of the particular industry or market. A low order conversion ratio indicates lack of sales effectiveness. However, if the order conversion ratio is too high, it may not necessarily be good. It may be a sign of under-utilization of sales resources – you may be playing too small a game.

Drilling down from the pipeline report

One can drill down from this report to the list of projects for the following metrics:
1. Click on the pipeline value to get a list of projects that are currently at that milestone
2. Click on the number of new projects to get details of the projects
3. Click on the Inactive projects X / Y to get the corresponding projects that are inactive. Both X and Y are separate links.

Key Performance Indicators

To understand how the above metrics can be used as key performance indicators, let us see another example of a pipeline report to compare with the previous one:

Let us compare the above pipeline with the one previously shown:
1. Shape of the funnel – Firstly, the shape of the funnel now looks warped. Compare this with the previous report, where the funnel was gradually tapering. The bulge in the middle indicates that this sales person has projects that have directly entered the quotation stage and not as converted leads. This is likely because these may be repeat orders by existing customers (one can see the details of the projects by clicking on the corresponding pipeline value). So the sales person may be overly dependent on repeat orders and not putting enough effort on new leads – or in this case, just sitting on the leads without working on them.

2. Distribution of Weighted Pipeline Value – Compared to the previous example, this report shows a different distribution of the weighted value. There is a larger weighed value of the top, and smaller weighted value at the bottom. However, if one looks at the new and inactive columns, it shows that these leads may be all old, and lying around without any progress. Hence if there is any deviation from a uniformly distributed weighted value, it could be a sign of trouble.

3. Lead Qualification Ratio – This report shows only 73% leads are being qualified, while in the previous report, 92% leads were being qualified. This may indicate that leads being captured are not good enough, or as in this case (evident from the inactive projects), the sales person is too lazy to work on the leads.

4. Order Conversation Ratio – This report shows an extraordinarily high order conversion ratio of 67% – a sure sign of trouble!!! A high order conversion ratio is a sure indication of under-utilization of sales resources. The earlier report showed only 7% conversion, but all other KPIs were good.

Had we used the conventional method of measuring performance only on value of orders converted, the second sales person would have been considered a better performer than the first. On2Biz pipeline report therefore simplifies the performance management by using a broader set of Key Performance Indicators, which ensure consistent sales effectiveness across the entire sales team.

Related posts:

1. Sales Cycle Time – a critical metric for measuring performance
2. Managing a Complex Sales Process
3. Feature Changes: Workspace dashboard menu with Activity List and Pipeline

To handle a growing number of customers, businesses hire more sales persons. This increases the available time and resources. And in India where salaries are affordable, this is the easiest way to facilitate growth. So most small businesses have a much larger sales force compared to their sales revenues. However, you cannot continue this strategy beyond a certain point, because good sales persons are not easy to find. To make average sales persons work with the same efficiency, you need to work as a team. And as the team size increases, managing the team becomes expensive and cumbersome, leading to loss of sales effectiveness. Hence sales effectiveness is not scalable

I recently read an article on Roy Gough’s blog about this issue. Roy is a successful CRM professional who has implemented CRM systems for companies in the US. He lists the following problems commonly faced by sales teams that try to grow without a system.

• Promised return phone calls not made, and information not sent
• Not being informed of possible delays or problems
• That call to tell you when your order is ready – promised but not made.
• One department in the company having no idea what another department said to you in the last call or letter.
• No one bothering to call to make sure the goods arrived, or are satisfactory. Probably no calls at all – until of course they want to sell you something else
• No one knowing what they last sold to you – or when
• No one knowing enough about you to offer you items or services that would enhance or compliment your purchase. Frequently only one person in the company seems to know anything about you! And if they’re not available…?

The answer is a CRM or sales management system like On2Biz gives you scalable sales effectiveness. The system works

1. by enhancing the efficiency of every individual sales person
2. as well as improving team management capabilities.

For an individual sales person, the system works like a personal secretary who never forgets, and who allows the individual to handle more customers within the same available time and resources. For a team, the system becomes the communication platform that allows a large team to work together without communication gaps, forgotten tasks, and incomplete briefs. So adding a CRM or sales management system is almost like doubling your sales force, but without the high cost and loss of effectiveness.

But the challenge in using a CRM or sales management system is in getting your sales force to adapt their working style to a more structured process, where information is recorded systematically and accurately. This additional responsibility is often viewed as an unnecessary overhead by individual sales persons. Sales persons initially tend to view the system as a way for managers to keep tabs on their activity. They consider it as a burden that hampers them rather than serving to enhance their productivity.

That is where On2Biz differs from other such systems available. On2Biz has been designed to minimize the pain involved in adopting a system that requires individuals to work in a structured process. Based on the years of experience in implementation of workflow management systems in India, Reach1to1 has created a business management system specifically for ensuring successful user adoption of sales management systems.

Contact the On2Biz team for creating an evaluation account for your sales team today!

Related posts:

1. How effective is your sales process?
2. The Secret behind Effective Sales Management
3. Customer / Partner Relationship Management facilities in On2Biz