Working on a product is different from working on a project. It is like the difference between running a marathon v/s running a short distance race. When you run a 100 mts race, you put all your energy into the race right from the beginning, and finish as fast as possible. In a marathon, you run as fast as you can without getting over-exerted. Your speed increases in stages, and as you come closer and closer to the finish, you run faster and faster. The problem is, in the product development marathon, you do not really know the terrain in advance - sometimes the road is a steep climb and sometimes it’s a nice downward run - sometimes the road is straightforward and you can see the way forward clearly, and sometimes its all curvy and every turn gives you a surprise. To win a marathon needs you to dynamically adjust your running style to the terrain, and most important, keep running come what may. So if you’re a short distance runner and are used to the short development cycles of projects, welcome to the world of marathons

Another important aspect in a long distance run is teamwork. You know how a flock of geese fly in a V formation? As each goose flaps its wings in its place in the formation, it creates uplift for the goose following it. By flying in a “V” formation, scientists have calculated that the whole flock adds up to 71 % more flying range than if the geese flew separately. Any goose that falls out of the formation quickly feels the drag and joins back. By working together in a team, we can fly much longer than if we were to do it alone.

But who leads the pack? When the goose in the lead gets tired, it rotates back into the group, and another goose takes it’s place in the lead. Now this is obvious - shared leadership ensures that no single person bears the brunt of leading from the front. But how do you think the geese decide who’s to lead at what time? The answer is that there is no “decision” - each goose flies thinking it is the leader. It’s speed is determined by the current energy levels. The goose with the most energy automatically flies a bit faster, and happens to become the leader. When it gets tired, it automatically falls back and another takes the leading position. If they had “decided” to follow the “mother” ( or father) goose at all times, they would not complete the journey!

When a goose gets sick or shot down, two geese will drop out of the formation and follow the wounded one down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is either able to fly again, or dies. They then either catch up with their flock or find another formation to join. They never fly alone.

Welcome to the race!

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Anand Shrikhande is the owner, who wants to expand his business & wants to have a
professional setup for his general insurance business. He expects that once he’s successful in implementing this with general insurance business, then he’ll expand it to his other businesses.

Ace Money has a team of tele-sales executives who make calls to customers when their insurance is due to expire, and then give them options of various Insurance products just in time to consider new and better options. If the customer decides to opt for any of the proposals, then they send a field sales executive to complete the transaction.

So far in On2Biz, we have handled primarily field sales operations. This was a new and interesting case that would challenge the SaaS model, and we were keen to rise up to the challenge.

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In this presentation, we cover the challenges involved in complex sales from the view point of various stake holders, and uncover the needs to address these challenges

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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.

If you are wondering how to manage all this, may be its time to Get On To Business to On2Biz way! - Could not resist the plug

• U.K. company fined over laptop theft
• Hard drive vanishes from VA facility
• Stolen Boeing laptop held ID data on 382,000
• Commerce Department counts 1,100 missing laptops
• Theft of laptop puts thousands of identities at risk

These stories show how easy it is to steal data from “well-resourced enterprises and government departments” when the data is stored in individual computers. Compared to that, data that is centrally stored in a professionally managed data center is far safer. The amount of investments that can be made at a data center towards securing data, and the risks involved for the service provider in the event of data loss are far too high. Ofcourse, trusting a big company like Google with your data is different from trusting an upstart like On2Biz. But then, with On2Biz, you have direct access to the people involved, rather than a call center handling customer calls. So you can hold us responsible - and we know it.

But as for outsourced storage, the story is going to get even more interesting. Google, and other big web companies like Amazon are working towards allowing web services companies like us to use their servers on a pay-per-use basis. We have already subscribed to Amazon’s S3 - which allows us to store data on servers managed by Amazon, and EC2 - which allows us to run our applications from their servers too! This will then give the double benefit of world-class security infrastructure combined with personal attention from the On2Biz team. But till then, our servers are still hosted in a world class professionally managed data center.

Looking forward to more action from the big guys…

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…

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.

The objective of this modules is to ensure that we are prioritizing our activity across our entire database of companies. Usually activity gets prioritized based on immediate need. However, with the relationship management module, You can grade companies based on level of attention required, and On2Biz will automatically bring to your attention those companies that need to be attended to out of turn. In addition, you can now track activity that is not necessarily related to any open or active project. Hence you can create tasks, appointments, calls, notes and files for companies even if they do not relate to any specific active project.

A. Creating a new customer / company

Usually a new company is created when you add the first project for the company. With relationship management activated, a new link appears in the workspace to create a new company. To view or edit the company details, you can click on the company name in the project to view the company page.

The company page contains the following details:
1. Company Name - as entered in the project
2. Company Code - you can use this to assign a unique accounting code to the customer, so as to match your internal accounting code for the company
3. Type - this specifies the relationship of the company - default relationships are End Customer, Distributor, Consultant etc. These can be customized to your requirement.
4. Account Manager - The account manager is automatically set to the project manager of the first project created for that customer.
5. Grade - You can assign a grade to the customer. Default grades are A,B,C,D. Grades correspond to a rating of the importance of the customer for your company. You can grade the customer based on any factor such as potential of business value, strategic importance of the relationship for entering a new market segment, possibility of repeat business, etc. For each customer grade, you can specify a default frequency of contact. For example, you can specify that A grade customers should be contacted every week, B grade customers every month, C grade customers every two months, and D grade customers every quarter. These are the default grades and periods. You can change these for your company’s requirements.
6. Company Website - the address(URL) of the company’s web site
7. Scale - Large scale, medium scale, small scale or professionals - can be used to segment customers
8. Industry Type - containing a choice of various types of industries - used to segment customers
9. Project List - showing a list of projects that relate to this company (as end customer or other company role). You can also create a new project from here. Clicking on the project title opens the corresponding project page.
10. Contacts List - list of contact persons with contact details. You can add or edit contact persons from here.
11. Address List - list of addresses or locations at which the company has presence. You can add or edit one or more addresses.
12. Tasks - tasks related to the company but not to any individual project. You can add tasks for the company or for the project, but only company related tasks are listed here. Project tasks are listed in the project page.
13. Appointments / Calls - appointments related to the company but not to any individual project. You can add appointments/calls for the company or for the project, but only company related calls are listed here. Project calls are listed in the project page.
14. Files - files related to the company but not to any individual project. You can add files for the company or for the project, but only company related files are listed here. Project files are listed in the project page.

B. Customer Activity in Workspace menu

The relationship management module introduces a few new entries in the workspace menu for managing company relationships:
1. Active Companies
a. by Activity - lists customers that have some activity(calls/tasks/notes) in the last 1 week
b. by Calls - lists customers that have been called (not tasks / notes) in the last 1 week
Note: The above should actually show customers who have been attended to in the period as defined by their grade. However, since in the beginning, no customers have been graded, we are starting with 1 week.
2. Inactive Customers
a. by Activity - lists customers that have NO activity(calls/tasks/notes) in the last 1 week
b. by Calls - lists customers that have NOT been called (not tasks / notes) in the last 1 week
Note: The above should actually show customers who have been not been attended to in the period as defined by their grade. However, since in the beginning, no customers have been graded, we are starting with 1 week.

C. Customer Analytical Reports

1. Customer Coverage Analysis in Pipeline Report - The pipeline report will contain a new section called customer coverage analysis which shows how well the user/group/category covers the customer base. For each grade of customers, it will show:
a. Total customer base - the number of customers in that grade, who have account managers as the selected user/group
b. Customers in pipeline - the number of customers who have active projects in the pipeline
c. Other customers - the number of customers who do NOT have active projects in the pipeline
d. Customers with completed calls - the number of customers who have been called in in the period specified
e. Customers with completed tasks - the number of customers who have completed tasks in the period specified

These metrics indicate the extent of coverage of the customer base by the pipeline and by activity. If the number of customers in the pipeline at any customer grade is too small, it shows that we are not covering enough customers of that grade. Then, we can see whether there is adequate activity for that grade of customer. If there is not enough activity, then we can re-focus activity for that grade of customer.

2. Company Listing Reports
In addition to the new section in the pipeline report, we also have a companies list report which can list out customers by various search criteria:
a. Company Name
b. Company Grade
c. Industry Type
d. Company Scale

With this module, On2Biz introduces an easy-to-use mechanism to add relationship management facilities, without adding any significant overhead of effort for users.

• Workspace - where the user manages and reports activities and processes
• Reports - where the user analyzes performance through various types of reports

Each of these sections have the corresponding menu, which acts like a dashboard for quick access to the facilities in the section.

We review here, the Workspace dashboard menu, and the changes we have implemented based on feedback from users.

The workspace menu consists of the following facilities:

1. Activity List

a. Scheduled Appointments - lists the appointments that are due today or overdue
b. Pending Tasks - lists the tasks that are due today or pending from before
c. Unread Notes - lists notes that have been added in projects where the user is an project manager or project team member
d. Active Projects
- by Milestone - lists projects that have shown progress in milestones in the last 1 week
- by Activity - lists projects that have shown some activity (calls/tasks/notes) in the last 1 week
e. Inactive Projects
- by Milestone - lists projects that have shown NO progress in milestones in the last 1 week
- by Activity - lists projects that have shown NO activity (calls/tasks/notes) in the last 1 week

2. Projects Pipeline

The projects pipeline shows the number of projects that are currently at various milestones. Previously we used to show all projects where the current user has permissions to view. Hence, a user will see all projects where:
a. The user is a project manager
b. The user is a project team member
c. The user is a category manager for a product category which is being sold
d. The user is a member of top management (and will see ALL projects for all users)

So for individual users who are not category managers or members of top management, the pipeline shows projects where that user is a project manager or a project team member.

While for managers, it would show all projects where they have permissions to view, which include projects that they are themselves project managers/project team members, as well as other users’ projects.

Some of the managers who are using On2Biz have brought to our notice that it is difficult for them to view their own projects from the workspace pipeline. If they want to view projects belonging to their subordinates, they can use the reports, where one can choose the user and see the sales pipeline in detail.

This made sense to us, so we have now created an option in the user preferences, to indicate whether the workspace pipeline should show subordinates pipeline or only the user’s own pipeline.

Hence if you are a manager, and you set your preference “show subordinates pipeline in workspace” to no, then your workspace pipeline will show only projects where:
a. The user is a project manager
b. The user is a project team member

This will affect the number of projects that appear in your pipeline if you are a category manager or a member of the top management.

By default, the workspace pipeline will include your subordinates projects. To see only your individual projects in the workspace pipeline, change your preferences “show subordinates pipeline in workspace” to yes.