On2Biz - measure, manage, scale your business!

Product Development and Teamwork

May 9, 2008 – 3:47 am
Yesterday, Ashish - our usability expert, came up to me expressing his concern about whether his work is adding value, and does it make sense to continue working. I shared with him some lessons about working on a product as compared to working on projects, and about teamwork, which I think is relevant to all of us. So I thought I should share the same conversation with all of you. 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 ...

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Calculating the projected value of an opportunity

April 29, 2008 – 9:24 am
Earlier, the weighted value for each project or opportunity in On2Biz was calculated by adjusting the opportunity value by the probability of closure, that was calculated at each milestone based on the historical movement of opportunities in the pipeline. This was giving us inconsistent results in many instances. In addition, the value did not account for two other factors that we usually use to assign higher priority to sales opportunities. Sales executives instinctively assign a higher priority to customers that are strategically more important to long term sales, and a lower priority to opportunities that take too long to move from one milestone to another. Our new methodology will account for both these factors.

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Case Study: Insurance and Financial Products Sales

April 10, 2008 – 5:57 pm
Ace Money is part of a group of 3 companies, with approximately 50 offices across Maharashtra and approximately 500 employees. They provide various value added services in the financial and insurance sector including credit cards, general insurance, home loans & personal loans. 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 ...

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Complex Sales Challenges

April 9, 2008 – 6:59 am
Complex sales is where the process of mapping the customer's need or problem to the product or service requires considerable time and effort. Typically, complex sales involves long sales cycles, involves multiple decision makers, is highly unpredictable and therefore very risky. 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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How effective is your sales process?

February 28, 2007 – 11:41 am
Managing your sales process is expensive. And if you are in the information technology or related industry, you are not alone. Carl Rahn Griffith, founder of egoboss, a highly respected consulting and advisory firm in the information technology industry comments on his blog: 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: A consistent, global definition of a lead - We have seen ...

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How safe is your data in On2Biz?

February 24, 2007 – 1:36 pm
With the recent declaration by Google to offer a paid version of its web applications such as Gmail, calendar, and online document editors - collectively called Google Apps, the Software As A Service (SaaS) model has become mainstream. Now the discussion of the core issues relating to SaaS are being actively discussed, and hopefully will result in a widespread understanding of the benefits and compromises involved. As a case in point, Phil Wainewright, who maintains a well read blog aptly titled “Applications on demand” recently wrote - “Your data: safe in your hands?” that talks about one of the core issues - Data Security. Unlike other attributes such as amount of space, bandwidth, or software features - which are easily measurable and therefore comparable, data security is psychological. Users have a false sense of security regarding data that is stored locally on their own computer or internal server as compared to ...

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Sales Cycle Time - a critical metric for measuring performance

February 17, 2007 – 12:18 pm
In the previous post on sales performance analysis, we talked about how certain key performance indicators can be used to measure sales performance. 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 ...

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Using the sales pipeline report for key performance indicators

February 5, 2007 – 12:58 pm
Conventionally, sales performance is measured by the value of orders closed. Sales persons are assigned targets, and their incentives are based on their ability to meet these targets. However, merely meeting targets does not ensure consistency of sales performance, effective utilization of sales resources, accurate target assignments, or effective sales conversions. 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. ...

Posted in CRM, Development Progress, Feature Updates, On2Biz Modules, Sales Pipeline Manager | No Comments »

Customer / Partner Relationship Management facilities in On2Biz

January 16, 2007 – 1:20 pm
On2Biz relationship management module provides facilities for managing relationships with companies, including customers, distributors or any other type of relationship. 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 ...

Posted in CRM, Feature Updates, Relationship Manager | No Comments »

Feature Changes: Workspace dashboard menu with Activity List and Pipeline

January 16, 2007 – 1:06 pm
On2Biz facilities have been divided into two sections: 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 ...

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