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Summary

10th Commandment

AUTOMATE SALES LAST TO CREATE
A PULL EFFECT FOR THE AUTOMATION PROGRAM.

The most frequent complaint we hear from the field is that the tools deployed hold no immediate value for the sales force. In many cases, the initial deployment, while having many features that make some tasks faster and easier to perform, seems to lack one critical thing: data, in particular, customer service data. More and more, reps state that if they just had timely access to customer service data to proactively see if customers were having problems, then they could do their job better.

Is this complaint merely another excuse not to use the tools? We think not. Content is king in any type of automation project. Having timely access to well-scrubbed data is imperative to successfully automating a company. Typically, though, most SFA projects put the onus on the sales reps to fill their contact databases from their existing little black books. If the bulk of these people are not natural born typists, then this represents a significant amount of work for them. Typing, when you are not a typist, is time-consuming and enormously frustrating. Given the choice, most reps will opt out and not use the tools and simply rely on their manual records and processes for tracking sales data.

Some companies port data from the centralized billing system to the contact management software and this pre-populates the rep databases with basic account demographics. This is a better approach, but since most contact management packages require the rep to fill in a myriad of other fields which may not be easily pre-populated from mainframes data dumps, the rep still needs to spend a great deal of time updating sales data for each customer record.

Of far more interest to most reps is the data they do not already know or have immediate access to – especially the data maintained by Customer Service. So our recommendation is to consider automating your customer service organizations first.

Then when you are ready to automate the sales force, you will most likely see a great deal of interest in the online customer data. By automating customer service first, and by populating the contact management module with customer service data, you will be creating immediate value for the sales force. Test it with a pilot group to see if we’re wrong.