5 Common Sales Problems - And How SFA Solves Them

SFA (Sales Force Automation) can help you prevent problems your sales force encounters every day. SFA won't sell your products for you, but it will help salespeople sell more efficiently, more productively and with greater customer satisfaction.
With SFA, you can marshal resources and apply them to sales efforts in a coordinated fashion. SFA lets you easily combine all customer information, history, past orders, present outstanding problems, latest inventory information and everything else you have into one unified view of a customer's relationship with your company. That allows you to deliver a more satisfying experience to customers, builds customer trust, reveals upselling and cross-selling opportunities and generally makes the sales call a more productive and pleasant experience for everyone.
The following five sales problems plague even the best salespeople. Fortunately, SFA can help. Here's how:

Click title above

<back to top>

SERVICE IS THE NEW SALES
How CRM can drive revenue from service requests.
By Pam Baker, InsideCRM.com (excerpt)

While it’s no secret that companies must make the most out of existing customers in order to prosper in this economy, some businesses are unaware of how helpful CRM is in doing so, especially during routine service calls. “CRM allows service professionals to ensure consistent service offerings, pricing, discounts and terms across a range of related service contracts,” said RunE2E CEO John Brasch. “Agents can let customers know about offers that they may not be aware of — turning a simple service request into a sale.”

But cross-selling and upselling are not the only ways to net new sales through service requests.“Service warranty revenue optimization is a common benefit of service-related CRM,” explained Brasch. “In-house agents can receive alerts when a customer’s service contract is about to expire and engage in proactive outreach to ensure appropriate renewal.”

<back to top>

Louisiana Innovation Council To Enhance Competitiveness of Knowledge-Based Economy
by Louisiana Economic Development (LED) (excerpt)

Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order creating the Louisiana Innovation Council, whose mission is to establish a comprehensive economic strategy and innovation agenda that will grow the state's economy as well as enhance competitiveness.

Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret said, "The Louisiana Innovation Council will help the state develop and implement targeted policies, programs and investments designed to maximize the potential of our increasingly knowledge-based economy. We will bring together academia, the business community, economic development and workforce leaders, as well as some of Louisiana's leading entrepreneurs to cultivate and foster Louisiana's innovation ecosystem. This is a significant step toward identifying and cultivating new growth industries, strengthening our traditional industries, diversifying our economy and enhancing Louisiana's economic competitiveness."

One of the major questions surrounding hosted CRM, or CRM as SaaS (software as a service), is an economic one: Do hosted CRM solutions from vendors like SugarCRM Inc. and Zoho save you money?

IT Staffing

Hosted CRM can lower the overall cost of your IT staff. Besides needing fewer staff resources, CRM as SaaS also offers some less evident financial benefits.

Hardware, Software Costs

Because of the way these additional costs are hidden in a large organization, small companies tend to see the value proposition of hosted CRM much more clearly. If you don't have a corporate IT department to pick up the expenses of additional operating-system and application licenses, or to handle maintenance, the advantages of hosted CRM are much more visible. According to Vegesna, this is one of the reasons that SMBs (small- to medium-sized businesses) are quicker to adopt the hosted model.

Excess Capacity

Hardware is modular, but your needs for CRM aren't. In other words, you can only increase the capacity of your servers, disk drives and other infrastructure in discrete chunks. However, the demands your CRM system puts on hardware varies.

With hosted CRM, you can vary your capacity demands much more smoothly. You don't have to add capacity until you actually need it, and then the scaling-up process consists of a phone call to the vendor.

Upgrades and Patches

Normally SaaS systems are automatically maintained by the vendor at no added charge to the customer. One other result of the different economics of hosted and on-site CRM, Vegesna said, is that the monthly fee for hosted CRM software will often be less than the monthly cost of support for an on-site system.

Outlay Pattern

One of the more subtle economic differences is the different pattern of outlay. An on-premise CRM system has a much higher up-front cost as you invest in hardware and software as well as in setting up the system. A hosted solution has set-up costs as well, but for the most part your investment consists of a monthly hosting fee.

Even if the hosted CRM application does not represent a savings when costs are compared over the long term, it makes a considerable difference when it comes to writing the checks each month and matching outlay to income.

Time to ROI

While deploying a full CRM system is a complex process that requires considerable planning, the time needed to actually implement the software and start reaping its benefits is typically much less with a hosted CRM system. "If you make the decision on SaaS on Friday, you can probably have something to work with by Monday," Schneider said. This is especially true for SMBs that don't need elaborate customization of their CRM systems.

When comparing costs of hosted and on-premise CRM, these hidden savings can mount up. They can even tip the balance in favor of hosted CRM when overall economics are considered — as they should be when choosing a CRM solution.

A few years ago, analysts were reporting failure rates as high as 50 to 70 percent for CRM projects. While companies have gotten more savvy about CRM and how to implement it, the failure rate for the software still remains high.

Part of that rate depends on the definition of “failure” as well as unrealistic expectations. But the fact remains that many CRM projects fail in the sense of not delivering the estimated increases to the bottom line, customer satisfaction and other endpoint metrics.

While the details, and the definitions, of these failures often vary significantly, they usually come down to the same major errors.

Here are three pitfalls you want to avoid with CRM:

1. Concentrating on the technology at the expense of the people: CRM is not technology. Instead, it uses technology to support sales and marketing's efforts to get closer to your customers.

2. Not having everyone aboard: According to Gartner Group, most CRM failures are the result of user errors rather than technological ones.

3. Not putting the customer first: By its nature, CRM is customer-centric. The CRM model tries to increase sales by focusing on and building better relations with the customer.

Between the decision to implement an enterprise-wide software solution and user acceptance lies perhaps the most treacherous ground in the corporate IT landscape.

Research paper after research paper report that an extraordinarily high percentage of software projects either fail to meet their goals after completion, are delivered over-budget or late or are simply canceled outright. According to Gartner Inc., half of the studied projects exceeded their initial budget tolerance by 200 percent. The Standish Group International Inc. suggested that fully one-third of software projects are scotched before a single user has drawn benefit from the application.

CRM projects are no different; they are subject to the same torques and tensions that tear other projects apart. In fact, the numbers are higher with CRM projects. Studies show up to 70 percent of CRM projects fail. What is the source of so many CRM failures? Are there characteristics of CRM projects that make them especially vulnerable? More important, what are the remedies?

<back to top>

SFA (Sales Force Automation) can help you prevent problems your sales force encounters every day. SFA won't sell your products for you, but it will help salespeople sell more efficiently, more productively and with greater customer satisfaction.

With SFA, you can marshal resources and apply them to sales efforts in a coordinated fashion. SFA lets you easily combine all customer information, history, past orders, present outstanding problems, latest inventory information and everything else you have into one unified view of a customer's relationship with your company. That allows you to deliver a more satisfying experience to customers, builds customer trust, reveals upselling and cross-selling opportunities and generally makes the sales call a more productive and pleasant experience for everyone.

The following five sales problems plague even the best salespeople. Fortunately, SFA can help. Here's how:

1. Not keeping promises. Companies fail to keep promises to customers not because of poor intentions, and not even because of laziness most of the time. They simply forget what they've promised. Properly used, SFA makes sure you never forget. If you enter a note to yourself during or right after a meeting with a customer, the system can be set to remind you. If your promise involves action by someone else in your company, the SFA application can remind that person or department.

2. Speaking with many voices. Another trust-buster comes when different people in your organization tell a customer different things. Again, if your customers believe they can't rely on what you say, they will be a lot less willing to deal with you.

3. Not knowing your customer. Customer knowledge is critical in this age of expanded, intensified customer relationships. Having a memory for such things is important for a good salesperson, but memory is notoriously fallible. Not knowing the information, or getting it wrong, is not conducive to good relationships.

4. Customers don't know you. If some sales problems frustrate customers, others frustrate the salespeople. One of the most irritating is having to constantly reintroduce yourself and your company to a customer because he or she has forgotten who you are.

SFA lets you set up a tickler file to remind you to contact the customer by mail or other means to reinforce your sales efforts and to keep you and your organization fresh in the customer's mind.

5. Predicting the future. One critical trend is order levels. Is a customer ordering more of your product over time? Less? Is he or she refocusing the business and changing the lines or stock levels? Having a global view of trends can help your company with its inventory levels. Having a long-term view of a particular customer can help the sales staff meet that customer's needs more effectively.

Fundamentally, SFA provides a unified view of your customers in a way that your sales force can act on. But it isn't magic. If someone doesn't put the right information into the system you won't be able to draw on it. But if your sales force, customer service department and other entities supply the information, SFA will help you leverage it to get better customer relationships and a better bottom line.

A comprehensive SFA (Sales Force Automation) project is a major undertaking for any enterprise. To do it right requires a lot of effort from sales, customer service and related departments. Here are some things that your company should do to make its SFA effort pay off.

1. Decide what your company is trying to do. What are your business's goals for its SFA effort? How do you expect SFA to contribute to the bottom line? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your company's sales and customer-service operations, and how will SFA help you with them?

2. Start selling your people. You need to sell your SFA plan up to top management, as well as down to the people who will actually implement it.

3. Build your team. In all but the smallest companies, an SFA project will need a team to design and implement the technology.

4. Pick the consultant (if you're using one). While there's nothing magic about implementing SFA, it does require knowledge. The easiest way to get this knowledge is to hire it.

5. Get the processes right. One of the most important and productive things that you can do as part of an SFA effort is to closely examine your company's sales-related business processes and make sure that they're actually doing what you want them to do.

6. Select a vendor. For many companies, choosing an SFA vendor is the first step in the process. Actually, this step should come near the middle.

7. Decide on the technology. SFA is emphatically not about technology. Instead, it is about using the appropriate technology to support and enhance the sales operation. The difference between those two concepts is fundamental.

8. Get buy-in with reasonable expectations. Your sales force isn't the only group that has to believe in your SFA plan.

9. Expect a build-test-build cycle. To some extent, implementing SFA is an iterative process. Don't expect to get everything right the first time. At the very least, you'll find that you have to do some tuning and usually at least one major overhaul of a process area.

10. Get lots and lots of feedback. Input (which is what you get before you put a process or technology in place) and feedback (which is what users tell you about how well the solution meets their needs) are both critical to a successful SFA implementation. Solicit feedback and listen to it. The people in the trenches may not have the big picture, but they know what affects them and, given half a chance, they'll tell you about it.

You just got a shiny new SFA solution and you're ready to configure the new system. But first you need to get the data from the old system and into the new one. You may think this is a simple matter of exporting the old system's data into the new one, and to some extent you would be right. But if you want to do migrate correctly, you should follow these tips from industry experts.

Take Out the Trash

The first and most important thing to remember is to get your data in order. If you send bad data to a new system, said Brent Leary, co-founder and partner of CRM Essentials LLC, a CRM consulting and advisory firm focused on SMBs (small- to medium-sized businesses), your users are going to reject the new system, no matter how good it is.

Improve Sales Practices While You’re at It

If you're going to the trouble and expense of implementing a new system, take the time not only to check your data, but to make sure your existing procedures to process that data are sound.

Connect the Dots

Sheehan suggested taking a hard look at your current system to make sure the new SFA solution will support the data relationships you need for your business.

Don't Forget Any Valuable Data

Sometimes data may be stored off the system on mobile devices.

Don't Leave Workflow Behind

SFA systems have robust workflow and sales processes set up, Leary explained. In addition to the data on people and opportunities, make sure these processes, workflows and escalations get transferred. "You want to make sure those get migrated over as well. You might need prospect information, percentage to close, tasks to perform, who's responsible for the task [and so forth]," Leary said.

Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order creating the Louisiana Innovation Council, whose mission is to establish a comprehensive economic strategy and innovation agenda that will grow the state's economy as well as enhance competitiveness.

Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret said, "The Louisiana Innovation Council will help the state develop and implement targeted policies, programs and investments designed to maximize the potential of our increasingly knowledge-based economy. We will bring together academia, the business community, economic development and workforce leaders, as well as some of Louisiana's leading entrepreneurs to cultivate and foster Louisiana's innovation ecosystem. This is a significant step toward identifying and cultivating new growth industries, strengthening our traditional industries, diversifying our economy and enhancing Louisiana's economic competitiveness."

Barry Erwin, president of Council for A Better Louisiana said, "We are excited about the governor's executive order to create an Innovation Council for Louisiana. Louisiana must continue to move forward to modernize its economy and create more knowledge-based jobs for our state. We believe this council will give us the mechanism to develop a forward-looking innovation strategy for Louisiana and grow the types of jobs that will enhance our economic competitiveness, diversify our economy and better position us for the future."

Michael Hecht, president and CEO, Greater New Orleans, Inc. said, "The unique cultural assets of our state combined with economic factors in our favor, like the lower cost of living, make Louisiana a very attractive destination for entrepreneurs. There is a unique opportunity here to reshape our state, where human capital becomes the essential element and innovation is celebrated. The result will be a more successful Louisiana."

Adam Knapp, CEO of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber said, "Innovation is the key to our competitiveness. Our region's long term growth is tied to our ability to nurture and attract innovation and high growth, entrepreneurial companies.  The Governor's vision in creating this Council is critical to the Baton Rouge area as well as the entire state."

With a deadline fast approaching, the venture capital industry continues to push for a change in the way the Small Business Innovation Research program is administered to allow the participation of venture-backed companies.

Josh Green, a general partner at MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures, and three entrepreneurs were in Washington on Wednesday to testify in front of the House Committee on Small Business about the need to reauthorize the SBIR the program, which is set to expire at the end of July.

A 2001 administrative law judge ruling, and subsequent rulings by the U.S. Small Business Administration, closed the program to many venture-backed companies. The principal reason: SBA has interpreted the law to mean that start-ups majority-owned by venture firms must count the employees of the firms’ other companies. As a result, venture-funded companies petitioning federal agencies that issue SBIR grants – such as the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health – have in many cases been judged to have more than 500 employees.

The National Venture Capital Association has opposed this interpretation, arguing that venture firms aren’t involved in the day-to-day operations of portfolio companies, and that most venture-backed businesses are small, typically employing fewer than 25 people.

 “Companies receiving venture funding may have other innovation in the pipeline worth pursuing,” Green told the committee Wednesday. ”It’s for these projects that companies would apply for SBIR grants. Businesses must continue to innovate and the current SBA interpretation forces companies into an uncomfortable dilemma for worthy new projects. This scenario results in small businesses at best delaying important discovery projects and at worst abandoning this important work altogether.”

Rep. Nydia Velazquez, chair of the committee, asked Rachel King, chief executive of venture-backed GlycoMimetics Inc. whether her company would be able to develop new research through SBIR grants that it could not otherwise.

 Wednesday’s entire testimony is viewable on YouTube, broken up into 25 videos.

In the midst of continuing rancor with its Palestinian neighbors and nuclear threats from Iran, Israel - which marks the 61st anniversary of its birth today - has managed to carve out a booming technological industry that far surpasses even Israeli expectations.

Six decades ago, the nascent Jewish state's star exports were primarily agricultural - the traditional Holy Land oranges, dates and olives, then flowers and specialty vegetables for a newly prosperous European market. Israeli hi-tech in 1948 was the export of Israeli made false teeth and polished diamonds.

Today close to 70 per cent of Israel's multi billion dollar global export market consists of hi-tech products and services - from computer science to ingenious medical mechanical innovations to ecologically linked processes for everything from desalination to solar power on cloudy days . Potentially, and possibly most important of all, large parts of Israel's technological it are making inroads into the vast Arab market that technically boycotts it.

Consider the following: Israel, the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population, can boast the following:

The cell phone , developed in Israel by Israelis working in the Israeli branch of Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel.

Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel. The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel. The Pentium microprocessor in your computer was most likely made in Israel.

Converse Technology, whose main operations are in Tel Aviv, is the world's largest producers of voice messaging systems.

Teva, with a network of plants south of Tel Aviv, is the world's largest generic drug maker.

Pergonal, the world's most widely used fertility drug, was discovered at Israel's Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer.

Various parts of the digital video and audio security systems developed by Israel-based Nice Systems are being used by everyone from Atlantic City casinos to air traffic controllers at Dulles and O'Hare airports to the NYPD and LAPD.

Israel's Given Imaging has developed a pill containing a tiny video camera that can be swallowed to help physicians detect and locate intestinal tumors.

The perimeter security fence around everything from Buckingham Palace to parts of Chicago's O'Hare Airport was developed and produced by Israel-based Magal Security Systems.

<back to top>

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama promised a new era of science and technology for the nation, telling the National Academy of Sciences on Monday that he wants to devote more funds to research and development.

America has fallen behind other countries in science, Obama said.

"I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development," Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.

That 3 percent would amount to about $420 billion.

"We will not just meet but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race," he said.

That pursuit of discovery a half century ago fueled the nation's prosperity and success, Obama told the academy.

"The commitment I am making today will fuel our success for another 50 years," he said. "This work begins with an historic commitment to basic science and applied research."

And he set forth a wish list including solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again and "an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us.'