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June 14, 1999

Software That Sells

Sales-effectiveness products go beyond process automation to help seal deals

By Jeff Sweat

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orget how much more efficient sales-force automation applications may have made your company's sales process. Actually making a sale has always come down to one thing: the salesperson's skill. To help individuals seal the deal, companies are turning to software that goes beyond simple process automation.

This software covers a wide range, from product configurators to proposal generators to knowledge-management tools. But all these products have one thing in common: information.

The new software lets salespeople get prices and quotes without leaving the room. It also facilitates the transmission of strategies on selling to specific types of customers in specific industries. And it arms the sales force with knowledge of a company's products, a customer's needs--and even a rival's offerings.

These are capabilities that sales-force automation software, for all the benefits it can bring to an organization, can't match. Sales-force automation applications focus on the sales process and keep track of sales prospects across an organization. "Sales-force automation won't help salespeople sell better. It's not going to coach them through [the deal]," says Liz Horrex, project manager for Pyxis Corp., a San Diego company that sells pharmaceutical ATMs that track patients' accounts at pharmacies, nursing homes, and hospitals. Sales-force automation tools, says Horrex, only manage contacts and monitor where prospects are in the sales pipeline--when they were contacted, whether they've made an offer, whether their purchasing budget has been approved. Combined with customer-relationship management software, sales-force automation tools can tell the sales force about the customer's history with the company--but when it comes to closing a deal, salespeople are on their own.

"Most sales-force automation is basically like a centralized Big Brother network that can tell you who's doing what," says David Downing, VP of marketing at software vendor Informatica Corp.--and he says that's not necessarily conducive to selling. For instance, salespeople are required to record every customer detail and to document their own sales actions so that managers know how salespeople are spending their time. "At the end of the day, you don't want salespeople entering lots of data," Downing says. "You want them selling."

Worse, while salespeople may come to resent the sales-force automation application because it lets management peer over their shoulders, the extra data entry can also take time away from their ability to close on any particular deal.

Making Selling Easier
But sales-effectiveness tools can boost the odds considerably by helping the sales force better understand customers and products. Sales effectiveness is a raw, untested market, but the tools coming into play are giving salespeople product and pricing information when they need it, so they can immediately give customers documents and tactics that focus on their particular needs.

The sales-effectiveness tools with the longest track record are product configurators--increasingly common in industries with complex products, such as manufacturing and high-tech. Such software can configure and price products on the spot, hacking days off the sales cycle.

For example, Raychem Corp., a Menlo Park, Calif., company that sells fiber-optic equipment, has recently begun using Newtonian Software's Sales Mechanix configuration product to pull together minutely detailed fiber-optic systems--a task that once required salespeople to confer extensively with product managers and engineers, sometimes for days on end. Now, the software follows rules that tell the salesperson which products work together and which are best suited for a specific situation. "The salesperson doesn't have to keep calling back to the head office," says Mike Read, Raychem's director of broadband systems, so making the sale is faster and easier.

In some cases, configuration is not a nicety, it's a necessity. Fisher Controls Inc., a St. Louis subsidiary of Emerson Electric Co. that builds valves and process-control systems, has close to 500 product lines, each with 4 million to 5 million possible configurations. Each configuration can be sold with every other product line, resulting in a staggering number of product possibilities. Before using configuration software, Fisher's salespeople--who typically required engineering backgrounds to do the work--would take days to figure out configuration and pricing by hand, then put together proposals and specification sheets. If they made mistakes, the difference came out of their commission.

Today, the process requires only a button click. Fisher uses Trilogy Software Inc.'s Selling Chain suite, which includes a configurator, the Attribute Selection Engine; and a pricing quote engine, the SC Pricer. The configurator evaluates customer requirements--including the pressure and temperature the part will need to endure--and comes up with ideal configurations. The pricer automatically suggests discounts based on the customer's relationship with Fisher.

"This allows you to build the experience of a 20- to 30-year veteran into the system," says Larry Burg, Fisher's configuration team leader. "The new guys don't have to make the mistakes that the old guys did to become old guys." That speeds up the sales cycle, which increases sales. And because the salespeople now consistently give correct quotes, customers are much less likely to cancel orders in midprocess.

Fisher has coupled the selling-chain software with a custom-built engineering application that draws newly configured products on the fly, so customers know what to expect and how to fit the new components into their existing systems. The result of all these innovations, Burg says, is that customers learn right away what kind of product they need, what it will look like, and how much it costs--and that makes them much more likely to buy it up front.