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December 13, 1999

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Software Lets Users Evaluate Sales Strategy
Business Resource Software Package is designed to help inexperienced sales staff

By Alexis Laris

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etting closer to your customers is vital to succeeding in this age of transformation. InformationWeek Research surveys indicate overwhelming interest in customer-relationship management solutions as one means of knowing and interacting with your customers. But given the range of products that claim to be in that category, it's not so obvious just what CRM really is.

Regardless, as the year 2000 approaches, most of your competitors have already implemented sales-force automation or CRM technologies, or they're doing so now. But before you finalize your approach, there's a giant challenge to consider: training.

While sales-force automation and CRM can rationalize the process and help you avoid losing customers or goodwill, they are only process-tighteners--they don't do anything about the human content of sales. It takes about a year to train a new salesperson to be effective, learning product service information, and understanding the industry and how the employer fits into the competitive landscape.

Beyond that, few companies provide incentives for successful salespeople to mentor young talent, and without specific incentive, salespeople would rather sell, and make money, than train potential competitors for free. Even willing mentors can find it hard to train in our increasingly dispersed businesses. And in the world of the disposable employee, many managers view training investment as a waste.

Vendors of sales-force automation CRM software products, value-added resellers, and consultants say it's easy and inexpensive to automate the "opportunity management" process while letting sales and management (regional and area VPs) people in your company track everything that you will need to know to increase sales and profitability. Implementing a sales-force automation system continues to be challenging and expensive, according to surveys. And once you've laid out the investment, there's still no guarantee that your salespeople will know how to close the deal.

Business Resource Software Inc. offers an expert system tool, Insight for Sales Strategy, that focuses on closing sales. It's designed for young, inexperienced salespeople in the field led by home and office sales management, a trend in today's workplace. By asking a series of questions about the customer's company, need, experience with you, and the people involved in closing the sale, Insight for Sales Strategy promises to add structure to the sales process and help your sales force better forecast sales and focus on the most promising accounts.

Add Insight for Sales Strategy to the sales process and to contact-management products and it purports to evaluate your sales strategy critically. Well-designed and thought-out strategies improve the possibility of closing complex sales, but I'm not convinced the current version of this product will enhance your chances much.

Of course, there are other products that focus on and take advantage of existing knowledge about analyzing a deal and how to close to your advantage. Traditional training courses, such as those on question-based selling and financial selling, can help. They have some advantages, such as providing techniques for applying priority to prospective customers based on their likelihood of buying or being able to analyze a company's financial statements to focus on likely solutions. Any reasonably talented sales force can get all the training it needs from well-executed classroom training, but management in too many companies resists this effective solution.

Modern organizational structure makes gathering a sales force from around the country into a single room more difficult, and with the pace of change accelerating into Internet time, fewer companies are willing to slow their sales forces in the short term, even for a midterm payback.

Insight for Sales Strategy aims to simplify part of the distributed sales-force training process. The package works by interviewing the salesperson about their specific customer or prospect in the context of question-based selling.

Many young salespeople talk too much. Trained about the features and benefits of their products and services, they think prospects are there to sit and listen to them. On the other hand, the experienced sales professional knows it's all in the questions. The interview style of the software identifies some of the key questions that too often go unasked and so go unanswered. Unanswered questions send up those all-too-familiar "red flags." Answering those questions helps the salesperson get to know the customer and begin establishing a relationship. At a basic level, Insight for Sales Strategy helps demonstrate this process.

At first glance, Insight for Sales Strategy seems thorough. It gathers information about five aspects of sales: the complexity of the sale, the buyers, the risks, the benefits, and the roadblocks. In each of these areas, the product asks for a variety of assessments. For example, you categorize buyers by how familiar they are with your company, the technology, their sense of urgency, and the degree to which each of the players will benefit from the sale. Likewise, roadblocks and risks touch on issues such as the risk aversion and strategic direction of the client, as well as more direct issues: Is more staff needed to deploy the product? Who needs to approve the sale before closing?

With all this information, Insight for Sales Strategy will generate its own rating of your prospect, compare it with the likelihood you assigned to closing the sale, and provide a simple report that highlights the issues with the sale. Those factors that may affect the closure also sport a red-flag icon so you can quickly locate concerns in each aspect of the sale.

Overall, the package falls short because it doesn't ask enough questions, and the analysis is too simplistic. It really should be more interactive, like the company's Plan Write Expert Edition, which recognizes patterns, makes suggestions, lets you explore alternatives, and provides a lot more of the questions that make up a question-based selling effort. Without this sort of expert analysis and feedback, the product really can't succeed as a training tool.

On the other hand, Insight for Sales Strategy does one thing really well. It's a strong aid to forecasting for a distributed organization, which is currently a nightmare for most big companies. Because the account profile built during a Sales Insight session can be rolled up to management for further analysis, it can be a solution to providing this deliverable, providing management a clear view of individual and cumulative forecasts to allocate resources better.

In the end, the challenges of making sales forces effective are only partially addressed by technology. For now, anyway, self-service training or mentoring isn't available and classroom training, as abhorrent as it is to the fast-moving company, is still the most effective approach.

Alexis Laris, owner of Athena Enterprises, is a marketing and business development consultant. She can be reached at athenaent@aol.com.

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