From 1995 through 2000, I was director of sales force automation for a
major telecommunications company. During my tenure, I saw a lot of good and
bad products, and I faced many challenges. In many cases, I frequently found
myself yearning for new features and options, increased flexibility and
customization, and greater accessibility to both data and tools. The problem
was that the technology had not yet caught up with the needs of the end users.
Jump a few years into present time, and now we see more and more SFA/CRM
products embracing Net technologies and architectures. The ASP approach (reminiscent
of yesteryear's time-sharing services) have now brought us tools and data that
are always accessible through a Net connection and a browser. The problem is
that people are slow to adopt this technology for many reasons.
For many there's a question of security -- using public telecommunications
to reach private data -- a reasonable fear given today's hostile hackers. But
the fact is that if I were to do it all over again, I think I would try an ASP
solution because there is less risk involved in piloting this technology, and
you can demonstrate return on investment much faster, too. Also, there is a
usability factor to consider. Since most corporate employees already know how
to navigate with their browser, and use their email, adoption is likely to
occur faster. For all these reasons and more, I looked at SalesNet.
SalesNet is a fairly intuitive application for managing
your sales contacts and opportunities, scheduling, sales collateral, sales
reporting, and outbound communications to prospects and customers.
Using familiar hypertext links, radio buttons, drop-down and
pop-up menus, you can quickly add, edit, delete and manipulate your data.
Context-sensitive help is available on most every screen.
Regrettably, considering the graphically rich nature of the web, the Help
screens do not contain many screen captures. Rather the text talks
about the options without actually showing them to you, so you are left
toggling between Help and application screens. Not a big deal, but this could
use a little more work to make it more friendly and helpful. I'd suggest some
animated tutorials using Flash to walk the new user through the main
processes.
Past this minor shortcoming, SalesNet has some very
neat features. Just about everything you can do with an off-the-shelf contact
manager, you can do live -- online -- with SalesNet.
To its credit, In addition to offering context-sensitive Help
files, SalesNet also offers help via LivePerson -- live chats
with SalesNet support personnel. This is quite nice since LivePerson
has the ability to push users to a particular URL and could really help a new
user get the hang of the system a lot faster than doing it by himself.
The main selling point of the product is its focus on Process
Building. Realizing that every individual and company sells to different
groups in different ways, a tool has been provided to facilitate the use of SalesNet
to increase the odds of closing the sale. The premise here is that most SFA/CRM
products tend to force the end user to follow embedded processes for
adding information and moving the prospect through the sales process. This is
why so many products fail the adoption test. Sales people develop their own
methodologies and techniques and want a product to support them. With SalesNet
it is possible to create a more flexible process.
I think this Process Building tool is very cool. I can
think of many instances where sales management wants to set a business
practice for the sales process and insure that their sales force follows it,
step by step. The problem is such processes are easily ignored. With the SalesNet
Process Builder, you can pretty much dictate the work flow, screen by
screen, and push the end-user through the process as well as trigger next
steps and who should be included as the sale moves towards closure.
The online sales reporting mechanism is fairly direct and it
creates hypertext reports with links to the account data, so you can always
jump to an account directly from a report by clicking on a line item. Nice
feature and a time-saver. You can also export the data to a comma delimited
file or Excel file for further manipulation and reporting. I would recommend
the use of some graphical charting as charts tend to be more in demand by
sales management, and a pie chart is worth a thousand words. If the end user
has Excel already installed on their system, I would think there is a
relatively simple way of extending the current reporting system to export the
data to Excel and dynamically pass certain charting parameters to create a pie
chart on demand.
Of course, one of the biggest issues with enterprise-wide SFA/CRM
implementations involves the synchronization of data. With a typical
client-server set-up, you need to have all of your users synch their data every day
to insure the central database is up-to-date and current. There are all types
of problems with this, not the least of which is time of day of synching,
network congestion, failed synchs due to poor dial-up connections, etc. The
list goes on and on. With a Net-based tool like SalesNet, these issues
become moot. Everyone connects to the central database, and the database is
always current. There is a lot less to go wrong. Reliability of data goes up.
Support issues and down-time goes down.
Another nice feature is the ability for the administrator to
create and integrate an online form with the corporate web site to capture
leads and pass them to appropriate parties for follow-up.
SalesNet also offers a special tool to enable you to
import/export data to and from other personal information managers (PIMs) such
as Outlook, ACT!, and Goldmine. This is real useful if your sales force is
either migrating from a prior implementation or from multiple tools being used
by different individuals.
All in all, SalesNet looks like a tool worth
investigating further if you are looking for a quick and easy way to launch
your own SFA/CRM implementation. As with any such project, I suggest you walk
before you run, and start with a small pilot group to work out the kinks, see
if the tool is appropriate for your enterprise, and to determine ROI (return
on investment).
For more information, please click here.
SalesNet
