The Next Wave in Building a Successful Sales Management Operation

The Next Wave in Building a Successful Sales Management Operation

By Robert Holler

To deliver strategic value to sales executives and managers, information must meet these four criteria: availability, accessibility, relevancy and adaptability.

Sales is a results-oriented environment, and predictability is critical to any successful sales operation. Historically responsible for generating 80-100 percent of revenues and 15-25 percent of expenses within a company, sales organizations are currently under more pressure than ever to perform in order to enhance shareholder value. Yet in today's highly dynamic markets, consistently delivering predictable results has become more challenging than ever.

To achieve established revenue objectives, sales organizations are beginning to depend more and more on information and technology as integral components of the decision-making process. World-class sales-oriented automation and business intelligence and planning tools are being deployed to help manage, measure and improve overall corporate sales effectiveness. This process is being facilitated by the wealth of enterprise data that is available to provide sales executives and their management teams with a solid, decision-making foundation based on domain- specific intelligence and industry-specific best practices as opposed to best guesses and gut-feel.

Information Availability

For the first time ever, enterprise implementations of financial, human resource (HR), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems have begun capturing much of the information necessary to provide sales managers with an end-to-end view of the entire sales operation. Like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with the general ledger as the center of the universe, and CRM systems with the customer at the polar center, sales managers need the ability to view the world from a comprehensive sales perspective. Whether the information is opportunity data from a CRM system, organizational reporting hierarchy data from an HR system or revenue data from an ERP system, the business information needs to be represented and acted upon in context of the sales operation and its unique business requirements.

To date, the challenge has been to consolidate this information from all of a company's disparate systems. Tremendous advances in data and application integration, data quality, data warehousing and business intelligence technologies have delivered a variety of solutions to these challenges in the last five years. And, while any project or product implementation to aggregate, present and act on information needs to be approached in context of a company's overall enterprise information architecture, the fact that a majority of the information even exists is a tremendous leap forward.

Information Accessibility

Sales management teams are often traveling, remotely located and disconnected entirely from the main corporate office. Therefore, any solution delivering truly scalable business value to the sales organization must take this aspect of their business into account. Web-based applications have, almost out of necessity, become the de facto standard for sales organizations. Similarly, automated synchronization and disconnected usage capabilities are now considered par for the course in many instances.

Given the limited bandwidth and line quality that sales executives are required to endure, performance is another huge consideration. In this context, performance alternatives can range anywhere from making a subset of critical functionality and/or information available for remote usage, to architecting a solution that minimizes data transfer requirements, to replicating an entire environment locally with the ability to synchronize data at specific times, to all of the above. In certain circumstances, each solution may be optimal for different organizations. To achieve truly scalable business value, the ability to access the right information, at the right time and at the right place is critical to building a successful sales management operation.

Information Relevance

Delivering information is one thing ?placing it in a highly usable context for sales management is another. Sales organizations, like any strategic business function, have unique requirements for viewing, interpreting and acting on information. To obtain real business value from sales data, the information and processes must be presented in a very domain-specific manner. Sales organizations need certain information displayed in a specific way to achieve the greatest understanding, and they need processes to adhere to certain standard methodologies and best practices to achieve the greatest efficiencies. They also need alternatives represented in the best possible format to ensure the most optimal actions are taken.

A tremendous amount of time and energy has been expended in automating the sales process in areas such as opportunity management, lead management, product configuration and pricing. While improved automation and efficiency benefit the sales operation, other strategic aspects of the business include effective measurement, planning and optimization. As Peter Drucker, author of Concept of the Corporation and other well-known business strategy books, has reminded us, "If you don't measure it, you can't improve it."

Moving forward, organizations need to focus more on strategic measurements such as close rates, deal size distribution, pipeline and forecast trends, and not on measuring detailed sales tasks such as phone calls. These key measurements often depict the differences between a world-class and an average sales organization. Additional strategic planning and optimization in the sales forecasting, territory alignment, quota setting and head-count planning processes also turn into sales success.

All of these measurements and processes integrate sales information in a broad, relevant context for optimal use by sales management. For example, the sales pipeline should be viewed in conjunction with remaining quota and the quarterly and/or annual revenue to provide the greatest value to sales executives. Consistent, justifiable sales quotas need to be established and deployed throughout the organization. Territories also need to be assigned according to best-practice methodologies to optimize sales revenue and minimize expense. It is only with the right information presented in the right context that allows sales managers to significantly improve both the decision making and execution processes.

Information Adaptability

In today's volatile markets, sales executives and managers need to shift strategy quickly to prevent sales delays and take advantage of new market opportunities. In the past, by the time certain information became apparent, it was too late for sales executives or managers to take corrective action. Today, sales management needs to be able to swiftly and confidently react to the following common scenarios: evolving channel opportunities, delayed or accelerated product launches, changing reporting structures, unexpected turnover and new market segments.

Therefore, the underlying information structure must be 1) flexible enough to change as the business fundamental shift and 2) granular enough to support strategic and detailed operational analysis and decision making. Rapid, often unanticipated, change is simply a way of life, and systems need to be designed to support this type of business model. Within each unique business model, information and processes needs to be configurable enough to ensure that sales executives and managers are only allowed to view and act on data in accordance with their specific reporting position, capabilities and roles within an organization. Adaptable information helps facilitate an adaptable sales organization.

Real-time information flow is also critical to this process. Without up-to-date information, the ability to quickly enact change is limited. Only recently have products, tools and technologies been able to deliver real-time information for analyzing and implementing corrective action before serious problems develop. The ability to quickly analyze and accurately interpret information and turn it into a sound sales strategy should be considered a tremendous strategic advantage. With this type of information, sales executives and managers can quickly close the loop by turning recently uncovered risks and opportunities into sales strategies and tactics. This includes having the entire sales management team focus on the actions and events that matter most within the sales organization.

Final Thoughts Going Forward

The days of manually generated reports, power-user intervention, information overload and missed opportunities are going to become more and more rare. Tomorrow's successful sales organization is a highly optimized and tightly integrated business unit that is capable of adapting to rapidly changing market dynamics. To achieve the necessary predictability and consistency that is required to succeed, technology must be considered a major enabler. While there are a variety of existing tools and technologies that help sales organizations and sales professionals, the focus should be directly on optimizing the potential of the entire sales organization. This requires an organization to take a hard look at the sales measurement and planning aspects of their business. As previously referenced, a motivated, optimized sales force is critical to shareholder value. To drive a successful sales organization, sales executives and managers need to use every piece of sales related information at their disposal to gain strategic insight into the overall health of their business. The next generation sales executive is able to achieve a fundamental competitive advantage by knowing where he stands and what needs to occur to achieve defined results at all times. Without this insight, intelligence and modeling capability, sales organizations are at high risk of repeating the sins of the past.

Robert Holler, chief technology officer for Ockham Technologies, has more than 13 years of experience in the high-tech software industry and has been focused on e-strategy and Internet technology since 1996. As CTO for Ockham, Holler is responsible to the overall technology vision and direction for the company's enterprise solutions. Prior to joining Ockham, Holler co-founded Tango Networks, a provider of e-business solutions to the local services industry. Prior to Tango, Holler was vice president of R&D for Clarus Corporation and was instrumental in the company's transition from the ERP market to business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. While at Clarus, the development organization grew from 20 to 80 employees with an annual budget in excess of $9 million. Earlier in his career, Holler was a consultant with Andersen Consulting and McCall Consulting Group.