Posted by Commence on March 16, 2010 under CEO Corner | 
Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) can deliver customer value by being product centric, i.e. providing product leadership, or by being customer centric or customer intimate. In the former instance, the SMB tries to continually improve the products and services they provide to their customers. In the latter instance the SMB strives to understand their “favorite” customer, anticipate future customer requirements, and to respond to those needs.
Product Centric Strategy
To pursue a strategy of product leadership or product centricity involves delivering customer value through leading edge products and services. This entails a continuous stream of new products and services, and creatively adapting to new and changing market conditions while constantly pursuing new solutions on behalf of clients and customers.
To do this effectively, the business needs to be very research and development centered and extremely knowledgeable about the products and services currently being developed and considered in the market place. Sales & Marketing needs to be closely tied to customers in order to teach them new approaches and solutions to their problems. This also requires the ability to direct customers into avenues they hadn’t entertained on their own about the use of new products and services.
Larger companies can execute this strategy more effectively than SMBs, because they have the resources to devote to research and development and also have larger sales, marketing and support organizations that are able to stay in touch with their customers. The company’s personnel often act as advisors and consultants to their customers assuming the role of fitting their product to the customer’s needs.
Customer Centric Strategy
Customer intimacy or customer centricity entails precisely segmenting and targeting markets, acquiring detailed customer knowledge, developing an operational flexibility that allows for immediate response to customer needs, and securing customer loyalty. The value added component of this strategy is to attain intimate knowledge of the customer’s requirements or pain points and outlining a specific solution to address those requirements.
This strategy demands a very active marketing, sales and customer service department geared to relationship selling. In fact, these departments drive the SMB’s business and are the company’s primary interface to prospects and the customer base. As such, they need to continually solicit customer information, sort it, analyze it, and use to define a consistent message for all who interact with the customer.
One of the ways to capture, manage and share this vital customer information is through the use of Customer Relationship Management software (CRM). Large organizations have been using CRM solutions for some time to automate and streamline the interaction between the company and the customer. The utilization however is mostly to gather contact management information about the customer and to use that information to drive and fine-tune the sales cycle. The objective is to find creative ways to sell additional products and services to the customer by convincing the customer that there is a fit between their requirements and the products or service the sales representatives is selling.
While this is fine, in order to execute a customer centric strategy you need a CRM solution that is designed for customer collaboration. The CRM software must solicit not only geographic customer data, but also demographic data to help build a detailed picture of the “favorite” customer makeup. In addition, the sales, customer service and any other personnel with customer contact need to be trained to solicit and collect psychographic and behavioral data that help define how and why the customer buys.
Social Networking
The rapid expansion and utilization of social networking can provide essential customer centric information for sales and marketing organizations. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are being used by today’s businesses to communicate and interact with similar organizations. These conversations provide valuable insight into customer buying patterns, likes and dislikes and behavioral data. Best of all, you don’t have to be an enterprise company to access social media sites, capture and analyze information and produce a marketing message that fits the customer’s pain points and buying habits. What is important is that the SMB selects the right CRM platform which will enable them to directly link to these sites, capture the information and utilize it to gain a competitive edge.
Commence Corporation, a leading provider of cloud computing based CRM software, is taking a leadership position in this area and understands that the future of customer relationship management will be driven based on the collaboration and partnership with customers. Commence is busy restructuring the data points that their system collects to include the needed demographic and psychographics data that CRM systems do not capture today. Commence is also working to seamlessly interface the product with social media applications so that it can collect and analyze all of the different streams of customer conversations that are currently on the web, then use this information for targeting effective marketing campaigns.
Having the right business strategy in today’s challenging economy is critical for success. A sound customer centric strategy gives you the ability to craft a company wide marketing message that is used by all to communicate your value not only to your current customer base, but also to those prospects that your sales team can readily qualify and close. To do this effectively, you need to select a CRM software provider that offers a platform that can support the customer collaboration that will need into take place in the future.
About the author: Larry Caretsky is the president of Commence Corporation, a leading provider of CRM software which can be deployed in a web-based, cloud-computing environment or on premise. Caretsky is considered an expert in Customer Relationship Management and has written numerous white papers on the subject, which may be accessed via the company’s web site at www.commence.com.
Posted by Commence on October 27, 2009 under CEO Corner |
Any high-growth business strategy must begin with a consistent and disciplined sales process that is easily understood across the sales organization. Salespeople and their managers need to use the same vocabulary, and view selling opportunities as having sequential stages that must be completed before a suspect becomes a prospect, and a prospect becomes a customer. Following a consistent process reduces the anxiety and uncertainty common among both salespeople and sales managers because everyone knows what is expected and needed for every sales pursuit. Having definite requirements and policies on when and how to give a demonstration, prepare a proposal, or send a sample helps the sales force proactively control the sales process versus simply reacting to requests from potentially unqualified prospects. Better preparation, deeper research, and clearer goals for each stage of the selling process will result in a more effective sales team and better business results.
A standard approach to pursuing and tracking opportunities is a smart way to assure that all sales activities are aligned with organizational goals and the overall direction of sales management. Consistency also reduces the amount of non-value added sales activities such as drafting letters, writing reports, and having lengthy phone calls to determine what stage is next in a sales opportunity. Having standard terminology saves time and minimizes confusion.
Sales managers benefit from standardized processes because it is also easier to determine how each salesperson is performing. Opportunities that are stalled in one stage can be identified and resolved. Salespeople benefit from standardization because they waste less time determining what information is missing and what the next step should be in the workflow. Sales appointments become more productive because they are only conducted when qualified as part of a planned sequence of events.
The high level steps to implement a sales process are:
- Document your sales process
- Design your implementation
- Train your sales team
- Support the implementation
Some companies adopt branded systems such as Sandler, Solution Selling, Dale Carnegie or others. Others develop their own systems with distinct terminology; perhaps a hybrid of popular systems or a mix of the techniques used by the company’s most successful sales performers.
A standard sales process allows companies to more easily analyze events and make sense of trends. As a regional sales manager at a mid-sized organization observed, “The only way to discover what’s working and what’s not is to measure the individual steps of the sales process. If you know the percentages of prospects that proceed through each stage of the process, you accurately predict how many sales will close in the future, based upon the current pipeline. You can also compare the performance of team members and take appropriate action, like additional coaching, in order to ensure that the team remains productive.”
Applying Best Practices to Sales
Most organizations are not strangers to processes, systems, and re-engineering. For example, in the manufacturing industry, plants and warehouses couldn’t operate profitably without them and no business manager would let accounting and purchasing departments improvise. The more complex the task, it’s more likely that the effective principles and processeses for successfully completing that task have been defined and codified. In other words, much of the business world is already highly process-driven, systematized, and automated.
Yet, oftentimes, the sales department hasn’t been automated. For example, in a recent study of distributor respondents, eighty-eight percent indicated that they do not have a documented, formal sales process. Given that sales is fundamental and represents a large expense item, it was quite surprising that written sales processes were non-existent for the majority of the study participants. Without such a document to provide a consistent road map, executives have no choice but to depend on the creativity, work ethic and luck of individual sales reps and their managers.
Organizations without a documented sales process often exhibit several common symptoms, such as a disconnected and manual approach to selling and a lengthy cycle time to find prospects, get quotes out the door, and close orders. This may in turn lead to irritated prospects, who expect a rapid response to their inquiries or request for a proposal. . In addition, top sales employees may become annoyed. They want to sell, not figure out the best way to put prospects in the pipeline, create quotes, enter orders and track shipments delivered. Other symptoms of process deficiencies include abundant and costly errors, evidenced by expedited orders and high volumes of returns, and inadequate margin on too many quotes, resulting in deflated profitability. This may lead to stagnant sales from the most important customers and cause engineering and other departments to be pulled into disarray when the sales team gets a request for proposal or learns about a bid opportunity.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many executives voice issues similar to these, yet the remedy seems to be incredibly difficult. Sales teams are often extremely autonomous, and management struggles to avoid “big brother” accusations and micromanaging. Despite these legitimate concerns, it is not that difficult to successfully implement a standard sales process.
When reviewing the various sales methodologies and processes available, make sure your final selection is repeatable, predictable, and scalable. What you want is a sales process that is simply enough that, over time, it will become second nature to the sales staff. Also, make sure that it isn’t too complicated, or the sales team will not use it.
The elements of a sales process typically include:
When smart organizations are designing a sales process implementation, they focus on change management, not sales training. By implementing a formalized sales process, businesses are fundamentally changing the way people do their jobs on a daily basis. There will be natural resistance. To develop a change management plan, make sure you can answer the following questions:
Follow the Leader
One of the best ways to make sure implementations “stick” is to have the management involved. One recent study found that when sales training is reinforced by management, the sales skills taught during training produced a 15% permanent increase in productivity.
Management needs to be involved in more than a cosmetic fashion. A senior member of the management team needs to attend the training, and this same manager should inspect the sales activities for a period of time to make sure they continuously are consistent with the new sales introduced during the training.
At the end of the day, the challenge with adopting a new sales process is getting everyone to follow it. Sales management must lead by example in sales meetings and on sales calls. An automated workflow reinforced by a CRM system that quickly prompts a salesperson to enter required information before moving to the next sales stage is invaluable. Standard reports and online visibility into the sales pipeline can help monitor the progress of opportunities over time so that both the salesperson and the sales manager can spot when an opportunity is stalled.
As one sales leader summed up his company’s recipe for success: “Our company can’t grow consistently unless the sales process is repeatable, not arbitrary. For us, it is a condition of employment – you have to embrace the standards, follow the processes and use the CRM system.”
Author Larry Caretsky is the CEO of Tinton Falls, N.J.-based Commence Corporation.
Tags: CRM, Information Management, OnDemand, process management, project management, Reports, SaaS, sales, Sales Effectiveness, sales force automation, sales forecasting, social networking, software
Posted by Commence on September 18, 2009 under CEO Corner |
Dear Customers, Press, Prospects & Partners,
I am delighted to invite you to follow Commence Corporation on Twitter and on our new Commence Blog. More and more businesses and individuals are relying on social networking to convey and receive information quickly and simply. Commence’s new social networking presence via blog postings and “tweets” will enable us to enhance our communication and build closer relationships with customers. Whether it’s the latest news on our flexible suite of award-winning CRM products or news in the sales and customer service industries, Commence looks to educate and inform our customers.
Commence’s Twitter followers were the first to know about our new drip marketing functionality. The newest version of Commence OnDemand, a flexible, Web-based hosted CRM solution, now enables marketing teams to automate, and schedule the delivery of text-based or HTML-based e-mail marketing campaigns. Commence understands that companies are being challenged to do more with less. Commence OnDemand’s breadth of functionality – such as our new drip marketing capabilities – makes it the ideal solution for small to medium-sized businesses that want to have one system that manages CRM, sales and marketing. By following us on Twitter or at our blog, you’ll be among the first to learn about product enhancements and industry news.
Larry Caretsky, Chief Executive Officer
