Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Steve

Gold dust!

I’m an unreconstructed intellectual who often can’t see the wood for the trees!

Here, we have a launch project which is capable of superb success. It is also capable of being screwed up within the first 6 weeks of launch and that would be, were it to happen, largely my fault.

The product is good enough to win, in it’s own right. How we convey it to a sceptical marketplace will be a critical challenge.

I look forward to anything else you can offer and thank you for your early response – It’s hard to be amongst the first people who reply.

Sincerely

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Deremiah

I love your approach. Could I just clarify that you mean Benjamin Franklin, 1706 – 1790, who is one of my heroes of science. He’s a useful hero, because most of the rest of them represent something which 99.5% of the population couldn’t even start to understand, if I spent a year teaching them about it!

F.E.A.R is a good acronym and I rather like it.
One thought at a time management and one idea at a time. Well, this might have been your personal belief, and well done for holding it. New Scientist, 7th April 2007 has published a paper which appears to prove the point. WE have a lot to learn there.

The bible holds no fears for me – I was an agnostic until I decided to get my children christened, such that they could have a rock and an anchor should they wish or need to use it. To do so, I took some vows. That resulted in me examining what I believed in, hence where I am today! Love it!

The latter part of your posting requires more consideration, so I’ll come back to you on these parts.
In the meanwhile, how do I bottle you?!
Yours sincerely

Steve Alker
(For a change) SalesVision

Dear Tom (Retail)

Good questions you’ve posed. I’d like more time to answer some of the deeper points, but on the difference front rather than on absolute values. George has turned down, at least for now, multi-million offers for finance. The product does appear to be that good.

I suppose that if I was being arrogant, that I could come cruising along on the same premise, but my feeling is that this must succeed on its own merit, and it will.

After all, life provided many rewards, but those which you earn are those which are most appreciated. Back in the early 1980’s, my first Porsche was really welcome, but if I’d really earned it, it would have counted for 10 times as much. Now my first Ferrari was a different matter!!!

Likewise here – I want to earn what I can do for SalesVision and our own operation.
Best wishes
Steve Alker
SalesVision

Yes Stevea,

I mean the one and only Benjamin Franklin. So glad to hear you are making comittments. The way you bottle me is after you launch your product you come back to me and partner with me on one product we can launch together. I'll bring the ideas you bring the bottle and the cork, then we'll tell the world about how much more they could be enjoying LIFE. We might even partner up on the "Benjamin Franklin Concept" the "New Junta". Benjamin Franklin was bout Community Solutions. Maybe we can start a new movement. "The Benjamin Franklin Way" how to solve your problems by inviting the community into your home. I really want to help make the world better. Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant, (and friend)

Deremiah CPE (Customer Passion Evanglist)

Caring Promotes Exuberance

Deremiah

This sound good - lets talk about it as a separate thread. Meanwhile, than you so much for your input.

Steve

Good input Kathysmithcasting!

Hey Stevea,

my friend and author Ben Mack, is an expert at debunking "marketing myths" and helping people launch the products they've developed. It might be hard for me to reach him right now because he's in Amsterdam. But as your servant I'd love to do that for you if you need me to and it's all for Free. I'm not hard up for money...just hard up for sincere good ole fashioned friendship and people who love to challenge the existing notion that the world is more spiritual than it is physical. Sort of like those who challenged the existing notion in past generatons that the world was flat when it really was round. Many argued on the wrong side of the question...Beware there are many myths in the world. In America 90% of the people believe in God but we have one of the highest crime rates in the world. Go figure. This happens because people are more emotional than most people can imagine. Our perception of the world can be a lot different than the world we experience. So I study human potential if I want to know what humans do. There is a nature that is common to humans that can not be rationalized and I know you know that. If you need me to call just let me know.

Your Servant,

Deremiah *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

Caring Promotes Exuberance

Hey Stevea,

you should probably shoot the staff of Marketinprofs an email to see if they will let you slide this question on to "Urgent Status" Since you have put up 8,000 points. Any question of this magnitude would normally be put on the Urgent platform.

Your Servant,

Deremiah *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

Dear Colleagues

I must apologise for the lack of a response, so far.

This is entirely due to the welter of enquiries which have accrued both from this forum and from other places I have been stupid enough to post my views!

I will respond to each and every one as soon as I can.


Yours sincerely

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions and SalesVision

OK Chaps and Chapesses!

As some of you will know, I’ve been under the weather a bit recently, so my responses have been slower than I would have liked.

This question has provoked some of the best thought-out arguments I’ve seen, so It’s time for detailed replies today.

Meanwhile I’d just like to thank everyone so far and to say thanks for that constant fount of inspiration which come from Deremiah!! Good on ya, man and God bless!

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision and Unimax Solutions

There you go Stevea,

I've read it! What do you think?

LET'S DEBUNK MARKETING MYTHS...
Sounds like Mgoodman is debunking marketing Myths doesn't it. He sure is! I knew Michael's insight would be an effective geniune perspective although on first take it seems radical in appearance.

DO YOU CHOSE LOGIC OR CREATIVITY TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS...
Steve be sure to tell everbody that you heard it hear first...Creativity can not be contained (or restricted) by logic but logic can be contained (or restricted) by creativity. So in my experiments I have found that creativity is a higher law than logic. It is the highest law in existence.

Now just because an idea doesn't seem logical doesn't fit the immediate pattern of observation really doesn't mean at all that it's off kilter. Think about it...in this day and age the dinosaur corporations are losing ground, breaking down and imploding faster than we can ever imagine. Why? Because the traditional logical methods alone are not working. Why? Because human nature has become harder to predict and in more than a few cases. Why? Because the things that appear (the things we see in the natural realm) were not made by the things that are created (this is your introduction to the fact that it breaks logic because it's pattern can not be traced and yes Steve this came from that ancient book you read).

CONTRADICITON SUPERSTITION OR STRANGE INTUITION???
What Michael has just communicated to the natural mind seems like a contradiction. So Steve why wouldn't people want to just own the technology? Is the first question that would come to anyones mind. It seems an obivious fair question to ask.

Maybe it's because human beings are more emotional than they are logical. Logic makes sense but emotionalism doesn't. So here's where the logic fits in. We can logically say that people are emotional. My Godfather Brian Tracy said in his most resent book "Something For Nothing" that people seek the most easiest, fastest, simplest, most inexpensive ways to do things because they are (--------) well you'll have to read the book to find out. I won't give away all his secrets online but one of the things Brian states is that people are lazy. So that sounds like what Mgoodman is saying indirectly, in between the lines, without saying it.

It's like a strange paradox that Bruce Lee described in one of his martial arts movies. He told his opponent "Have you ever heard of the ART of Fighting WITHOUT Fighting?". You say no such thing, right? Wrong because in the movie he demonstrates it. Mgoodman has just demonstrated The ART of Intution exalting itself over logic. Welcome to the AGE of INTUITION, The AGE of EMOTION, and The AGE of CREATIVITY. And the Strangest Secret is that these three things don't follow any pattern of Logic. I hate to burst most peoples bubbles but real Marketing isn't about Logic it's about solving problems but ultimately SERVING THE NEEDS OF YOUR CUSTOMER and that requires INTUITION, EMOTION and CREATIVITY.

Steve, something inside of me tells me you're going to make this thing work for you. Do IT Now! Use Mgoodman's paradigm. That's the solution in a nutshell. Combine it with the geniune emotional edge of the Servant's Mentality and if it works (and it will) you can pay us off the residuals.

I'll be putting the above ideas I've unleashed tonight in my new book. Mike Goodman's going to help me make it a Best Seller. WATCH & BE AMAZED! Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant,

Deremiah, *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

Caring Promotes Exuberance

Dear Retail

Now that I’m feeling better, time to go into some belated responses. Your questions and my answers are below.

1. Does it work? Have current users been given the opportunity to upgrade to and Beta test the new version?

a. Yes it does! We’ve already got an existing client-base who are seeing verifiable returns fro using the software. The latest release is on the site, www.salesvisiononline.co.uk and the seamless way it works with MS Outlook is one of the most commented on aspects.

2. This might be the ideal time to sell out to a larger software company or competitor and let them deal with the logistics while you go to the bank.

b. The owner thought of that, but has decided that we should develop the client base through business partners, our own marketing and through channels as yet unexplored.

3. This might be the ideal time to sell out to a larger software company or competitor and let them deal with the logistics while you go to the bank. (just in cast I was not clear in #2)

c. And spoil all the fun we’re having! (Just in case I wasn’t clear in #b!)

4. Start with the current customer base, profile them and the industries they serve and develop case studies that give real life examples of how the application made life better, faster or cheaper...

d. Good advice and we are doing just that. We have a large number of case histories and white papers both under preparation and ready for release. In addition, we are also approaching CRM clients and prospects who want to do something more profitable with their SPM and Forecasting.

5. Recruit sales reps and distributors.

e. We have been focussing exclusively on selected business partners. Rather than look at other software companies, we have looked at those organisations which have a deep understanding of the issues involved – sales training, sales management development, sales and marketing analytical organisations and those database companies which actually understand the issues of sales forecasting and reporting.

6. Attend trade related shows.

f. This is under discussion. It is my view that we would be better off attending a vertical market show which is both staffed and attended by sales and marketing people, rather than go for one of the Sales Force Automation events, where, though SalesVision will still be unique, we will have to work harder to stand out as “Not just another database vendor”

7. Identify industry buying groups & offer affinity discounts.

g. What’s a discount?! But, yes, the affinity groupings are a good thought. I’ve identified recruiters who could both use SalesVision and also recommend it to their clients as part of the wider services they offer.


Many thanks for your comments and your patience for waiting for some feedback.

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Papadoc (Steve)

Thanks for your comments and your patience. We can deliver and the challenge is certainly to “Open up the conversation channel” For example, any sales based approach which started off with “Would you be interested in a proven system which can increase sales, reduce costs, raise profits ------?” would result in us being dismissed as cranks much of the time, unless done very skilfully.

You see, a 200 / hour a week saving in time for a sales force of 10 to produce genuine sales forecasts and genuine reports of sales activity, probably represents a saving of £100,000 a year on time alone.

To have an accurate sales forecast which doesn’t take management another 20 hours a week represents another £100,000 and activity reporting which allows the team to be managed without driving everyone insane is probably another £100,000.

These figures are dwarfed by the answer to the question “What will you do with all that sales time and management time which we have freed up?”

Assuming that the answer is not to spend it all on the Golf Course, the additional sales opportunities that it represents could be as much as £1,000,000. Or more.

These are such large and attractive figures that they look incredible, but if we can secure the chance – say 30 minutes of the CEO and the CFO’s time for an initial exploration, they will be able to conclude for themselves what is achievable.

It’s getting that 30 minutes that looks taxing.

Your next few points are therefore givens in that we need to focus on what it delivers, not what it does.

The only area where I disagree with you is #3 – more sex. When I was a salesman, living in Scotland on a London salary and a London bonus, becoming vastly more successful through using the latest professional advice and techniques contributed vastly to your #3. But then that’s maybe the effect driving a Ferrari has on most people, especially if they are only 28!!

Finance points. I take them all on board, except that at all costs we want to avoid the “Necessary Evil” That’s current time consuming reporting via a spreadsheet or an inappropriate database.

Sales and Marketing Points. I agree on all apart from brand recognition. SalesVision will allow the cost of any marketing campaign to be tracked to it’s effectiveness in generating leads, with the same time savings it offers for the sales people. It then tracks the lead through to a sale, so we can look at all aspects of sales and marketing effectiveness.

How that helps a brand position, I can’t see at the moment as that is usually inferred from surveying the market as a whole. We build up the picture by analysing what people do and what they can foresee coming in as sales.
Customer Services. These I have to split evenly between CRM and our idea which is Sales performance Management. The two should be closely linked and we can probably integrate any two systems. On thing is for certain – this is the only system which I have seen apart from big ERP which can take a sales forecast and turn it into quotations, purchasing requirements and the manufacturing needs of the shop-floor.

MIS. Oh, dear. The enemy!!! Many MIS people see systems such as ERP, SPM, CRM and SFA as a threat to their livelihoods. Or their ability to pretend to be Gandalf all day. Given their own way, they’d write this themselves in an eclectic mix of C++, MYSQL and some other object-orientated oddities, plus VXML. They’d write their own word processing packages and spreadsheet software if it wasn’t so palpably silly, but because this is a database, this is somehow “Their Turf”

That said, when I do mange to get them onto our side (None of the arguments above work) they can see that it can enhance their role in the client company, rather than dent it. It’s difficult though.

Administration. They love it. Your points are all valid. If we ask the admin guys, the CFO and the CEO just what reports they currently produce, what they do with them and how long the process takes, we can usually show a payback before we have left the building.

Again, many thanks for your in-depth observations. The last point about the big sale is well understood and we will need to ensure that we address the issues and concerns of both the initial level contacts and those who work above and below them in the hierarchy.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Peter (Henna gaijin)

You said and I respond as below – I apologise for the somewhat formulaic response, but a week in the smallest room in the house has produced such a wealth of comment here that I needed to come up with answers rather than my usual waffle. Whoops, there I go again!

1. In marketing, you will find that many things are not mandatory, but instead are nice to have. That includes advertising, PR, etc.

a. I can’t exactly agree with the PR bit – part of my strategy is to introduce the idea of SPM (Sales Performance Management) and Forecasting into the industrial Vertical Markets – because they employ sales people, because they are sold to by sales people and because we are able to take their own sales forecasts and, perhaps for the first time, translate them into a manufacturing forecast.


2. Mandatory are the things you absolutely need to do to get sales rolling. These include setting up sales channels and processes (whether they are complicated or simple - just make sure that if someone says they want to buy the product, you are ready to sell it), setting pricing, producing the basics of sales literature needed, etc. So figure out what is mandatory and make sure they are done.

a. I think that we are in broad agreement here. If we could establish partnerships with enough channels such that they can give us open introductions to their contacts who could use SalesVision, our close rate is extremely high. It’s getting people who are both credible to their clients and capable of understanding the product which is the challenge. Points taken.


3. So moving on to after you have done the mandatory and referring to what you said:
> Given the scale, breadth and depth of this task
> what approaches would you take? Expanding on what Deremiah said related to narrowing the focus - one way I look at this is to "pick the low hanging fruit". This generally means go after whatever is easiest and gets you results. If everyone can be a customer, look at the possible in regards to who can be turned from prospects to customers and which of these gets you the most return (lowest cost to do, highest profitability in doing). You need to focus your time and energy at the point which gives you the most benefits.

a. This is very relevant, especially in the early launch days, before the PR and stuff can kick in. We will take this point on board very seriously.



4. ps - Thanks for the definition - I didn't have my dictionary handy...

a. From a guy who speaks Japanese!? Thanks for your thoughts Peter, they are extremely welcome.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Jim (Deveau/Catalyst)

Thanks for your inputs. I’ve covered a few in the responses above, so great mind’s think alike. There are a few specifics however which I think I should single out. By the way, rather than seeking out consistency as to how I present answers to contributor’s comments, for the sake of a lack of clarity. I appear to attempting to find as many ways as possible to do it!

You background in leading strategic and consumer sales teams is very relevant. I had one cosmetics prospect who simply wouldn’t / couldn’t believe the amount of paper, time, effort and fiddling of figures which I could provide with Maximizer and some SFA that they wouldn’t take my proposition seriously. SalesVision is better at these functions by an order of magnitude, so you can see why I anticipate a minor problem on the credibility front!

>SEGMENTATION + DIFFERENTIATION = POSITIONING.

That should be the aim. We need to ensure an utterly consistent approach so that we are positioned in each segment of the market and clearly differentiated from our competition. The competition, by the way is not a CRM system, it’s a spreadsheet (Or 20 spreadsheets) the backs of several envelopes and guesswork!

>You may find your real target is sales forces of at least 30 reps, working in product >(versus service) mode, with no sales force automation product, falling behind on >client contacts, and facing stiff competition, etc.

The reality is that there looks to be a direct relationship between the desirability of SalesVision and the following 3 factors: Sales force size doesn’t appear to come into the equation! Manufacturers have a further buy-in from the fact that the forecast can feed through directly into a purchasing plan and a manufacturing plan.

1 Cost of time saved in reporting sales activities and forecasting
2 Value accrued through re-deploying that time to something useful to sales!
3 Value delivered to finances, manufacturing and purchasing by having an accurate forecast
4 Value of actually knowing what sales people “Do” without having to make them spend all day telling you

All that said, I guess that my target market is the SMA sector of 5-20 users, but the scale of returns appears to increase, the more people are involved, or meant to be involved in forecasting.

Perhaps you have made me realise something here – the larger the sales organisation the more complex it is to manage, hence the greater the potential value of SalesVision. I’d guess that there would be some complex but exponential relationship between the size of the structure and the difficulty of getting consistent and meaningful forecasts and activity reports out of it. We might be on to something there!

>You are not finished. Remember - you do not really target companies - you target >people who work in these companies. Work your segmentation further until you >have identified the "best" target within this segment. Is it the VP of Sales? The >President? CFO?

It’s the CEO and the CFO. The VP Marketing is often scared of what they’ll find as is VP of Sales, but they can be won over. CIO’s or IT Directors rarely understand the concepts

>For (target segment), SalesVision is a type of (generic name for your product) that >(key differentiation) so you can (key benefit).

I’m doing this for each identifiable vertical market. A new PR take is the ability to take sales forecasts back to the factory floor, without ruining the sales team.

We’ve got a launch meeting tomorrow, so I’ll be able to discuss these ideas and hopefully collate the feedback.

>Work win-win solutions by partnering and making IT the heros.

I do hereby solemnly try to the best of my ability -----!

Once again, Jim thanks for your ideas and for your patience whilst I stopped being a patient!

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Marcus

Your take on reducing the number of things that we talk about when we present SalesVision is striking a strong chord. It relates to my most successful CRM sales – to demonstrate or even talk about any mid range CRM product in it’s entirety would take a week.

We must focus (A word alluded to time and again in responses here) on the key benefits it delivers to that particular organisation and the people in it.

One of the things I’ve learned from the feedback here is that we must keep our focus narrow in order to be credible and in order to relate to the prospects. To do that I’ll have to ensure that I never waffle on about the product.

It’s back to ask the questions, listen to the answers, overcome objections and close the sale.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

It is time for some final comments and then to close down this question. Again, my thanks to everyone who has responded on and off the forum. Some have offered ideas and insights which they felt to be too sensitive to air in public (You know who you are!) for which even more thanks.

My colleagues and partners reviewed the overall state of play yesterday and the MD said that he was “Blown away” by the level of detail and the quality of insights you have collectively given us.

Again, I must apologise for the tardiness of my own responses. I’d not anticipated losing a week to hospital and the tender ministrations of the National Health Service!

Kathy: Your comments that the problems must have been recognised and that software must have been developed to solve them are totally correct. Huge ERP and CRM developments have produced solutions of ever-increasing complexity. Either they take all week for the participants to fill in all the details or they take on swinging assumptions of breathtakingly convoluted maths, either of which can render them unworkable.

I know of one potential customer who has just had the courage to write off a £7.2Million investment in a forecasting system based on SAP, because it simply didn’t work and no amount of corrective work was going to make it work. We have a client who has written off a custom developed Maximizer based system which cost them £70,000 because the effort of getting the sales people to input the appropriate data was leaving them with no time to go out and sell.

The default position is therefore sales pipeline systems which are based on individual inputs (As is ours) but which cost £10,000 a seat or more or the humble spreadsheet and hours (and hours!) of sales and management time. Even then, there is a default problem – does the CFO actually believe the sales forecast? The answer is usually “No” and without extraordinary effort he has little opportunity to prove his point every month, so it is often ignored.

We feel that we are at the cusp of a change, just like the Finance Directors went through 15 or 20 years ago, when they discovered that they could better serve their companies by moving from hugely expensive mainframe computer accounts packages and spreadsheets to the likes of Sage or QuickBooks. It took a hell of a lot to persuade them that it was both safe and efficacious. I can remember my old FD turning to me as I set up our first CRM system and saying, “Well, you won’t find me trusting this company’s accounts to a bunch of PC’s in a hundred years.” They now use 15 PC’s to run the accounts in a company which has grown by about 30 times!

The rest of what you say about replacing other programmes then totally fits into place – that is what we are doing, albeit replacing Excel or Lotus and a few thousand wasted hours or Big-Brother and a few million wasted dollars.

The point which you and others repeatedly stress – focus on solving a problem – not learning to sell 1000 features is well taken. I can’t come out with 6 neat USP’s and a single 10 second elevator sales pitch, because the USP’s and the pitch will vary from prospect to prospect. Everyone has made this clear and we agree.
What we are distilling from this is a new approach that can be summed up as follows:

We need to win 30 seconds of the right person’s attention in order for them to let us ask enough questions to reveal what we can do.

That will win us 30 minutes for us to qualify the sales process and to briefly outline what we can do for the customer.

Unless we do it badly, that will lead to a couple of hours when we can show, in detail how SalesVision would work for them and for them alone.

That boils down to half a minute to get half and hour to get half a day!

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Dave (Telemoxie)

You are correct, there is a typo there! The calculation of cost savings and revenue increase is not rocket science, but it is utterly dependent on the company, its cost structures and sales revenue expectations.

Thus, for a time saving of 1 sales-person hour a day, for a field sales team of 10 we get a saving of 50 hours a week or roughly 200 hours a month. At an all costs included rate of £50/hour for the sales cost, this equates to £10,000 / month or £120,000 a year – assuming that the time saved is redeployed to something useful to sales.

If management is spending 20 hours / month at a senior overhead cost of £200 / Hour that equates to £4000 / Month or £48,000 a year. I think that with management, we can safely make the assumption that they will use their rescued time for something more useful or use the advantage that seniority brings with it – which is that time for playing golf has to come from somewhere.

Then there is the opportunity gain from saving all that time. If a sales person is responsible for a target of £500K per annum, that’s roughly £2,400 for every day they spend selling. If they are only able to spend 4 hours a day actively selling, then it is astonishing (But nearly true!) but they earn £600 / hour for the company if they are hitting target. Let’s assume that they can usefully deploy half of the hour that we’ve given them back. For the sales team of 10, that’s 100 hours extra selling time a month, or the opportunity to earn another £60K / month for the company. Wow, that’s £720,000 a year in additional revenues on a team which would have an implied turnover of £5Million. Company turnover would be greater because of service, repair and management sales targets.

Based on those figures, we’ve shown how to save £168,000 in wasted time and on a 50% redeployment of that time, earn an additional £720,000 income. We can’t just add these figures together, because one is a consequence of the other. And that doesn’t even assume that there is an opportunity cost and an opportunity gain from freeing up management time.

I’m glad that you challenged my figures though. This sales process will require some very carefully worked out examples of the savings and gains which can be made and although we have over 30 real examples, the ones which will matter most will be those which pertain to the prospect we are talking to. I think that we need to come up with a model which will avoid any silly mistakes such as the above!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dave (Telemoxie) - Once more unto the breach dear friends!

We spent quite a bit of time yesterday reviewing these postings and brainstorming the way forward with our new business partners.

I agree that an outbound campaign is essential, especially for the early sales and for the reasons you have stated. Then there’s the low hanging fruit and other points made here. The question of who to call and who should do it has also been looked at.

We are in agreement that from our existing clients we should be approaching the CEO and the CFO. A couple of my new colleagues are Managing Directors of Sales Training and Coaching Companies and they feel that there is mileage in a more tangential approach through the HR function. Others are from differing disciplines and as I pointed out that this is the first SMEA sales forecasting product which carries its results through to Manufacturing and Purchasing forecasts, there are options in those areas. Only two of us are from a CRM background and we feel that many Sales Directors will be wary of introducing a product which is just capable of making them look incompetent to date!

Looking at the other channels you have highlighted, I can’t help but agree – The ability to get a referral into a company and discover some of the “Pain-Points” would be invaluable. Likewise, I asked the George to work through an example using channels and he came up with a brilliant example from the automotive industry and their distributors / agents, who always place optimistic forecasts on the country supplier, inevitably resulting in over-stocking.

It seems astonishing that an industry which has adopted lean-manufacturing so universally can end up believing any old crap that their distributors feed them, simply because they don’t have the means to look at the historic validity of channel sales forecasts.

So all in all, a sustained outbound campaign is on the cards. See what I wrote above about my new “Mission” on half a minute to win half an hour to win half a day to lead to a sale.

I’ll stay in contact with you over this – if there is something which we can do that would be brilliant. Initially, though, I guess that it will have to be the new BP’s who launch the initial outbound campaign to their existing clients and contacts, because we have so much to learn about what the responses are likely to be, what objections might arise and how we can handle them.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Wayde

That was one fantastic posting – and thanks for your off forum advice and suggestions. I’d have got back to you a lot earlier but for the unexpected as explained above!

I’ve covered a few of the areas you’ve touched on already, but I wanted to comment on some of the other points.

On the NEEDS front, we looked at needs, features and benefits yesterday and came to even more conclusions than we expected. By gaining the chance to talk to someone of CEO or CFO rank and discovering what their pain-points are, we can perhaps establish a unique need for that customer. That appears to beat any number of features (Drone-drone, yawn-yawn, as per usual software bore-them-out-of-their-wits presentation)

For example, if the guy constantly has a warehouse full of manufactured but unsold stock, it’s bound to be down to poor forecasting, but the solution isn’t always visible as a forecasting one. If delivery times are often over the horizon, that too is probably due to the fact that no-one asked the factory to make anything in time. If cash-flow keeps getting out of control, chances are that the CFO was unable to keep expenditure within revenue because some wombat (or some wombats) consistently over-exaggerated their sales projections. And so on.

As to the features, there are quite a lot of them and I’ve taken a lesson from comments here and from my CRM sales experience, only to talk about those that the prospect expresses an interest in. And even then, we’ve got to relate each one of them back to a need, so presenting them as benefits is now a given.

Your comments about people not buying this stuff as a product from our website are totally accepted. If fact, I’d now go further and say that we will never sell SalesVision as a software licence. It isn’t some off the shelf solution or even a customised solution and as a consequence, I doubt if we’ll ever have a demo disk because without understanding how it meets a need and cures a problem, there is really nothing to demonstrate which is remotely relevant. It was suggested that we should produce six USP’s to tempt prospective customers. Which six and why that six? There’s no way that we can standardise the appeal of the product when the overall concept is still so new.

Right at the beginning of this posting, I was asked if we actually use the product for our own sales forecasting (We do) and that struck a chord with your idea of mapping the sales process. As part of the product sales process we need to consult with the prospect to discover their own sales process – then we can se how SalesVision can go about improving it. So we’ve done it for ourselves and come up with all the steps which we think that we will need to go through to secure a sale. The result of several weeks’ worth of work on our own processes, based on about 30 sales to date has resulted in a detailed mapping of what we ought to do. Whether its right or wrong, it is something we will follow and change as we learn more about the sales process.

Then there’s another thing which I’d not really taken on board and that’s the ability to track an opportunity over time and to come up with meaningful information and management actions as a result. For example, if a sale starts of with a forecast of, say, 55% and a close date 3 months hence, the 55% indicate that a certain number of criteria have been met and that the 3 months shows that the customer has indicated that, if successful, that is when their buying cycle will be complete.

As the weeks go by, it is inconceivable that the sale will stick at 55% as more purchasing criteria need to be met before they will buy. Either the sales person is in charge of this process or they are making it up! So we would expect to see the probability of purchase advance by increments, or if things go wrong, decrease. If the thing remains stuck, someone is having someone on. With the ability to take a regular snapshot of all the sales opportunities, sales people and management can immediately see if they are doing the work needed to progress a sale.

It brings in a new dimension to progressing a sale, because rather than hassling a prospective customer for the order, you are only ever going to be following up for information which you have both agreed that you need. In other words, the sales organisation is forced to be cognisant of the customers buying cycle – to their mutual benefit.

I think that covers most of your points and thank you again for the insights.

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Randall (WMMA)

Thank you for comments sent to my personal email address and, in particular for your suggestion which you sent to me in confidence. Be assured that we will treat the idea contained as confidential to the SalesVision project.

For the record, George, the MD was most impressed that you should have trusted us with such detailed and useful information.

“Mustard” by the way (Sorry, but this will be incomprehensible to everyone else!) is Old-English post World War II for “Brilliant and Hot”!

Regards


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Gary (Vevolution)

Your concern about the troops in the trenches was and is one of my greatest areas under the microscope. As I’ve already said, existing systems, whether they are paper based, spreadsheet based, part of a CRM or and ERP system or stand alone all depend on the troopers being prepared to put their data into the product to make it work. In return, we’ve got to offer them something back, rather than just provide management with yet another rod with which to beat them.

Firstly, let’s be clear about one thing – SalesVision as a forecasting and sales performance reporting tool is utterly dependent on the individuals involved – Internal Sales, Field Sales, Tele-Sales, Marketing and Sales Management telling the system about the prospects they have in landing an order. If they don’t know what the likelihood of landing the order is, because they haven’t asked enough questions, they can’t produce a forecast.

Likewise if it is not accepted in the team that the members will let management know just how much work and what types of work they have been doing, there’s no way that the Sales Performance can be Managed! These are management issues and the amount of detail needed is arrived at by the client taking decisions concerning their own processes. It’s never a question of SalesVision imposing some sales structures onto a company for the sake of it (As is often the case with some potted Miller Heinmann software)

So if we start off by assuming that an effective sales team will already be asking the relevant questions, we need to present to them how their lives will be made easier and the bonuses bigger by feeding the information through SalesVision. Here are some of the parameters and how I see them at the moment. (If they are not doing this – sales training and management coaching is available from our partners!)

If you want to know when an order might be placed, you need to ask the prospect. They might give you an exact date or “Within the next 4 months” If the sales person is already qualifying this fact, then the customer is agreeing to some kind of conclusion to the process. The salesman will have to write the date down, somewhere.

It is probable that they will have to write it down in several places:

• Their record card / database
• Their sales report
• Their sales forecast
• Their sales forecast summary


And then the manager has to read the data, collate it, do some stats on it and report on it to the board, accounts, manufacturing and purchasing.

If, as we envisage, this date only needs to be entered into a customer record, once, against the relevant contact, that should be easier to do and cater for all users of the information.

Next, they need to know the potential value of a sale. I know that this sounds facile, but it is either a quoted amount or it is not. It is not a guess or an approximation. Guesses can be taken care of in estimating the probability of a sale. There might be a range of prices, because the client has stated that he might be able to secure a range of budgets or that he needs to consult with others the arrive at the number of units, number of licenses, lengths of contract, number of knobs on the box etc, etc.

This figure or range of figures needs to be entered somewhere – at the moment, it will probably feature in a report, in a record of the sales call, in the precursor to a quotation or the quotation itself and in some kind of forecast. So what’s the betting that the sales person has to enter it many times into many different systems – paper, database, spreadsheet etc? What we are aiming to do here is to provide one place where it can live and from which everyone can access it, analyse it and use it.

Lastly there is the probability of closing or winning the sale. This is a percentage for the confidence with which, on the evidence available, a sale will come into the company on the date forecast. It should not be a guess. It should be built on agreed factors such as; the suitability of the product for the client’s needs, the availability of a budget, the authority of the person being talked to and so on. These factors can be as few or as many as a company decides that it needs to use to produce a reliable prediction of the likelihood of closing a sale.

Perhaps more important than the absolute criteria is consistency. By using the same factors from sales call to sales call and from one sales person to another sales person, the aggregate forecast will at least use the same rules for all of its component parts, from whomever and from whenever they arose.

This figure is a vital means of managing the sale. It cannot remain static and remain credible. If it goes in at 55% in 3 months time, the 55% will translate to something such as, “Budget in place, meets the needs, guy liked it, needs to consult with three colleagues and XYZ co is also putting in a bid” In a months time, it can’t still be 55% if the agreed follow-up work has been done. Did the other three colleagues like it? How did XYZ do in their presentation? Was a further presentation required? Was a quotation requested? The 55% figure will go up (You are succeeding) or it will go down (You are losing the sale) but it is highly unlikely to remain the same.

Now how often have you looked at a forecast and seen a sale entered at a 60% probability 4 months hence and it’s still sitting there at 60% with one week to go. Is the other 40% of deciding factors going to be cleared up in the last week? Is the close date still realistic? Have further meaningful sales work gone on between entering the prospective sale and today’s date?

The above situation is usually the result of inaction or even mishandling the sales process. Prospective sales are moving things and they move as a result of information which is received. By taking snapshots of the sales process, both the sales people and the management can monitor this, but most importantly, it can remove, for ever, the terrible practice of “Hassling the Client” Sales people should no longer be phoning to “Chase things up” they should only be phoning to gain information which both they and the client have both agreed is necessary to conclude their business.

I’ve seen too many managers who are constantly pushing their sales team to “Chase up the major prospects” Why on earth should they? If they are doing their jobs properly in the first place and acting professionally after the initial presentation, all further contact to advance the sale will be agreed, hassle free and mutually beneficial, even if the information you receive tells you that the sale is going down the pan!

I believe that what we are seeking to do with SalesVision is to provide an easy to use platform whereby these 3 bits of information can be entered and from which it can subsequently be analysed. It should do this whilst vastly reducing the time that a sales person has to spend in order to record the information they need in the first place and it should make it consistent across an entire company.

The last piece of the jigsaw to make sales people happy will probably be our quotation system. Rather than spending an afternoon with the pricelists and a quotation form in Microsoft Word or Excel or even Quote Works, the sales guy will be able to enter the breakdown of the items or services they have been forecasting.

When the confidence level moves to the prospect requiring a quotation, it rather implies that discussions have progressed to where some considerable detail is available. By breaking the forecast down into its quotable components, SalesVision will bang the quote out, cc to Manufacturing, cc to Purchasing and cc to the CFO to ensure that they can afford to build it!


Hope that this clarifies a few loose ends which I seem to have created.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Michael

The argument for targeting the CFO has grown in strength as this posting has developed. I’ve already covered some of the points, but the idea of targeting companies which are to one extent or another failing hadn’t struck me as a goer!

Elsewhere here, telemoxie has come up with the strategy of targeting those who are seeking funding – a point made by a member of our board of advisers whose own company had just undergone an acquisition by a venture fund – one of the first thing they demanded was a greater quantity of metrics and better sales forecasts – apparently a preferred way is to install one of the “Big CRM” packages which at £3000-£5000 a seat is an expensive way to achieve only half what you are looking to do!

I guess that companies which are looking to cost reduce will see the merit of saving all that reporting time, but if it is re-deployed, it generates further revenue (See my worked example above for David) On top of that there are the cost reductions which decent forecasting can bring into manufacturing, inventory and purchasing. I think that everyone has convinced me that a failed forecast is multi-dimensionally expensive.

As to the objection that they’ve already spent or are spending £40K on Salesforce.com or SalesLogix or Sage CRM or whatever, I’d say fine. This is not a CRM system. It doesn’t seek to get the maximum return from your existing customers, nor does it seek to give the customers the best possible sales experience from their suppliers who use a CRM strategy. It is a means of managing sales and managing the performance of a sales organisation.

We will build on the data which is in an existing system – the last thing which we want is to have is a sales team typing company names and addresses and contact details into our system when they already exist in their ERP or CRM system. That would be silly! Although we’ll take each system as they come, most integrate with Outlook, so as SalesVision Exchange uses Outlook as it’s email and address client, making systems work together will often be straightforward.

Thanks for your comments and for your patience as I wind this up.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Chris

That was a comprehensive set of ideas and comments. As you owe me a pint in Melbourne for your Guinness-Blond / Paris Hilton idea I guess that I now owe you one as well. Rather than let them cancel themselves out, I’ll look forward to booking the tickets there!

Do we use it ourselves? Emphatically yes. George has made it a requirement of being a BP that SalesVision is used for all forecasts and tracking all opportunities. When I entered the world of CRM with Maximizer 10 years ago, I was astonished to find that some Maximizer Business Partners sold the package without using it. I don’t see how you can remotely start to serve your customers in this area unless you actually use what you are selling. Maximizer UK obviously thought the same and took a big broom to sweep out all the dross.

Your warning about the implementation problem is also taken on board. We have ample experience from CRM sales of clients who are unwilling to invest enough time to complete what they have stated they need. In truth the majority of “CRM” systems are bought on the wrong assumption that if they somehow pare down our quotation to the bare necessities, it will somehow deliver better value.

There’s an assumption that by a process of experience of usage and osmosis that they will somehow develop the potential of a system in a few months and take on board information which has taken professionally trained business partners years to accumulate. Of course it doesn’t happen like that and it does result in partially completed systems which fail to deliver their full potential value. I would describe about 80% of purchased CRM systems as being little more than an electronic dustbin which has been genetically crossed with a filing cabinet. Customers can chuck everything into it and then mess around with changing the order of the tags on the files and creating unnecessary new tags in the name of segmentation, all because they could.

The consultative approach we are taking could conceal another abused term, “Consultative Sales” in that it might be assumed that we ask loaded questions in order to hear the answers we need to sell them the box that we sell. It’s not like that at all.

As I’ve said elsewhere, we can’t come up with six killer USP’s for SalesVision as they will be different for every client. We do need to understand both their existing sales process and their intended sales process. We need to understand the metrics they wish to capture and the analysis they need to extract and why they need them. Then SalesVision can be configured to what they want it to do. It is possible that they might be wrong in their assessment of the probability of closing a sale, but time will quickly tell. It’s the only system I am aware of that actually requires the user to compare their forecast to an emerging reality!

I think that your warning about insidious sabotage is an experience which we have anticipated, though you have actually gone further and your comments will be noted. As a system, it is designed to be hard to fiddle. It was developed on the back of the experience of successful sales people in a wide variety of environments. You don’t get to be a successful sales person without learning how to “Play the system” so if there’s a trick to be played, one of us has usually played it. Surprisingly, it is designed to be tolerant of the benign tricks but intolerant of the often unintended ones which produce fantasy rather than forecast. If it’s not used, it won’t produce forecasts. If it is used incorrectly, it will warn the sales person and the managers. If it is showing Nirvana when doom and destruction is actually on the horizon, all sorts of alarm bells ring. It is not impossible to fiddle it, but I’m certain that it will take more effort than doing the job properly in the first case.

I also hope that we will avoid subterfuge by training the users in the way in which they have said they want to use it. Unusually, it’s not software which we can make much money out of from product training. After about an hour, we sort of run out of things to say. The real work is done before the launch by ensuring that the sales process and the reporting process is all contained within SalesVision. Once they start using it, it’s a case of quickly entering the relevant data (Which as I’ve said above, would have needed to be entered somewhere else, probably several times over) and almost immediately getting information and reports.

The quantity of information will grow as the weeks progress. The quality of the information will depend on the base assumptions, but there’s always a reality check from the order book. If they have made poor assumptions about the factors which affect the probability of closing and got it wrong, at least it will be consistently wrong across the entire sales team and for all sales calls. Correcting it is a matter of editing the sales assumptions. For the record, the old, wrong forecasts remain on the system, but the updated or edited ones supersede them in the reports.

It is a problem that the system can potentially make management look foolish and that is one which we’ve got to learn how to overcome. One CEO of a customer asked us to a board meeting a few weeks after implementation. “Gentlemen” he said, “The good news is that for the first time ever, we have an accurate sales forecast. The bad news is that contrary to all our beliefs and expectations, we apparently have no sales for August”

Thanks for all the time you’ve taken to give me such detail – as you can see, we’ve tried to put it to the best possible use.

Regards

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear John (Skoobie99)

Thanks to the time it’s taken me to respond to you personally, I’ve covered most of the points you made already.

Getting a sales-force buy in is absolutely critical. I’ve seen CRM systems fail because of a failure to involve the internal and external sales people and I’ve seen them flounder because they appear to exclude Marketing.

On of my greatest successes, though it cost quite a lot, was to replace a paper based record system and field sales activity reporting system with Maximizer and some custom designed activity reports and some basic forecasting. The sheer amount of time and effort it saved on the activity reporting gave it an immediate buy-in from the 15 sales people at the time. Forecasting worked as well as their paper based system (Which was not at all!) but took less time.

Seven years later, the sales team has changed or forgotten the savings they accrued in 1999 and they are now objecting to the time they have to spend on the new system. In addition, to make forecasting work, the clients have increased the complexity of the sales forecasting part to the level where there is a disincentive to use it at all. And even now, after all that effort, the finance director doesn’t believe a darned thing they tell him!

We’re to an extent victims of our initial success and the shortness of corporate memory, but I think that we could do it all over again with SalesVision and a new Customer Service add-on. SalesVision will simplify the reporting and forecasting whilst at the same time producing forecasts which are believed. The ability to drill down into a forecast will be beneficial to both management and to individual sales people. One further benefit we can add is that they produce a lot of quotations, which are generated independently. If the guys forecast, with a bit of detail picked from a table of items and prices, which can include rules (You can’t have A with B and D needs two off X for it to work) we can spit out the quotations for them. I’ve not mentioned that to date because we’ve only just released the quotation module!

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Jo (Jo Masterton)

Thanks for your idea of partnering. We are actively looking at this kind of opportunity and it certainly saves me a lot of time to be pointed in the appropriate direction. I recognise one of the most important areas for accounts package integration is that the accounts package is often the only consistent source of customer information in the company. It also contains some vital bits of information – sales history and the current booked values, so it makes sense that SalesVision should talk to any accounts package.

Integration is often a step too far – my experiences with CRM systems are that most CFO’s are happy to have booking and order data fed to the CRM package in order to give the sales history visibility to the sales team, I’ve never come across any organisation which has allowed the CRM system to feed information into an accounts package. The audit trail is simply too precious! Extracting the information into a CRM package can be via one-way integration or simply a daily batch programme to update numbers in the CRM records. The same is possible for SalesVision – in fact it is more likely to succeed than it usually is for a CRM package.

The reason for this is that most CRM systems have a disconnection from the accounts system which will have occurred due to sloppy set-up or an insufficient willingness on the part of the client to listen to our advice. Yes, the CRM system and the accounts package will contain the same companies, but they are unlikely to contain the same contacts. People, who place orders, write cheques and need chasing for payment, are rarely the people who agree to the purchase of a product and receive the demonstration.

Likewise, the companies in the CRM package are usually entered in isolation to the accounts package, so there are a host of ways in which they will not tie up together – different spellings, differing addresses etc. What was really needed would have been for the CRM system to be initially populated from the accounts package along with a unique ID or reference number. Next additional contacts can be entered or merged in an intelligent manner, with the same ID number. Different delivery addresses, different billing addresses and different addresses where the demonstration was carried out can thus be catered for in the CRM. With SalesVision, we would set out to populate it in this manner from the start.

After all, we want the user to start making comparisons between their forecast and the actual bookings as quickly as possible and the last thing that will be wanted is for someone having to work out whether Imperial Chemical Industries in accounts is the same as ICI in Fred’s entry for his territory CRM record or whether it’s the same as Mond Division at the same address which came from a lead handed over by marketing.

By paying attention to these areas we could deliver an unexpected benefit in making all the systems they employ more capable of being used together.

I’ll see how we can get involved with QuickBooks and Sage. Are there any others which come to mind? I had thought of some Siebel partners who might easily use SalesVision, where our product will easily cost one tenth the price of their solution and actually do more! I foresaw some potential conflicts of interest, but maybe I’m being too precious!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Steve (Steve Byrne)

Your million lawyers may not be too wide of the mark after all! It sent me scurrying to my media directory where I discovered about 30 B2B legal journals covering all aspects of their profession. When we initially went live with Maximizer, it coincided with the legal-eagles in the UK being freed up to do marketing. As a consequence, they all hired marketing managers who all went out and purchased CRM systems, a few of which were actually implemented before the hapless marketers got the sack for telling the fuddy-duddies what to do.

I’m following the PR to verticals as part of my PR campaign – the more people who ask us about SalesVision compared to those we have to tell about it (Pull marketing versus Push marketing) the better.

Watch this space!

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Michael (mgoodman)

It was good to hear from you on this, the longest posting I’ve ever done. I hope that I can make the wait for a comment worthwhile from some feedback. That’s a problem with a huge response and an equally large private mailbag. Everyone should have the courtesy of an acknowledgement and thanks for their contribution, but I guess that I invited this onto myself by asking a taxing question slap bang at to beginning of our launch and then ending up in hospital for a few days!

Your comment about sales managers and directors not wanting to get too involved in analytics rings very true, but their default position is that they are forced by circumstances to do so and they have to use the software which is available to them.

This comes at a cost. Setting up analytics on a CRM system by getting the CRM supplier to do it is easily a 30 day process. At $1200 / day or more. Even then, it will only do the basics we are looking at. More usually, they try to do it themselves. The rewards of this are a 6 month project which swamps everything else that they do, a system which usually doesn’t work (I’ve rescued enough of them!) and the poor guy who did the implementation gets the sack for taking 6 months off from being a sales director.

So they use spreadsheets and get all the sales force to do likewise. Apart from the fact that a spreadsheet is never going to give them the information, trends, analysis and history they need, there is the staggering amount of time it takes to collect the data, enter it into the sheets, collate them and then to analyse them into some readable report.

When I was general sales manager for Wayne-Kerr (I’m not joking, that was the name, so stop sniggering. This huge electronics company was named after John Wayne and Debora Kerr) I got the sales team to report and to forecast for the first time in about 12 years, just so we’d have a clue about where we stood and so that manufacturing and purchasing had a chance to bring down our catastrophically long delivery times.

Daily, they spent about an hour putting information into spreadsheets and monthly they spent 1 to 2 days collating it and analysing it. Even then, I couldn’t answer detailed questions about the forecast order book from the reports I generated without quizzing the individual salesman concerned. I sorted half of this by moving them onto a CRM system with much of the reporting built-in, but the forecasts remained on a spreadsheet because the task was too great for our CRM system at the time (Tracker II) to handle. In the end, the company imploded because they just couldn’t get the manufacturing of products to align with the market demand we generated. The historic reason for this was piss-poor forecasting and rotten management stretching back for years and my solutions simply came along too late to save the day. Ouch!

Your idea of using the software to offer a magic solution to clients through consultancy is I think well understood, by me at least. The problem is that it cuts across the needs which SalesVision as a company has which is to sell licences. There is however a hybrid solution which we are pursuing, so it’s good to get an initial confirmation that this is a useful approach.

We recognise that we can’t just sell the software. We have to sell what it can do. As the software is so easy to use (Like yours) there’s not a lot of mileage in training users. There is however a lot of mileage in consultancy with the customer to help them to identify their existing sales processes, what they thought that they were and what they want them to be. Then there are the reporting, analysis and management aspects of using the package. This is pure consultancy work, using SalesVision as the tool. The implication is that this work will be carried out by our Business Partners, using their consultancy and management skills but also using SalesVision owned and used daily by the customer. It’s a total package – like most CRM systems, flogging the software alone results in a failed implementation and a disappointed customer. We can’t expect to get people to want to buy SalesVision alone, as it will have some major turn-offs to the Sales and Marketing Management Community. In effect, if we are not careful we are asking them to purchase and deploy something which if used correctly could show their boss that they have been inept in the past!

There’s nothing to stop consultancies from using SalesVision as their own black-box as part of their own consultancy package, but to derive the greatest benefits out of it, the users should be using it all the time and always asking questions.

If this was just me, I’d be inclined to agree with your conclusions about making money from consultancy and not emphasising the software too much. But its not, we’ve got to produce licence revenues for a manufacturer and allow both their people and our business partners to make their consultancy fees from value added work in the way which benefits the end-user customers most.

Actually, I was involved in the sale of a “Solution” which was so mind-blowingly complex and being analogue, covered in knobs and dials that no one apart from the most dedicated technocrat would have dreamed of purchasing one. It optimized things, such as profits or throughput and it was interactive so that unwanted side effects (Such as removing the expense of the chairman’s mistress in order to optimise profits) could be “tuned” out. In today’s money it would have cost £700,000 and selling it as a consultancy service looked to be the only option.

English China Clays actually bought two of them and were trained up to use it. They attributed it to saving their entire UK operation by solving a problem involving blending clays to market predictions in the optimal manner. I think they paid, in today’s terms about £800,000 for their slimmed down machines, which paid for themselves in weeks. We never did find another customer with the technical skills to appreciate the benefits and I wasn’t enough of a sales person at the time (1980) to be able to rise to the challenge, so consultancy it was.

Best wishes and thanks again for your ideas.

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Karen (proeditor)

Thanks for your comments. I’ve got to admit that we are trying to bring focus to the effort through committee and through brainstorming. The closest we can get at the moment to a co-ordinator on the marketing front is in the form of the Managing Director, George, who is able to cut through the misguided and errant ideas which come up with ease. Actually it’s with a startling level of alacrity, given the fact that he’s got to be responsible for everything else as well! In addition, the Head of Software Development is pretty single minded in not allowing the launch to be diverted by minor diversions.

We’re not in a position to appoint a new body to look after this critical area, but your warning is well taken. We will endeavour to act in a single minded way as far as the implementation of the launch is concerned without getting too distracted by the almost infinite possibilities presented by the project.

It is useful to be brought back to organisational reality by you!

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Telemoxie

One last bit of feedback before closing. I proposed contacting the venture funds, banks and other city professionals about using SalesVision as a tool for getting better performance from the companies they fund. It turns out that SalesVision had gone down this route before a couple of years ago on a previous version and been met with a big Zilch.

It turned out that they are not interested in offering better tools to a management than they already have, having offered them the money on the strength of their existing business case and existing management strengths. A cynic might say that they are happy for their clients to spend £ 1000’s and waste lord knows how much time to meet their reporting requirements. It’s almost as though some of the providers of funds wanted their clients to fail!

On the other hand, they’ve never been in the habit of saying, “Here’s the £10 Million and by the way, you ought to get your CFO to use Sage or QuickBooks” so I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised.

That means that we could still get mileage out of trying to identify companies which have just succeeded with a funding round, but I’m going to have to work out how to identify them. If the venture capitalists and banks are disinterested in providing better forecasting information, we will have to try to identify the companies directly and then approach them with a solution to their reporting requirements to their new paymasters.

How on earth I’ll do that I haven’t a clue, but I’ll have to work it out!

Best wishes and thanks again for your suggestions.

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Hi Everyone

It’s time to close, award points and to say a few final words of thanks.

Firstly, thanks to Carrie and to Val for allowing me to keep the question open for so long. It’s been very worthwhile to everyone at SalesVision. We’ve learned a huge amount from all your inputs.

Next, a special word of thanks to Deremiah for all the words of encouragement, both on the forum and off – it has been well appreciated.

Finally to all the rest of the MarketingProfs team who have weighed in and offered your thoughts and feedback, again both on and off the forum – keeping track and following things through over such a protracted period can’t have been easy and your endeavours are really appreciated.

Best wishes and here’s mud in your eye – If I’ve missed anyone out, my apologies, it’s not intentional, but with 57 postings, it’s easy to lose track. If I were to print the thing out, I’d have run out of paper!

Steve Alker
SalesVision