Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Hi Adrian

If it makes you feel any better, your problem is quite common, where a CRM software solution has been implemented without giving the necessary thought to the functions it has to carry out. In fairness, if SalesForce.com was implemented prior to your appointment and the need to track the success of a campaign was not identified at the time, then changes to the operating processes will be necessary.

I would have thought that there would be an integral approach to the solution from within your current package, without needing to go through import and export routines, but I am not surprised. I must be careful here not to allude to something which that package might not do too well as I get weird communications, off-forum from SalesForce.commies (Pun intended!) who hide behind someone else’s email address.

Rather than go nuclear and immediately start to look at other packages, with the cost, time and training implications that involves (Not to mention reports of the difficulty of retrieving all of what is, after all, your data, from someone else’s ASP server – whoops, I’ve done it again, that’s more odd emails!) you should map out the processes you want to subject your data to.

From the core CRM functionality of the software suit, focussing on your lead tracking requirement, you need to decide where to record a lead and to what level of detail. Clearly you will have to identify the source of the lead (Campaign and where relevant, publication) the date it was received and the product or service enquired about.

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to enter this information into user defined fields (Even if they are table fields) attached to the company or contact record. If the customer makes a second enquiry, whilst the first one is ongoing, you are stuffed and doubling up the number of fields to accommodate the second enquiry is cumbersome and still leaves you up a gum tree when the third lead comes in. This is a relational database exercise and is handled in packages like Maximizer by the Opportunity Manager or the lead Management system. (Maximizer is our CRM speciality, so I must disclose an interest in name of fairness)

An action needs to be set to ensure that someone follows it up and if necessary, the action must be assigned to someone. A supervisory role probably exists, so some reporting to indicate who is responsible for a lead, whether it has been acted on and the time span of the process is also desirable. You don’t want the sales director to have to view every enquiry and its progress unless he / she wants to, so this should be a summary report.

Following contact with the prospect, the lead gains a few more attributes and a number of further actionable events. You will be able to ascertain the size of the potential order they are enquiring about, the time it might take to execute it, the revenue value and the timescale for making a decision. You will also be able to estimate a rough likelihood of closing the deal which can then be represented as a percentage.
Actions resulting may include further literature, booking a meeting or a demonstration, sending demonstration software, contacting references and perhaps instigating some customer background research.

Again, these need to be attached to the lead and the company record and as a monetary value has been estimated, you are stating to get the basics of something you can put into a sales forecast. Meetings, letters, proposals and quotations will also need to be reported on so that your management (You?) can produce summary reports. These items are also relational in their nature as you have the possibility of needing to attach many leads, each with a number of scenarios to a single record.

When you have made a sales visit or a presentation, again the salient details, including notes must be recorded. Notes can be rendered searchable and thus quantifiable by putting them in category headings via a “Structured Note” format, thus allowing the outcome of a sales visit to be analysed.

Quotations might follow and the closing process can again be tracked via actions and dates for actions. All of these follow-up steps will be used to alter the basic details of the sales opportunity that the lead has developed into: The monetary value, the percentage likelihood of close and the expected order date.

Once the contract has been awarded, the final value and date of order must be recorded and if it is lost, a reason for the loss ascribed.

All of this process requires a relational approach as the details you need to record are many and are attached to a single record. Also, with the sales forecasting, the details will change as the opportunity progresses towards its conclusion. The close date will change, the monetary value will go up or go down and the likelihood of winning the business will vary depending on the success of your sales people, the activities of your competitors and the continuing interest and financial health of your prospect.

The final part of this picture is to decide on how you wish to report this process. We prefer to access all the recorded information and to allow the client to decide how they wish to agglomerate or alternatively to drill down into the detail, choosing the parameters of the report according to their need. Thus they will select such variables as the time period, a sales person or a team, a product or the company as a whole. This is easily achieved with Maximizer by utilising Crystal Reports and ensuring that the data our clients wish to utilise is available, either from within Maximizer’s modules or in tables we attach to the core software.

I believe that this is inherently easier with client owned software, rather than the ASP model as we can integrate the reporting process with external software on the client’s server, but the packages you mentioned probably offer something similar based on either their own servers or via .net interfaces with the data which is available.

We are currently running Maximizer as an ASP model on our own hardware on behalf of clients who do not wish to maintain their own systems, so I know that with our own systems, we can both store and report on the data in any way the client feels he needs and deliver it via a web interface.

Can I suggest that you draw out your map of processes and reports and then ask the suppliers you named how they would go about it and what the cost (Ongoing and up-front) would be?

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions