Sales Force e-Tools
They may help drum up new sales but only with proper data-entry and follow-up
Garrett Wasny, CMC | August, 2000Here’s the latest annoying e-commerce acronym: SFA. That’s short for sales-force-automation, a fancy term for web programs which allow you to track how often and what you communicate to clients. Ideally, SFA e-services can help you manage every point of contact with the customer, and create new selling opportunities. A terrific concept, yes, but without constant updates by all members of your sales team and management follow-up, SFAs could just as easily stand for Super Frivolous Application.
In the past year or so, a growing number of web-based SFA packages have popped up online, all free to use. These include MyNetSales (http://www.mynetsales.com), Sales.Com (http://www.sales.com), SalesForce (http://www.salesforce.com), and Upshot (http://www.upshot.com). This month, no less than Oracle, the wooly mammoth of cyberspace, plunges into the sales force fray with the launch of its own contact management system entitled Oracle Sales Online (http://www.oraclesalesonline.com).
Created especially for small and mid-sized businesses, the e-packages offer an assortment of features ranging from forecasting tools to industry briefings to training aids. All deliver what they promise, although just barely. The services suffer from a clunky and stiff design that I wouldn’t have expected from a tool that focuses on sales, an age-old activity that humans have been doing since the first bearskin-clad salesperson went cave-to-cave to hock pointed rocks. Your average HTML editor – and HTML has been around for less than a decade – is far better designed and thought out. The layout and content of Sales.Com, for example, are typical. The text-heavy opening page highlights five major sections: My Desktop, Career, Network, Biz Center, and Travel. Personally, the only section that interested me was My Desktop, the contact management module. The other sections were, frankly, e-fluff, and a waste of precious screen space. This is an all too common flaw in many e-business service sites: throw every conceivable product or service offering at the visitor on the opening page and convince them that this single site can solve all their business needs. It’s as if the big-shot Silicon Valley site designers – who should know better – somehow believe that their visitors are all backwoods hayrubes, new to the web, who will be so entranced by the blizzard of choices on their particular e-hub that they’ll spot-weld their browsers to this URL and never visit another e-business site, ever again. Puh-lease. My advice? Stick to the knitting. If I want job information, I’ll go to Monster.com. When arranging a trip, I’ll visit Travelocity. Focus on what you do best – in this case, sales management – and forget the rest. That’s how you’ll win me over.
Once past the digital dead-ends, I drilled down into the My Desktop section on Sales.Com. There, I finally found what I was looking for: a calendar to arrange appointments, an accounts manager to track customers, and a contact organizer to stay current on business relationships. The service also includes a personal briefing area to receive updates on competitors and other companies, an opportunities module to check the progress of each sales deal, and a sales prospector which, for a fee, allows you to search for leads in a Dun and Bradstreet 15-million-company database. Smartly designed and easy to use, the e-tools allow everyone from a lone entrepreneur to a team of sales and customer service reps to keep tabs on all customers all along the sales pipeline. On paper, this looks like a sure-fire winner and a must-have application. In the real world, I’m not so sure.
The major problem is not the e-packages themselves, but how they’re used – or rather, not used. The tipoff is in the name: sales force automation. Machines may be automated. People – especially sports-jacket-wearing, high-fiving, Coors-swilling salespeople – will never be. In my experience, the people who actually interact with a customer – the head-set wearers working the phone, or the salespeople on the retail floor or out in the field – are often too busy or poorly trained to correctly or fully input what’s required in any SFA system, web-based or otherwise, if they bother to input anything at all. Invariably, any contact management system will only be as good as the worst slackers on your sales or customer service team. Unless all members of the unit regularly update the database with due diligence, slackers included, the information will have gaping holes, and little relevance. Further complicating matters is that contact management systems are often used not so much to keep track of customers as they are to keep track of employees. Salespeople in all industries are under constant pressure for volume, volume, volume. Send x amount of e-mails, make y number of phone calls, and arrange z number of meetings, every day, every week, every month. Come performance review and bonus time, the SFA is a key – sometimes only -- measuring stick. If it’s not written down in the SFA database, it never happened. I’ve known more than one goose-stepping supervisor who played endless SFA number games, and cared more about maintaining the database than they ever did about genuine client service. In this situation, the temptation is strong for employees to be highly creative in their SFA accounting to boost their numbers and cover their back.
Worst of all, SFA information once collected, however incomplete and imperfect, is often ignored by the very corner-office types who ordered the system in the first place, and demand that all employees use it. I roll my eyes whenever I hear these Fortune 500 CEOs and VPs expound on their uncompromising commitment to “customer-relationship management” and “marketing and sales synergy.” Oh really? Why is it then that I have to dig into my wallet for my frequent flyer number everytime I book a flight, even though I’ve already booked scores of flights with the same airline? Why hasn’t IBM, the e-business juggernaut, ever bothered to write me a letter, e-mail me, or telephone me to inquire if I’d be interested in purchasing another one of their laptops, even though I’ve already bought two ThinkPads from them in the past four years, phoned their help line at least a dozen times, completed numerous customer feedback forms, and twice purchased extended warranties? I suspect that a lot of the SFA brouhaha is for show, and many companies – even ones which profess to be on the leading e-commerce edge – still struggle with how to collect, analyze, and respond to customer feedback.
Although hindered by design flaws and a spotty track record in actually delivering improved customer service, web-based sales force automation tools offer small businesspeople a no-cost way to better coordinate their interactions and relationships with customers. For better or worse, the e-packages cannot do it all -- nor should they be expected to -- and their ultimate success will depend on how well companies actually listen and respond to what their customers want.
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Garrett Wasny, CMC, is an e-commerce trainer and author. His latest book is World Business Resources.com. Mr. Wasny may be reached at gwasny@direct.ca or Tel: 604/878-4555.
Back to Home page.
