Many organizations have widely dispersed sales teams that are rarely in the office yet are expected to be kept informed of new developments and, similarly, must keep central management informed of sales leads and progress. Other organizations operate a variety of sales channels and have difficulty in keeping track of leads and opportunities. Every operation does basically the same things…but has slightly different sales operation management systems to reflect its specific needs and processes.
There are already a wide range of sales force automation tools on the market but these applications can be rigid to work with and expensive to deploy. In short, you have to adapt your process to suit them or they won’t work for you.
That’s what makes business portal software such a powerful tool.
With a reliable business portal application, you can customize the software to suit your processes rather than the other way around. You can set up procedures to manage all of your sales operations, whether it is in-house, telephone based, field sales based or any combination of these. And often without having to buy any additional business software or hardware.
Every independent study into the cost of sales operations has shown that the average cost to generate a sales lead is around $200. With that level of spending, isn’t it critical to make sure you manage every single one of them and maximize every opportunity?
Many business portal software products come shipped with basic sales opportunity management applications loaded, but how you set it up and mange it is crucial to your success.
Sales is a process driven discipline. It is not an ad hoc series of events that sometimes leads to a customer signing on the dotted line. If you have been involved in selling for some time you will already know also that truly high achieving sales people tend to be systematic in their approach to selling: they don’t tend to be loose cannons with a gift of the gab.
If you accept that (and if you don’t, there is a ton of evidence to suggest you should) then you have to also accept that systems improve sales.
However, there is not a sales person on the planet that likes to be systematic. They don’t like filling out sales reports and following a regime – it runs counter to their “instincts” and “gut-feel”. Therefore it’s management’s job to make sure that the sales portal application is as easy as possible and to persuade the sales person that there is something in the portal process for them.
This concept underpins every recommendation we make about how to use your sales portal software successfully: think of every user of the business portal as a customer of the business portal application, and build the systems accordingly.
Rule #1 when dealing with customers: if you want them to do something for you, you first need to do something for them. So it is with customers of the sales portal application – in this case your internal sales team.
Therefore it is essential that the sales person gets something of value from the sales portal application, or it will just be seen as yet another managerial tool -- something to be gotten around where possible or completed under duress.
The first steps in setting up a successful Sales Opportunity Management business portal application begin by analyzing what you do now -- before you even start to think about improvements.
Every business needs to generate sales opportunities -- leads -- in order to survive. There are, pretty much, two main profiles of a salesperson: Hunters and Farmers.
Hunters look for new business constantly. They need that constant challenge of a new deal to keep them fired up.
Farmers, on the other hand, are the relationship builders -- the account managers -- who get to know their customers over a long period of time.
Needless to say, one can’t exist without the other. For example, an organization that has only Farmers will eventually decline as new customers are not added to replace the natural attrition rate. An organization that has only Hunters will not achieve its true potential as it costs 10 times as much to win a customer as it does to sell to an existing one.
It is a very rare individual indeed that exhibits both sets of characteristics in equal measure, although it is equally rare to find only one or the other being dominant. In most people, and most sales teams, a combination is present.
So, given that in most organizations we have two potentially conflicting sets of goals to achieve; that of gaining new business whilst looking after customers, we need to make sure that the sales processes cover these adequately for effective sales opportunity management.
Hunters will get their leads from, typically, these kinds of sources:
- Themselves (cold calls, networking etc)
- Marketing initiatives
- Suppliers
- Friends and family
- Trade journals etc
- Advertising
Farmers will get their leads from, typically, these kinds of sources:
- Customers (cross and up selling)
- Customer referrals (to other businesses)
- Word of mouth
- Websites
The critical thing, therefore, is to collect information about the source of every sales opportunity that comes to your organization. And we mean EVERY one. Then, and only then, will you be able to decide what is working and what is not -- and, in the case of the Hunters, who is working and who is not.
There are other little pieces of information that you may want to collect at this stage too:
- The area/territory the sales opportunity came from so you can watch for hot-spots.
- The general profile of the sales opportunity i.e. the closest fit to your product/service offerings.
There is also a wealth of information implicit in the sales opportunity transaction too. This comes from the relationship to the organizations and/or individuals that are associated with the sales opportunity. Please read “Contact Management as a Portal Application” to see what is available and why, but in the interests of completeness here, you will also have access to information on:
- The size of the organization
- Their industry sector
- The decision makers and influencers
- Their financial standing
Tip #1 – The systematic collection of data through your business portal software as a by-product of what people are doing anyway ALWAYS pays dividends. Sales people don’t like filling out forms -- make their life easy by creating the right defaults and relationships within your sales portal software and they will buy into the process right away.
In the next article in this series we’ll look more closely at the steps in the sales process.
Chic McSherry
CEO
iport4business.com Inc
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