REDISCOVERING THE ART OF THE SALE

The foul-mouthed film “Glengarry Glen Ross” argued that salesmen are born, not made. But according to Michael Heflin, CEO at WhisperWire — a provider of sales effectiveness tools to the telecom industry — a mere 3% of a company's top sales reps account for about 80% of its revenue. If that's true, an awful lot of salespeople out there were born to be something else. And they need help.

But can technology, heretofore a clunky, unsightly and ineffective appendage, really help make average sales reps more effective? Can it help them make the right pitch at the right time, close the deal on the spot and up-sell without gouging the customer? Will it make potential clients any happier to see them at the door? Or will it provide the self-doubting salesman the kind of comfort Sally Field's Oscar award gave her — convincing him that people really, really like him? The answer from a growing number of solutions providers and experts in the field to all but the latter is: yes.

However, it will take results to convince the journeymen of sales. As it turns out, when it comes to buying solutions designed to make salesmen more effective, these artisans of business and network solutions sales are as skeptical, mistrusting and impatient as the clients they serve. Nearly half of all sales force automation (SFA) software purchased over the last several years sits unused, according to Cary Fulbright at Salesforce.com.

Salespeople have been burned too often relying on technology when delivering a presentation or conducting a webcast. They have been caught off guard one too many times by inaccurate or competitive data and embarrassed by the same regarding their own marketing campaigns. Salesmen don't like being embarrassed.

Today, a more basic motivator is driving managers to give SFA tools another try: The gravy train hasn't left the yard in years.

“In the late '90s, people were doing so well, they didn't need to be effective. Selling was easy,” said Bob Schmonsees, founder and CEO of RJS Associates, a management consulting firm. “Even the ‘C-players’ were making their quotas.”

Another reason to give sales tools a second try is the quality of the tools themselves. A confluence of technologies and focus — including high-bandwidth Internet access, easy-to-use graphics software, ubiquitous wireless, and hosting and application technology aimed squarely at telecom service providers — have converged to provide inside and outside sales managers the tools they need to help make better salesmen out of “the other 97%.”

Relative newcomers to this space such as WhisperWire, Salesforce.com and Avitage, as well as traditional players such as Amdocs and PeopleSoft, are delivering ways to make sales technology meaningful, cool and, when required, invisible.

Ideally, salesmen want tools that give them real-time competitive data; real-time pricing and availability on their own product portfolios; up-to-the-second data on the needs, concerns and desires of current and potential clients; and sophisticated audio-visual tools to deliver their pitches. They also want real-time access to subject matter experts, customer testimonials and leads. In other words, they want what Trebor Smyles had, if only for one night (see sidebar on page 36).

Of the many solutions providers in this space, WhisperWire is the only company dedicated to improving the sales process for telecom service providers. Its strategy has already paid off with a substantial contract with SBC Communications. And if the product works as demonstrated, it soon could be the telecom sales reps' best friend.

“When you do the math to determine everything a sales rep has to keep up with [to decide] what is the right thing to sell to a customer at the right moment, based on competitive pressure, availability and number of products and ongoing promotions, I don't know how anyone can keep up without help,” WhisperWire's Heflin said.

The dream of most sales managers, he added, is not to make everyone a top sales rep (although that would be nice) but to increase the skills of every sales rep so they improve their close ratios by a mere 15% to 20%. Heflin doesn't think that's too much to ask. “We outstrip that substantially,” he said.

Typically, SFA solutions have focused on the administrative elements of sales, managing the leads database, targeting promotions and tracking where a potential client is in the sales process. But WhisperWire and Avitage in particular focus on the sales process from the time a lead is generated to the time it's closed.

One of WhisperWire's best features is its ability to design, configure and price complex telecom orders and display the result graphically on-demand while sitting face-to-face with the customer. The software also coaches the sales rep to ask probing questions, overcome objections and make recommendations. “But it's not a script that says, ‘Hello, Mrs. Jones. I want to slam your long-distance,’” Heflin said.

The ability to provide pricing, design and competitive information on the spot leads to an increase in the number of proposals and quotes a rep can put in front of a customer. Less complex quotes can be produced on the spot. “It simply makes salespeople more effective. And if ever there was a time telecom needed to be more effective, it is now,” Heflin said.

Sales reps also need to be more cost conscious. To that end, companies are increasingly turning to telephone sales. Wellesley, Mass.-based Avitage helps companies sell services over the phone. The company introduces the element of Web conferencing and enhances the standard voice pitch using synchronized audio, graphics, animation and video to manage the message sales reps present to their clients.

Traditional Web conferencing, such as that used in presenting quarterly reports or other one-sided presentations, isn't very effective in a sales situation, said Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage. “When you move into the selling space, the customer is in control. They jump in with questions you haven't planned for. So you have to present in a way that supports the real-time nature of customer selling,” he said.

The problem with that is sales people don't make money while they are creating slides in PowerPoint. Ideally, it is the domain of marketing to create templates and other methods of presenting a consistent message to a target market.

However, in a recent report by Aberdeen Group, the company said, “In the foundation upon which rests the working relationship between marketing and sales departments, cracks that have existed for years are now deepening.”

To help both marketing and sales manage their message with some modicum of consistency, Avitage provides a solution that manages a single repository for presentations and customer communications content. This content includes pre-recorded audio and visual customer testimonials and discussions of specific topics by subject matter experts. Sales reps can incorporate these features directly into the phone conversation through conferencing.

“Without that single repository, sales and sales support spend entirely too much time searching for content. Then they mix and match slides that don't even look like they came from the same company,” Burns said.

Also, while marketing is concerned with a unified company image and message, the salesman is concerned with tailoring the message to a specific customer need. According to Burns, the result can be disastrous. “With Microsoft Office, everyone becomes a producer,” Burns said. “But you have people that can't put together a good PowerPoint presentation. Now you are going to give them digital video, audio and animation and expect them to build shows and deliver them over the Web? What if they mangle it? What's going to happen to your brand?”

Thus the need for an Avitage to pre-package a company's message, help deliver it through Web conferencing, and make the content accessible to sales reps on-demand so they can respond to extemporaneous requests from the customer. “The Avitage solution [also] helps guide people to ask the right sales analysis questions they should be asking anyway but tend not to over the phone,” Burns said.

Like Avitage, Salesforce.com, a provider of hosted customer relationship management (CRM) applications, addresses the cost concerns of a sales organization. Its goal is to lower the cost and confidence barriers that keep some sales personnel from using SFA tools. “Sales people, for better or for worse, have the ability to tell management, ‘Look, I'm making 110% of quota. Are you going to fire me for not using the SFA system?’” said Cary Fulbright, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce.com.

One of the ways a hosted service can make SFA more palatable is to provide better support than most internal telco IT departments can. “A telco's IT department tends to focus on supporting the network. The sales organization, which is widely distributed and difficult to support, tends to play second fiddle,” Fulbright said.

Salesforce.com's hosted service cures one of the biggest headaches for sales reps and IT departments: keeping their data and applications in sync with the rest of the organization. In a large, widely distributed sales force using a licensed application, reps end up using several different software versions. That complicates support and makes upgrading expensive. A hosted, prescription service like Salesforce.com can keep all users on the same software version all the time.

This also helps prevent sales reps from shooting themselves in the foot by not taking the time to synchronize their data with the central server. “It can take hours,” Fulbright said. “Reps are reluctant to synchronize, so they don't.”

Not only do sales reps hurt themselves by not synchronizing, but their sales managers look silly in the Friday forecast meeting because they don't know how their reps have done all week.

Leading CRM player PeopleSoft aims to address the synchronization issue with its SFA software. In its latest release (version 8.4), the software has incorporated a “no code on the client” strategy that lets mobile sales reps stay connected to lead distribution and other FSA tools in real time without having to re-synchronize.

The company recently sold its SFA software to a major U.S. wireless provider, which has rolled it out to approximately 500 sales reps across the country. According to company representatives, PeopleSoft's new offering goes beyond traditional administrative SFA capabilities in that it focuses less on the managerial process of sales managers and more on empowering salespeople.

“That was one of the criteria for this customer,” said Daniel Kenyon, vice president of communications industry strategy at PeopleSoft. “They wanted a product not only for managing the work force, but a tool sales reps themselves would see a lot of value in.”

Managing automated lead distribution for a national operator was an important first step. PeopleSoft's bidirectional lead generation software helps keep leads fresh by acknowledging receipt by the sales rep. “When the rep accepts a lead, the clock starts ticking,” Kenyon said. “A lead's value diminishes over time, and this creates an incentive for sales reps to respond to them.”

It also creates the opportunity for a company like PeopleSoft, with tentacles in several operation support system functions, to help automate the rest of the process and tie together the order management systems that turn the opportunity into a revenue-generating service.

This is also where CRM players like Amdocs can shine. While others include SFA as a subcomponent of overall CRM, Amdocs sees it as a separate entity, where the former helps in acquiring new business and the latter helps in maintaining profitable customer relationships.

However, that doesn't mean the two can't be integrated. As a provider of licensed and outsourced billing and order management solutions, which recently integrated the Clarify CRM business it acquired from Nortel Networks, Amdocs is in an enviable position to be able to tie together the various back office systems that supply much of the data upon which SFA depends.

The real problem companies face in selling sales force effectiveness tools simply may be that association with CRM. Some very expensive bombs have been laid in deploying CRM technology. But two things may help sales force solutions overcome that history and gain traction. One is that they have come a long way, particularly the solution from WhisperWire. The other is desperation.

DIARY OF A FUTURE SALESMAN

How tomorrow's pitchman closes the sale using sales force automation

Trebor Smyles stepped off the people mover three blocks from his next appointment. The bell-shaped GPS-assisted scheduler fastened to his lapel informed him he would still arrive at Liquid Spoons — a Midwest manufacturer of molecularly constructed kitchen utensils — three minutes early. He whistled an old Beatles tune his great-grandfather had taught him, feeling as well-prepared as any network apps salesman could be.

Smyles clicked his jaw, activating his automated buddy-in-a-box. “Abby,” he said. “I'm almost there. Can you double check the customer contact database to make sure there's nothing outstanding with Spoons?”

Abby replied in the Ukrainian accent Smyles had downloaded over the weekend, “Trebor, you know you did not have to ask. I am sending you the trahble teekit as we speak.”

Smyles' cochlear implant played the recorded conversation that came into his help desk late last night. “…your nine-nines reliability worked just fine, but at 500 terabytes, a lot of data can be lost in a microsecond. I need a buffer readout ASAP.”

Chuckling, Smyles said, “Check his SLA and see if that's gonna cost him, Abby. And let me know when the report is ready.”

As he crossed the street to his client's building, Smyles noticed the sign for Pahpah's Persian Rug Co. was being removed. He told Abby to cross-check the address with the leads database.

Smyles strode confidently into the conference room. No briefcase. No laptop. Just his wits, his winning personality and Abby. And oh yes, the wireless personal server built into his wristwatch and a small collection of holographic projection thimbles in his breast pocket.

It had taken Smyles months to master the art of coordinating presentation material, accessing on-demand technical support, fending off objections with pre-recorded customer testimonials, and knowing just when to deliver the proper quote. It had taken him even longer to make the pauses in his delivery appear natural whenever he stopped to listen to Abby coaching through his earpiece.

Smyles stood in front of Liquid Spoons' network director and a couple of engineers, including Sergia Chi, who called in last night's trouble. Smyles trumpeted the new innovative solutions and aggressive new pricing plans that would enable Liquid Spoons to lower its total cost of ownership as well as improve the speed and quality of its communications network.

“Ladies,” he said, pointing a thimbled-finger to project a holographic representation of their current network configuration in front of them. “This architecture has served you well…” (A single beep in his ear told Smyles the buffer report was ready.) “…as you can see by the report that just hit your inbox, Ms. Chi, no data was lost in that minor hiccup last night.”

Just then, Ms. Chi's BoysenBerry beeped. She smiled when she saw the report. Smyles paused for effect.

He went on to explain how the new Itanium XII processors and, finally, optical switching were creating a new paradigm in bandwidth-on-demand. He filled the room with holographic diagrams of different features and configurations, giving each one a brief introduction. In a flash he whisked them away, leaving his client's current network hanging in the air like a helium balloon. Smyles walked quietly around to their side of the table and sat with them. “Those are all possibilities. But let's work out together what you really need.”

Smyles plugged scenarios into his personal server as fast as they could dream them up. He projected them around the room, thankful that he no longer had to scribble on a white board. With each configuration was a price list, including the discount announced that morning from marketing that targeted customers like Liquid Spoons, whom they were trying to migrate off old gig-E networks. Smyles sneaked a message to Abby relaying his thanks to the marketing team.

Chi hit Smyles with a question he wasn't prepared for. Without breaking stride, he quickly yanked a video SME file from his server and played it, but soon saw it was made prior to the latest software release. He sent a request for a live subject matter expert and was glad to see him pop up on Ms. Chi's laptop just as the short video ended. The matter was settled. Smyles had his deal. It was all over but the approval from finance.

Liquid Spoons' director of engineering thanked everyone for their hard work and said she would take the proposal to Old Purse Strings in the morning.

“Smyles, we'll call you,” she said.

Smyles quickly sent an audio/visual file highlighting the financial aspects of his presentation to the CFO directly, fearful that the director's constant instant messaging during the presentation had left her with less than a clear understanding of the return on investment. The next day after closing the sale, Smyles tacked on a nice fat service package with Gold level support. He told Abby to book his vacation at that new resort on the friendly shores of the Persian Gulf.

On his way out of the building, Abby chimed in with a new lead. A new business was moving in at Pahpah's. “Be there in two minutes,” Smyles said.

Then he woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across his head. It was 3 a.m. Haggard, but careful not to wake the snoring twist of sheets next to him, Smyles sat down at his clunky old Dell. He dialed into the VPN, opened his PowerPoint and Visio applications, and began to prepare for his first appointment. He sent the first slide to the printer. It promptly jammed. Smyles' head hit the desk with a thud.
— Tim McElligott