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When Is Contact Management Software Not Enough?
At a December 2007 seminar sponsored by CRM magazine, presenters—including both an Oracle representative and Siebel On Demand customers—sought to define the point at which a company's growth makes contact management software not just inefficient but an unacceptable business risk.
Standalone contact management software is "exponentially more valuable than flat files," said Steve Diamond, senior director of product marketing, Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand. In fact, it may be sufficient for a small, regional company that still runs on QuickBooks and has only a handful of sales reps all working out of a single office, he said.
But as a business grows into a national or global player, as sales offices multiply, and as the back-end application infrastructure grows more sophisticated, contact management just cannot keep up with the task, all the presenters agreed.
From Customer Data to Profitable Insight
"What you can't get from contact management software alone is insight," said Diamond. "Who are your most—and least—profitable customers? How can you build loyalty? Why do you lose deals? How can you best manage reps? What products should I up-sell and cross-sell?"
It is harder, too, to implement best-practice sales methodologies and embed them into larger CRM processes.
"Our previous sales tool took in information all the time, but actually getting insight that was useful to salespeople was just about impossible," said Sam Sanderson, manager of sales automation and analytics at Administaff, a growing HR outsourcing company.
"The most outstanding feature of Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand has been the power of its analytics," said Sanderson. "Everything is there to provide up-to-date and valid pipelines to our salespeople."
"Now, salespeople don't have to go digging though the system and pouring data into their own spreadsheets," added Sanderson, "because everything is there at a click of a button."
Whose Data Is It, Anyway?
The loss of sales reps is inevitable. But it can also be very costly, especially when they take all their customer data right along with them.
“What we hear over and over again," said Diamond, "is that at companies who use contact management systems, reps who leave take their data with them. It's a huge pain point."
"Because CRM applications are built on top of a centralized information management system," Diamond explained, "organizations rightfully reclaim their customer information."
Up and Running Faster
While companies can outgrow contact management software sooner than they might imagine, they can also have integrated CRM solutions up and running faster, and with fewer resources, than they might expect too, all participants agreed.
"After evaluating the capabilities of the applications themselves, we found that Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand provided the same amount of information and leverage as if we'd gone in-house—minus all the logistical challenges," Sanderson said.
"As we try to be lean and mean and efficient, we can't have a large IT staff," said Dan Rebella, president and CEO of software and consulting firm DSC Consulting. "So having it hosted was a requirement for us."
And the results so far?
"In 2006 we documented 10 cross-sells," said Rebella. "With Siebel CRM On Demand, in 2007 we documented 52 cross-sells."
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