Switching to the Fast Track

Continued

When Raybon and other managers looked at the sales cycle, they realized that the sales force spent too much time on fulfillment and not enough time designing solutions for clients. They further realized that by spending more time with clients in the early stages of shaping the solution and demonstrating the value add, reps would need to spend less time with the customer after the sale. And customers would be happier, because their new systems would more likely meet their needs from the start.

NEC’s staff wrote a new go-to-market strategy to determine the product offerings, how account executives would approach customers, and what support would be given internally. The plan involved everyone in the company: marketing, a group called “offering development,” sales, product delivery, customer service, human resources, IT, legal, and financial. For the company to succeed, every department’s goals had to be aligned with the overall goals for the organization as well as with the clients’ needs. This wasn’t just a sales force transformation—it was a corporate transformation.

The company’s sales force is divided into two: 80 direct sales account managers, who handle enterprise customers, and 45 channel account managers, who work with NEC Unified Solution’s 800 U.S. resellers. A group of 40 engineers support the direct sales efforts, and another 25 work with the value-added resellers. “We wanted to give our people the tools to do their jobs better and to free up more time for coaching,” Raybon says. For that, NEC Unified Solutions needed a new CRM system.

The Tool That Works

Before NEC Unified Solutions’ systems could help customers, the company’s salespeople needed to track customers better. They needed information that would help them identify opportunities and keep track of how the sales process was progressing. Any new system had to be used throughout the company. The ideal methodology would support the new sales focus, reinforcing it with tools, training, and coaching programs. As the company benchmarked its performance against the best-in-class players in similar industries, management realized that it needed to emphasize coaching more. Rather than try to rework or retrain on the existing CRM system, the company decided to start over with Oracle CRM On Demand.

The company’s previous CRM system was from Oracle’s PeopleSoft, but Raybon says that it wasn’t being used properly. The lesson they learned was that a robust system isn’t enough if it hasn’t been configured so that salespeople use it to drive their business. “It was just enough to get the minimum done to make sure we could forecast the business,” he says. Most salespeople developed their own systems; Raybon jokes that previously, the most frequently used CRM system was Microsoft Office.

Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research, a marketing research company that specializes in marketing software, says that one of the problems with implementing CRM is that the lack of access to solid data means the corporate staff and the salespeople are sometimes on two different pages. “What we’re talking about here is the crossover from an oral to a literary culture,” he says. Although at some point the organization will have to take a leap of faith, the salespeople will go along more willingly if they see that the system design is consistent with the sales goals.

Of course, all CRM installations have the same challenge: convincing the sales force. “There’s no shortage of evidence out there that salespeople are a little hard to fit with technology,” Pombriant says. “They don’t have the time to learn it, but when they invest the time, they see the payoff in happier customers and higher sales.”

Raybon reports that NEC Unified Solution’s adoption was smooth because of close interaction with the sales force. The salespeople wanted an effective CRM system. They knew that their spreadsheets and contact lists weren’t the most powerful way to support their work, and they wanted to participate in developing the Oracle CRM On Demand tools. The software as a service was easy to design and test before NEC Unified Solutions had to commit to any options, because it uses standard architecture and features. Oracle CRM On Demand has a library of different processes that customers can choose from to ensure that they have the right fit for the business without customization.

Some companies force salespeople to use a CRM system if they want to get paid, and Pombriant says that’s a bad idea. “It speaks of desperation on the part of management,” he says. A successful CRM implementation will start by understanding the needs of the salespeople before the investment is made so that the salespeople want to use it.

Pombriant’s research shows that the companies with the most success using CRM analyzed their needs before any vendors came in. “People who are upgrading or changing vendors have no excuse for not doing a needs analysis,” he says.