Solutions that Increase Sales
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Using IT to Increase Sales
by John Krzykowski - August 2009
Believe it or not, businesses evaluate your company during the sales process and you may be eliminated without knowing it before you submit your final proposal. While this seems obvious, most businesses are moving at 100 miles per hour and don't take the time to analyze how they interact with potential customers during the sales process. Companies don't realize IT can help increase sales.
A couple of years ago, I did a consulting project for a client and interviewed several of their customers as well as companies that took their business elsewhere. There was a common theme among all companies - during the sales process they evaluated potential vendors based on the following criteria:
- Response time
- Quality of their response
- Company reputation
- Price
I was surprised how important the first two points were for these companies. But when they explained their reasoning, it made perfect sense. If a vendor takes a long time to get back to us during the sales process, what will it be like when they have a signed contract? Workplace2go experienced this first hand when our company was looking for a telesales firm. We contacted several firms via e-mail and phone. Only 1 firm actually got back to us and it took them over a week. These are telesales firms specializing in sales! It blew our mind. Needless to say we went elsewhere.
What are the common causes for a slow response? The main problems I've encountered are poor communication and no proposal management process.
Let's talk about communication first. The Internet and PDAs (Blackberry, Smart Phones, iPhone) have significantly changed customer expectations. It is rarely acceptable to wait even a day to respond to requests from potential customers. Most businesses expect an initial response from potential suppliers within a few hours. In order to succeed, sales staff need to be armed with tools that enable them to easily get information out to their contact list with a single effort, and to have real-time access to information (contacts, email and data) when they are out of the office. Companies that wait a day or more to acknowledge a potential customer are usually out of the running before the race even starts.
A tool such as Microsoft Exchange will help you stay in the game. Many companies use POP mail which is included as part of their web site plan and is generally viewed as a free service. There is a reason POP e-mail is free – it has many limitations. Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook premium e-mail service is more than just business email— it manages schedules and projects, prioritizes messages, and delegates tasks. Users can access new as well as past e-mail from any computer or a mobile device and can share calendars with other team members to efficiently schedule meetings. You can buy the software and hardware and install it in your building or buy it as a service. The latter method is usually priced per person per month and is typically less than $15 per person/month, with no need for dedicated hardware, expensive software licenses, or specialized IT staff.
If your initial response is quick, the next hurdle is quickly understanding the customer's requirements and providing a quality proposal within a reasonable time frame. Most sales people either use one of their past proposals as a starting point or send out an e-mail to their colleagues requesting a proposal that closely meets the customer's requirements. If a sales person's past proposal is solid, no problem. The problem arises when they send out an e-mail asking a colleague if they have a proposal that meets the requirements. Their colleagues are busy managing their own opportunities/customers and typically don't respond for a day or more. Even if another sales person does respond in a reasonable time frame, it usually takes several e-mails to get the right information. As a result, it takes much longer to produce a quality proposal than it should. If your competitor responded in half the time, guess who'll win.
Implementing the following processes/tools will help you always start off with your ‘best foot forward.’
- Typically a handful of proposals cover 80% or more of your sales opportunities. Track success rates for your proposals and identify the most successful proposals.
- Educate your sales people on your “proposal” library explaining when each proposal is appropriate.
- Store the proposals on a secure Intranet (click on the following link if you aren’t familiar with Intranets - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intranets) so you’re sales people can access these documents whether they are in the office, at home or on the road. Using e-mail as a proposal distribution mechanism is not effective for the reasons described above.
- Intranets give your sales team easy access to the proposal they need and quickly get it to your potential customer.
- You can buy the software and hardware to implement an Intranet (which takes weeks or months) or you can buy it as a service and be up and running within a day or two. Intranets sold as a service are typically less than $50/month. Web Ex's WebOffice, Microsoft's SharePoint and SMBLive (SharePoint on steroids) are three services I've used in the past.
If you have an alternative process that works well, please send me an email. I'm always interested in hearing about new ideas.