Saturday, May 21, 2011

Efficient Product Configuration and Pricing Tools and Processes

They are key for every efficient Sales Force. The less people you need to involve in a Sales Cycle the smoother the sales cycle can be. Sales Reps should be able to use Product Configuration and quoting tools without reading a 50 page document or going to a 5 day training class. If your environment requires additional teams to handle a product configuration or a quote you have room for improvement.  Let's take it step by step. Before a Sales Rep ever gets into the situation where they have to use these tools they have to know the products they are selling. Therefore the focus for every company will be to train their sales force about their own product offering first. In some cases the product offering can become very complex (e.g. cars, computers) and so it would be challenging for even the best sales reps to memorize all the rules (e.g. sun roofs are only offered with cars above a certain $ value and in certain geographic areas). In addition to that almost all products become more customizable and hence the need for a configuration tool is only increasing going forward.
The (configuration) rules are continually changing and you want your sales force to foster good relationships with your customers and NOT to memorize all the rules because the sales objective is to increase the face-to-face time of your sales force with your customers. For e-Commerce this is obviously different. We'll address this in a future post.
Which sales tools (e.g. Salesforce.com, Siebel)  you use is less important than the company culture and the support your sales operations team can provide.
If the Sales Support/Operations team is doing their job well it can open new exciting opportunities (for cross and upsell) for your Sales Force.
What does your Sales Team need to proactively address more customer needs/questions?
What is your sales cycle? How long does it usually take to prepare a quote in your industry? Are you selling online or do you meet your customers face-to-face? Do you use predominantly standard pricing or customer specific pricing? In any case you want to offer your customers as many possible value enhancing solutions as possible w/o becoming annoying. That is where the value of the Product Configuration and quoting tools can support your sales team. You want to guide your Sales Reps by giving them a powerful configuration and quote tool.  If they never know about additional options they can't sell them.
Tools are important and there are a number of good tools out there. Nevertheless I think the company culture is more important than any specific tool.
What tools do you use? How is that working for you?

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Focus on your tasks!

There are many things to look out for to have a successful and gratifying business career. If we compare a business career to a game then your education (and relationships!) is the key to let you play the game and to start the game at a certain level (which in turn will decide, in most cases, where you will end up in your career).
Once you have the education and you're in a job you are ready to play the game but now it's a different game. It is different because now you don't want to get in now you want to get up or you want to have more freedom to make decisions or you want to be noticed or you want to be liked etc.
If you focus too much on what others do, how they do it and why they get what they get instead of focusing on your team and/or work tasks you have a good chance that you won't achieve anything. It is good and smart to learn what your leaders want and how they want to get things done but you don't let that interfere with the tasks you're working on. How do you work with your teams if you are a leader yourself? 
When you have a task (e.g. improve the sales order turn-around-time from x hours to y hours) then you don't need to worry about Team ABC that works on Sales Compensation. If you question why that team has more budget, why some of their team members get promoted while you can't promote anyone or you don't get promoted yourself you focus on the wrong things! You have to focus on your task (improve the sales order turn around time). Learn how you can do it. Who can help you to do it? Communicate and network with the key players in that area and make sure that they understand what your team/you are doing to achieve that goal. An attitude that shows you want to reach that goal (with your team) without putting your team/yourself in the middle of the stage will help. Put all your effort into this and get the task done!
Notice that in every sport (e.g. basketball, soccer) the players are focused on the game! Yes, there are interesting things happening all around them. There may be thousand distractions but they are there to play their sport! Take the current NBA Playoffs, most players are pretty young and they manage NOT to be distracted. This is what makes them successful! They focus on what counts when it counts. Do the same thing for yourself in your job and focus on your tasks!

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Challenge yourself!

As long as you feel very comfortable with the tasks that you do you don't grow. If you want to grow you have to challenge yourself. You should feel uncomfortable with new tasks on a regular basis because otherwise you've been there, done that. While it feels good to be comfortable with a certain task it doesn't help you to grow.  There are many routine tasks that everyone needs to master in every job and they are good to build confidence but if you want to grow you have to leave this path on a regular basis.
In today's and tomorrow's workplace you have to keep learning/growing and if you want to have a successful career you have to do that while you are working on your relationship skills.
What do I mean by "feeling uncomfortable"? I mean for example that somebody might assign you a task that you feel is too much. You might think you can't do that but instead of looking for excuses or other ways to get out of it you actually sit down think about how you can approach the task. Who in your network can help you? How can they help you? What sources can you use to come up to speed? Don't accept a "no" from yourself. To make this work you have to be honest with yourself. For example if you know how to write a Software Program and somebody wants you to build a rocket you are in over your head. In this case the challenge is unrealistic! You should know yourself well enough to prevent these unrealistic to prevent unnecessary frustration. Now if somebody asks you, as a Software Programmer, to improve the performance of a critical program that somebody else has written in 2 weeks. Now that might be difficult, you might not have done that before but this is in your area of knowledge. All you need to be successful is determination and perseverance. Maybe you need others to help. The goal is to make it work and be responsible for it. No, you can't do everything yourself but you can be responsible for making it work. Take on this responsibility and grow. Don't wait for these tasks to be assigned to you. Look for them! Make sure you always have something that gives you an opportunity to grow.
You will gain much more self-confidence from these tasks than you get from the routine tasks you do today. The challenges of today are the routines of tomorrow.