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?
