Collaboration: The Impossible Dream Made Possible

By Dale Wolf

There is a reason many sales managers are losing their hair. 

Anyone sales manager working in a manufacturing company with more than $100,000, and certainly those with more than $1 million in revenue knows firsthand the pain of getting an order through the internal barriers. It is hard enough to go out and land a prospect who wants to buy what you are selling. But then to run smack into bidding, estimating, quoting and contracting roadblocks, well, it's enough to make you want to pull your hair out.

Where's the breakdown?

Usually it is harmless looking ... just fellow employees each trying to do their part of the job of moving a sale through the organization. Individually, not so bad. But collectively. That's where we fall apart. And it is happening in one manufacturer after another.

Take these stats from Aberdeen. Increasing top line revenue is the highest rated task creating management pressure. No. 2, right behind growth, is improving sales productivity. That's where the rub begins. Sales productivity is the inhibitor of improving top line revenue.

It feels a lot like working in a Chinese fireworks assembly line.

Solution Paths?

Get out of the fireworks by improving team collaboration. Specifically improve the sales rep's knowledge of how to get a sale through the organization effectively. Most engineers at build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers believe that product complexity is not the primary barrier to customization. They cite lack of knowledge of options by the customer (67 percent) and the field
(44 percent) as the primary barrier to product customization efforts. This is according to a research report by Cincom.

Jim Wilson, sales and product configurator guru at Cincom Systems:   "The implication is that the knowledge required to sell customized productsis not being effectively transferred to the field and customer. This is not surprising given the lack of strategic investment in front-office processes and systems."

Relieving the Pressure

Lean front-office requires channel collaboration management between people: specifically those responsible for selling and delivering your products to customers. In a time of competitive challenge, responsiveness and speed are the underpinning to winning business. Channel collaboration management is essential!

 

Streamline people-driven business processes -- Improved communication and coordination in people-driven processes means more rigorous execution in traditionally hard-to-reach parts of the business.

• Deploy standard portal templates to improve common people-driven processes.
• Drive process variation out of your business with consistent workflow.
• Create collaborative applications using integrated application development capabilities.

Create, capture, and share community knowledge -- Sharing best practices across expert teams drives awareness and adoption of business process innovation.

• Broadcast information with blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
• Capture community knowledge with wikis.
• Encourage dialogue with surveys and discussions.

Improve team productivity -- High performing teams are a key to better business results.

• Coordinate teamwork with shared calendars, alerts and notifications.
• Communicate with team members in context using presence and instant messaging.
• Make it easy to include and work with team members from outside the organization.

Poster -- 25 habits that enable you to win the complex sale

Cincom recognizes that it takes more than technology for manufacturers of complex products to win more sales. Everything we do is focused on helping you become more successful - from a resource library of whitepapers, to Webinars and other useful documents that address how to sell more effectively. Our newest addition to this resource library is a poster that summarizes the "25 Habits of Highly Successful Sales People."

 

"As always, in the case of IT initiative, if you haven't got them linked to the business goals you don't have anything, really, that's of any value to the organization. We need to take our specific initiatives for any given year and link actions to those strategies such as expanding in our sales channel. We have 200 rep firms around the country and around the world. Clearly the use of our field-to-factory direct order entry capability is focused around channel penetration, being more responsive to our customer. In fact, our motto is "we want to be the easiest supplier to do business with."

 

Best in Class companies utilize a range of strategies to ensure that sales reps have quick and easy access to the information they need to sell more effectively. 48% of firms indicate that improving rep's knowledge of products, customer needs and competitive offerings is a key to relieving the pressure and to grow top line revenue.

Nine Integrated Channel Collaboration Management Functions:

Opportunity Management

Product & Service Management

Organization Management

Business Rules Module

Integration & Automation

Reporting and Analytics

Workflow Management

Forms Management

Portal Administration   

Clear the barriers with intensive support of internal collaboration and the pressure for effective selling will melt away.

Photo Credits:

Man Pulling Hair: See kevstaku's photos

VW Breakdown: See Igor Alecsander's photos

Chinese Fireworks: See Igor Alecsander's photos

Relieving Pressure: See more of { Ana }'s photos