Complex Selling Made Effective

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

Why Managing Contracts Is Essential In Channel Management

With so much pressure on marketing departments to generate positive returns on the investments they make in channel marketing and channel programs, getting the most out of managing contracts often gets forgotten about.  There is no clear return on investment calculation for contract management, and as a result it gets ignored.

Yet contract management needs to be the basis of any multichannel management strategy today. It’s not enough to just rely on the outbound marketing strategies anymore; looking instead at how to better use pricing discounts, arbitrate on pricing strategies, and how to better manage resellers to performance levels and goals all can be tied to the better use of contract management.

Looking at how Cisco was able to capitalize on putting contract management at the core of their channel management strategies is a case in point.  Instead of allowing pricing discounts and opportunities for cost savings to expire, Cisco has create an enterprise-wide contract management system that is now core to their multichannel management strategies.  Their ability to manage pricing, analyze contracts down to the clause level and also increase the profitability of their channel partners and in so doing add to their own is evident in the latest fiscal year figures reported.  An astounding $4.8B backlog and 7% revenue growth illustrates how critical managing contracts with their many channel partners. 

An Emerging Contract Management Maturity Model

The majority of companies rely on intensive contract management systems to manage their procurement and supply chain contracts, yet this same level of concentration and intensity needed for sell-side contracts as well.  From several companies in the discrete manufacturing, high-tech, and process goods industries relying on contract management in their sell-side and multichannel management operations, the following maturity model has emerged from the companies spoken with:

Level 1: Stand-Alone and Siloed.  The majority of these companies use sell-side contract management only for managing pricing exceptions and as a database for re-evaluating selling contracts.  These databases often reside in Microsoft Access databases and also in Microsoft Excel.  As a result, there is often a lag in terms of the accuracy of the data that leads to lost profit opportunities as well.  From the research, approximately 70 – 80% of the companies researched are in this category.  There are major opportunities for increasing contract management performance in multichannel management strategies.

Level 2: Minimal Integration leads to Margin Loss.  This is the middle ground of the contract management maturity model, and is populated by companies who have integrated their sell-side contract management systems with sales operations, Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), and in the case of distribution-based businesses, their pricing and forecasting systems.  On average these systems have two to four system integrations, most often through internally developed adapters or connectors their IT departments have created.  Companies in this level of the maturity model have the ability to forecast and plan out the impact of taking discounts across their reseller base, create specific programs to help resellers get to their specific performance goals. 

Level 3: Contract Management Platform. In companies including Cisco, Ingram Micro, Intel, GE, Microsoft and others, channel contracts are managed more as part of the broader Master Data Management (MDM) strategy, which are what SAP customers commonly use for managing their Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) contracts. Forward-thinking companies spoken with during a series of sales calls on sell-side contract management want to move their dealer and distributor contracts into their SAP MDM warehouses as well.  Companies who have done this are capable of managing their multiple channels more profitably because the contracts can be accessed and used by anyone completing a marketing plan or evaluating a new marketing strategy.

Bottom Line: Instead of filling up filing cabinet with contracts, get them automated so they can be used for better managing your resellers and creating incentives for your channels to seller higher margin, more profitable products.