BRIAN: "Is it fair to say that rest of your organization really has no visibility to what is going on with you and prospect/customer either?" JIM: "Pretty much. I sent in a report monthly of my activity to my boss, but that is about it."

BRIAN: "How about any financial information? Do you have access to any of that?" JIM: "Quarterly we get a spreadsheet from corporate. I compare my personal spreadsheet to theirs just to make sure that my commission is right."

Perhaps some of you can relate to this situation. It is not that uncommon, but more and more companies are realizing benefits of moving towards being a customer centric organization through a CRM initiative.

I went on to begin to paint a different picture for Jim about how his life could be made a lot easier and how he could be more productive with his time. Below are just 4 ways that integrating department silos, and disparate applications and data could improve a salesperson's life. I could expand and share a similar list about each end user of a CRM system, but I think that you can probably draw some conclusions on your own about how integrating information would help Sales Managers, Customer Service Personnel, Technical Support representatives, and Accounts Receivable specialists.

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1. What if you could turn a quote into an order with push of a button, and have it automatically inserted into your ERP/Financial system? Wouldn't that cut down on time and errors spent entering orders in two systems?

2. What if you had visibility about all open tech support or other customer service issues that your customer had called about, and you were able to proactively contact them, instead of being blindsided when you are trying to sell them additional products or services? Do you think they might be impressed with your level of service and attentiveness? Do you think that your unsolicited follow up might communicate to them that even when things go wrong, you are truly interested in helping them?

3. What if you had access to see how much a customer had spent over past year, products they had purchased, and whether they were on time with their payments? Do you think this might give you increased visibility to who your most valuable customers are? Do you think it might help prioritze who you should be calling on?

4. What if you could sort your customers easily by product line, and easily market to them with complimentary products and services that you offer? Do you think it might help enhance collaboration between Sales and Marketing departments in cross selling efforts? ****************************************

"An effective CRM implementation will have to be able to account for an entire spectrum of customer-based systems and how they interact with customers themselves. This is likely to include conventional personal interactions, paper-based transactions, Web site browsing, e-commerce, telephone contact or voice/data interaction via wireless technology. Organizations must be able to manage and maintain these multiple points of interaction to say they have an effective CRM system." says Charles Saunders in September 24, 2001 edition of EAI Journal.

Outlook can be effective for managing your day to day tasks. But how much time is spent on phone, through email, looking at 4 different spreadsheets to gather fragmented, out of date information? No wonder so many people are frustrated.

To learn more about how Initium Technology can help integrate your applications, data, and information silos into an efficient customer relationship system, please call us at 1-800-250-5732, or visit our website http://www.initiumtech.com/rfi.htm

Have a wonderful Valentine's Day and President's Day weekend! Be sure and take time to express your love to special people in your life!

Kind regards,

Brian Vellmure Initium Technology bvellmure@initiumtech.com

Copyright 2003 Initium, LLC. All Rights Reserved

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How compensation is done: For this project to be successful and actually pay for itself, sales applicant needs to be hired under very specific financial conditions. They need to be hired on a draw + commission. This means that they get a low amount of money weekly for a certain period of time and if they do well, they should be producing enough sales to repay their draw and start making money quickly, for themselves as well as company. How this is worked out is key to success of project. If this is not worked out correctly, sales people will either not start, not produce and stay too long and drain company or quit before their training is effectively completed.

The mastery of conversation: A successful sales person requires one skill above all others. This is ability to guide and control a conversation. If he or she can guide and control a conversation, it is then possible to continue to try to interest customer and be successful at it.

For a salesperson to do this one action well, an in-depth 3-day training on basics of conversation and how to guide and control a conversation, is vital. Communication between people (conversation) have very certain and definite laws, which if followed, puts a sales person in total control of a conversation without making other person feel like they are being controlled!

Drilling sales patter: After sales applicants have successfully mastered art of controlling a conversation, they now need to be drilled on successful sales patter. If a full day is devoted to drilling them on this and they are drilled to a point where they easily and smoothly deliver their patter, without referring to notes or becoming tongue-tied or embarrassed, then and only then, will they be ready for next step.

Get them out selling: After above steps are completed and your sales people are ready to ‘hit streets’, they should be divided up into groups of 3 to 5 people with one of them being sales manager of group. They are then sent out to find customers and deliver their pitches (sales patter).

This should be done in such a way that there is not great pressure on sales people for first few days. Tell them to go out and practice on any customer they find. The objective is to get them comfortable delivering their patter.

They are given realistic targets to achieve and when they flub and do not get results, they are corrected and sent back out by person that is overall in charge of this project.

Failures: Not all will make it through this line-up. Correct them as much as possible and if they cannot make it, turn them loose and concentrate on others that are making it. As sales manager you also need to work on starting new groups through process. Continue these steps until you have all sales people you need to really boost company sales.

Personnel: The number of sales force trainers required to train company sales manager on this procedure and help him build his sales force is only 2 people. They will need to work in company for 30 days. One of these would be person overall in charge of project. He or she creates sales advertisements, get people in, does tests on them, interviews them and decide which ones to hire. This person also does corrections. The assistant does conversation-control training; successful sales patter drilling and help lead trainer with corrections of sales teams.

Summary: An effective sale teams can be built that pays its own way, enhances company sales and increases value of any business. The key to it all is having a hiring method and training program for sales people that follows exact laws involved in guiding and controlling a conversation.