Why should the SME explore technology to automate sales processes?

To paraphrase Sir John Harvey Jones “business’ don’t fail because they don’t have good products or can’t produce goods quickly. They fail because they don’t sell enough”. The challenge of selling “enough” has become more and more difficult as technology has enabled smaller business’ to compete on a more level playing field with their larger competitors through better routes to market and better access to information. So in general, why should the SME explore technology to automate sales?

Broadly speaking, the sales managers methods of growing sales have evolved as follows

1. Paper based - Historically, in the 1970’s and 80’s the SME addressed the requirement for more and more sales typically by hiring more and more salesmen. Management of sales forces at this time was probably 95% paper based historic call reports. If they filled them in you had a reasonable idea of what had happened, but usually no idea of what was going to happen. These call records were the only way of telling what was happening in your customer base until an order came in. Information was limited, out of date and slowed up business decision making
2. Telesales – phone up for an order regularly. As markets matured and price played more of a part field sales alone became uneconomic. The sheer professionalism required to compete in an industry - any industry – became greater than it had been, which put huge demands on the abilities of the “generic” old fashioned salesman. Therefore salesmen became less effective (as less of them have these skills) and more expensive, either to re train or hire. If you think training sales people is expensive, try keeping them employed and not training or monitoring them. This led to the rise of telesales. Problem was without detailed information on both previous dialogue between Prospect and the selling company and profiling of the Prospects interests and requirements, a constant stream of unfocussed telephone calls soon alienated the Prospect. Just phoning customers was better than not phoning them, but as some competitors became more sophisticated about who they chose to call “just phoning” wasn’t enough. Better information was needed.
3. Database Marketing – Allows you to use better information from software databases kept for profiling which Prospects as well as customers should be called when. A well trained telesales team with the right information to hand can be very cost effective and generate more sales at less cost than an untrained field sales team. It was realized that a single system to give one view of Customer and Prospect profiles made available across the business was a very powerful tool for field sales and internal sales. These are called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Business owners started to realize that having all this information in isolation from other sets of data in the business meant duplication of effort. So how can CRM be linked into everything else? In many cases the sheer proliferation of technology has led to multiple systems in a business that don’t talk to each other.
4. Integrated Business systems – A modern business may have an accounts software package for customer info, Excel spreadsheets for prospects, Outlook contacts databases for each staff member, Access databases, and a simple contact management system, none of which talk to each other, with maybe information having to be typed for quotations and again for sales orders or invoices. A single view of what’s actually going on in sales can be difficult to get. Steam’s Business Builder can manage business activity and be a single view of company wide data including invoices and purchase orders with graphical summary of performance against forecast.

• Waiting for business to come to you doesn’t work because your competitors are doing more than that.
• Field sales staff have to be monitored because they are expensive.
• Database marketing is effective but everyone needs to buy into it as a business process.
• Knowledge is power. Integrated technology systems can link all aspects of your business into single databases that allow you to make better business development decisions more quickly.
• The Internet has revolutionized the ease with which information from many systems can be stored, filtered and automatically summarized. The SME can have access to management information that historically was only available to much larger companies.

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