Management, July 2000
Professional
salespeople are driven by challenge, success and reward. In order to
continually achieve results they need to understand their customers
and be highly skilled communicators. Manager working with sales people
should be clear about their visions, treat staff as individuals, and
learn the skills needed to help the team drive top revenues.
Traditional ideas involving motivation, solution selling, and presentation skill still make for success in selling. Customer relationship management (CRM) has become the norm and means far more than just contact management for a call centre. The latest buzzwords to help sales teams are sales force automation (SFA), which put simply means putting the best practices of selling into a software package. The ultimate goal of SFA is to attract and retain profitable customers. More and more companies are finding that CRM software brings together sales and marketing strategies and provides a competitive edge.
AMR Research estimates that the size of the CRM market will continue to grow, increasing 10-fold, from US $762 million in license revenues in 1997 to more than US $7.5 billion in 2002. Of that AMR says that SFA is the fastest growing segment of this market with an annual growth rate of 64 percent.
In New Zealand CRM vendors such as Marketing Technologies are seeing an increasing demand for its software. "As companies recognise that rising customer expectations and a global marketplace require delivery of consistently excellent one-to-one sales, service and support they turn to packages like Brains," says managing director Andrew Segar.
Auckland-based U-Bix Document Solutions lacked a centralised database to manage its customer information. Instead individual account manager held information on paper and in their heads. As a result multiple relationships between account managers and customers often ended up crossed.
For U-Bix the implementation of Brains has seen a number of benefits. "Sales forecast management has improved, new and prospective customers are captured in the centralised database, Brains' telemarketing functionality has allowed major improvements in customer service, and a significant increase in customer satisfaction has been recorded," says Segar.