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The Changing Face of Sales Management

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At Sales2.0 and Enterprise2.0 conferences this week in Boston, I’m looking forward to hearing more on the state of the industry, and how enterprises may be changing in the increasing interconnected, transparent, and engaged world that is possible through social Business.

I spent Monday morning at the Sales2.0 conference this year held in parallel with the Enterprise2.0 conference, hoping to learn how sales operations are changing with the rise of collaboration and social software. The event was hosted by Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and Publisher of Selling Power magazine.

Mr. Gschwandtner led an interesting drive through an extensive landscape of online resources particular to salespeople and managers in different parts of the sales engagement process:

It is particularly refreshing to see that the answer isn’t always just LinkedIn.com when it comes to tools and resources online for salespeople. These companies address the many needs of salespeople beyond simply finding contacts.

Michael Dunne, Research VP at analyst firm Gartner, gave a refreshingly deep view into the world of sales automation systems, software designed particularly from the viewpoint of the sales process. He described that while 80% of most effort in enterprises has been to improve contact, account or order management, the sales automation world is much wider:

  • A variety of access modes: laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet
  • Tools for managing sales operations areas and at different levels of granularity: lead distribution, contact management, account management, sales pipeline management
  • Tools to improve sales effectiveness: prospect qualification, content management, Configuation/Pricing/Quote (CPQ), proposal and contracts management, order and inventory management
  • Sales performance management: territory management, quota management, objectives management, sales incentive management
  • And finally, all the monitoring, reporting and analytics features needed to understand trends, growth, and noticeable changes.

I have to consider this view of all the elements of sales automation when I hear all the discussions around Social CRM that is the current hot topic at this week’s event, and online. There rarely seems to be continued debate on what ‘Social CRM’ beyond just managing customer relationships using a new channel of social business software tools. I’ll use industry thoughtleader Paul Greenberg’s definition which tends to be the most accepted:

" Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It is the company's programmatic response to the customer's control of the conversation."

In the view of the full picture of the sales process needs, Social CRM focuses intensely on the lead, contact and account management, and even to particular elements of relationship management like handling requests, calls, finding resources to respond appropriately, and so on. The ‘social’ here particularly expands how many people (possibly anyone in the company) become involved in the process to directly accept customer requests, distribute the lead to the right destination in the sales force, assist with creating the customer response, present the response to the customer, and generally handling the customer experience itself.

What this new concept still leaves behind are the changes that need to happen to how sales managers consider sales performance management issues, qualify prospects, handle CPQ, etc. These also have a need for collaboration so all the parties involved in the sales activity or transaction are aware of what is happening. When the customer comes to ask—which again can still be their sales contact, but with the social world can now also be anyone else in the company—there needs to be a way to find and respond quickly and appropriately to them.

Sales management needs new information on how this collaboration and how sales activity outside their direct sales staff is occurring, while also having insight into the support and services side of the sale. After all, maintenance and service contracts help build and keep cash flow from customer channels, and it is not enough to simply have them sign off on such contracts to hand over to the support department.

So far, Day 1 of the joint Sales2.0 and Enterprise2.0 conferences has been quite informative to the changing nature of the sales processes in organizations. There is a feel that Social CRM will continue to be a hot topic all this week, although I’d particularly like to see how much further beyond the customer relationship this transformation will go.