Executive Thought Leadership

Empowering the Sales Force

Improving the productivity of the sales force with e-sales technology can be challenging. Here, Rick Justice, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at Cisco Systems, provides five “must-have” strategies to meet that challenge successfully.

The Internet is a useful sales channel that provides a very flexible environment to assist with the sales process. And more importantly, it is a powerful tool to boost productivity. The Cisco worldwide operations group recently embarked on an e-sales initiative with the charter to create new Internet-based tools to increase productivity and efficiency as well as improve the sales team’s ability to serve customers.

We developed the e-sales initiative because salespeople must spend a fair amount of time working on noncustomer-facing activities. A salesperson can be mired in numerous manual tasks—researching customer and industry information, tracking bookings, and managing lead times and shipments. Since the information is spread throughout multiple systems, finding and synthesizing the data can take up as much as 20 percent of a salesperson’s time. This is time that could be spent talking with customers, generating new leads, or ensuring customer requirements are being met.

Our e-sales portal, launched in March 2001, is designed to eliminate these manual processes by automatically integrating all the data a salesperson needs and displaying it in one location. While the Internet enables access to large volumes of data, our e-sales portal brings all that information together in one place.

There was tight alignment from the genesis of the initiative. The business lead interviewed with IT management as part of the selection process. Likewise, the IT lead was selected only after he interviewed with global sales leaders. From there, we continued the process of joint selection for key positions on both teams. Second, the business lead has consistently “walked the talk” of partnership, meeting one on one with IT team members to ensure that the business priorities and objectives are understood. From the IT side, we have consistently followed the practice of naming IT partners to all levels of the business lead’s program team, down to the individual program and track lead. Third, the teams created the same goals and associated incentives. Finally, critically important for ongoing partnership, we have a joint business and operations review process for which both teams review each other’s programs quarterly. And we also realize that in order to be successful that the teams must agree on key issues before we finalize and communicate commitments.

Dynamic, Web-based portals such as ours present real-time, business-critical information that enables our sales force to manage their accounts more effectively, thereby enhancing a customer’s experience with Cisco.

E-Sales Tools

The breadth and scope of e-sales tools can greatly vary, depending on an organization’s size, products, and services. The underlying commonality is that e-sales tools offer a tremendous advantage in improving productivity.

These tools include:

• Sales statistics, bookings, and linearity: The account manager’s recent orders, sales results for the week, month, quarter, and fiscal year can be sorted chronologically or geographically. A graphical display of the even spread of bookings over time (linearity) is also available.
• Alerts: Notify account managers of events related to their customers that are captured in other systems. For example, an alert might tell the account manager that a customer has opened a priority case with the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) or that a customer order was shipped.
• News: Pertinent information about customers and competitors, as defined by the account manager, is generated using external news feeds. The latest internal company news headlines are also displayed.

Since our e-sales portal is an ongoing project, it is continuously being tested and updated with new features. It is being rolled out globally in phases. We continue to solicit feedback from our sales force to ensure we are meeting their needs, and we evaluate the latest technologies to determine which will best meet our objectives. One of the most exciting features we plan to incorporate will be the ability to access the portal wirelessly and through voice recognition applications. These services will enable true access to these new e-sales tools “anytime, anywhere.”

The Top 5 “Must Haves”

If your company is thinking about implementing e-sales tools, take the following into consideration:

• Alignment of IT and business teams: Whether you use your internal IT organization or an external resource, it is critical that you act as a team. Both parties must work seamlessly together to ensure the right technologies and systems are being built and that the appropriate benchmarks and measurements are established. A mutually agreed-upon scope and prioritization of goals for the project will enable cross-functional buy in.
• Executive leadership: As with any new company-wide initiative, an Internet strategy must be aligned with corporate goals. Executive leadership must communicate how these new tools will contribute to the bottom line and deliver greater value to the overall organization. Executive direction and buy in will enable the initiative to get through the inevitable hurdles that will occur along the way.
• Data integrity: Ensure the data sources and integrity of the data are clean. Provide incentives for those inputting data (such as new customer leads) to do so with accuracy. Also, take a look at how the various data elements relate to each other. The effectiveness of your e-sales tools will greatly depend on the data that is put into those tools.
• End-user perspective: Spend time with your sales force. Get their input. Consider hiring someone from your sales force to lead the team or have representation on a task force. The old adage, “the customer knows best” applies here, too. In this case, the customer is your sales force.
• Establish quick wins: There is nothing like instant gratification when in the midst of change. The enthusiasm of the team designing and deploying the e-sales tools will need to be constant. Therefore, setting realistic and ongoing goals that focus on priorities will allow them to see the fruits of their labor. For the sales force, it will be important to maintain their desire to use the tools, so immediate return on value is critical. Daily updates can provide this information instantly.

E-sales tools are not just for large enterprises such as Cisco. Small and medium-sized businesses can also benefit from incorporating e-sales tools into their overall selling systems. By learning to integrate new e-sales tools with traditional sales channels and tools, most companies will find that adopting the Internet as a new sales mechanism is initially a challenge, but one that will result in an unquestionable return on investment.