Move Move It, Move your CRM from Desktop to Mobile

Dears,


I will admit it: I was a smart phone late adopter. Part of it was that, as a IT Consultant, I had spent years – literally – on the phone; it’s still perhaps the consultant’s greatest tool. I was a later adopter than most salespeople. Most of the sales people I know loved their smart phones (iPhone/BB/Androids) much as I loathed it – for them, calls meant money. It’s come to be that they can’t be away from the phone, so their mobile phones are now permanent fixtures. And, living in Different Metros, a lot of these sales pros are also gadget guys and girls. That meant they liked trying out devices, and just as no one platform owns the market, no one device captured the hearts of everyone in sales.

So, here’s what you have: a workforce that is required to use CRM as part of its job, and is also required to use mobile devices. The only question I have is this: Why isn’t mobile CRM ubiquitous yet?

In this case, I think, it’s partly the fault of CRM vendors. For years, mobility has been seen as an extra, and add-on, an option – but the way people work now demands it become a standard feature. If you’re paying for a CRM application, you shouldn’t also be paying for mobile CRM. Think about seat belts in cars – they were options you had to ask for and pay an additional fee to get until the early 1960s, when they became standard – but today most of us use them readily. Think about how absurd and out of touch car-makers would seem if they still treated seat belts as an option?

But some CRM vendors still treat mobile that way and ask users to pay extra for the right to work the way they want to work. That’s radically counterproductive: it discourages adoption, forces sales people to work the way the CRM system dictates, and keeps critical information out of the field when it might be at its most useful.

Yes, developing mobile applications for the many platforms that are being carried around is a hassle – but it’s been done, at least for major platforms, and browser-based versions can fill in the blanks nicely (and can fill in unforeseen holes in support for emerging platforms until dedicated solutions are developed).

So why is mobile CRM at this point, this far into the mobile revolution, still such an under-utilized technology? I think what’s happened is akin to the friction that developed between on-premise and on-demand software – especially within vendors that sold versions of software with different delivery models. The fear that the new model will cannibalize an existing profit stream is great enough to distort reality for some vendors, to the point where they actually make it difficult for their customers to progress and evolve the way they do business. In other words, these vendors equate maintaining profits with restraining their customers – and, since customers have options, it’s a dumb idea. Mobile is a way to make money, and changing that model is anathema to many vendors until the market forces them to change.

A smarter approach is to look at the world as it is and adapt to the realities that CRM users are working under today. Mobile CRM is not an option – it’s the extension of CRM to the platforms people use for data management. It puts CRM in front of the salesperson, no matter where he or she is. It gives sales pros access to data when they need it and allows them to update CRM records as they receive information instead of later after they’ve returned to the office or hotel. Why should this be considered “optional?”

There were more handheld devices shipped in the first quarter of 2011 than laptop and desktop PCs, and while not all of them were sold to the business market the writing is neatly printed on the wall. If you lack the ability to deliver CRM to your employees’ handheld devices, you’re depriving them of critical data when they need it and in the format in which they want to work. You’re also depriving yourself of an adoption tool and, as a result, an improved view of sales operations. These are pretty basic things when you think about it, and you owe it to yourself to investigate vendors who want to help you embrace the technology instead of holding you at arm’s length until you pay for it.

In the last few months its eye opener to CRM evangelist likes me to understand and appreciate the need of a mobile crm. Specially the benefits it provides to the field sales and field service professional is amazing and that to certain Industries like Healthcare, Retail Mobile Sales, Various System Maintenance and repair professional this is definitely a tool that would make their life and profession lot more easier.


Loving P&C


DC*

Rewarding Right with Incentive Compensation Management

Dears,


As the global economy emerges from its three-year slumber, pressure builds for companies everywhere to reinvigorate their growth-generating engines. The most critical component of that engine is the sales force. The despite its importance, the sales function in many companies is not excelling, for two significant reasons: insufficient employee awareness of corporate sales strategy, and basic shortcomings in the behaviors and capabilities of salespeople

Todays Challenge
Some companies have attempted to address these shortcomings by creating a pay-for-performance culture shifting more of what they pay people from fixed to variable compensation in the hope that money will provide sufficient motivation. Yet in doing so, many have confronted a cold reality. The process and technologies on which they have long relied to devise incentive compensation plans are woefully inadequate to meet today’s unpredictable business environment. Changing customer demands require more agile sales strategies and far more flexible incentive management programs. While companies expect to use variable and incentive compensation to motivate the Sales force, the shortcomings of their current capabilities for managing incentives often compel them to take overly reactive measures.

Incentive management also is a pain point in many companies. We have found many organizations suffer from key shortcomings that make it difficult to more effectively influence sales force behaviors. At the most basic level, incentive compensation administration is cumbersome and error-prone because most companies rely on inadequate homegrown technology applications or elaborate multilayer spreadsheets. Besides being hard to adapt when market conditions change or product lines evolve, these systems often result in higher administrative costs, decreased productivity and lost sales force confidence in the overall incentive compensation process.

Consider, for example, the complex implications for compensation when sales territories are realigned or sales positions are changed mid pay period. Such changes require the enterprise to track and calculate accurate incentives for both former and new staff assignments not only tracking direct sales credit but also accounting for multiple shared credit assignments. Clearly, the administrative challenge for such legacy-constrained enterprises is immense and often results in overpayment of compensation.From a behavioral perspective, sales participants often drop the ball when making the transition to new assignments. Introducing transition bonuses often is impossible or, at best, quite difficult and costly. As a result, companies generally wait out changes until it is convenient to change the compensation system, which grossly reduces the company’s ability to adapt to market changes.Furthermore, such legacy applications often limit companies from launching new incentive plans and measures in many cases, imposing lead times of three to six months and significant direct technology costs to implement incentive plan changes. Often companies decide the prospective IT expense cannot be supported, thereby delaying the rollout of new market-competitive plans and further burdening an already manually intensive process (with all its attendant risks and potential for error).

Making matters worse is the lack of attention that incentive management receives from senior executives. We conjecture that if executives were asked to name the top 10 capabilities most critical to fund in order to improve sales performance incentive management would consistently come out at number 11 or 12 on the list. At the operational level, the typical large organization has, at most, 10 to 14 people administering incentive compensation. Because senior executives tend to view improving the administration of incentive compensation as simply an exercise in operational effectiveness, the corporate gains of increased efficiency for 10 people will probably not generate sufficient excitement. If executives expanded their view of incentive management as a key strategic tool, they would acknowledge the implications of ineffective incentive management to extend far beyond negligible productivity concerns with a dozen employees.

A New Approach to Incentive Management

Improving the incentive management process is critical to a company’s ability to meet target sales objectives. There are two distinct approaches to improvement, each with its attendant benefits.

The most basic approach, and the one that companies most often embrace, involves focusing strictly on upgrading the technology used to administer incentive compensation programs. Certainly, this is a step in the right direction. By refreshing the technology, a company can relieve some of the administrative burden and subsequently reduce compensation cycle times, improve compensation accuracy and cut administrative costs.

However, in our experience, companies can realize much larger and more strategic benefits by approaching incentive management improvement opportunities with a holistic perspective and featuring next-generation incentive management technology solutions as central components of business process-led programs. More than simply involving a technology upgrade, such an approach addresses the deeper need to more closely align sales force behavior with sales and corporate strategy and, consequently, improve revenue while reducing incentive compensation management administration costs.

This approach views the incentive management process as comprising four principal elements:

o Plan design, which covers such issues as sales planning; compensation budgeting; objectives, quota and territory management; incentives design; and integration with total rewards.

o Plan set-up and administration, which includes plan modeling; business rules definition; plan creation and changes; hierarchy and participant management; and sales plan communication.

o Incentive compensation processing, which involves data gathering and validation; sales credit assignment; compensation calculation and payment; research and inquiry management; and adjustment processing.

o Reporting and analysis, which covers query, reporting and analytics; earnings estimation; plan diagnostics; and audit trails.

Today, compensation professionals spend an overwhelming majority of their time on setup, administration, adjustment processing and reconciliation. By creating a more effective incentive compensation process, a company can free up these individuals to focus on the more value-added activities of design, modeling, forecasting and analysis. Next-generation incentive compensation management software provides tools to further support those value-added activities, thus transforming incentive management from a primarily administrative task to a more strategic activity with a much broader and more significant impact on overall corporate performance. In short, this approach replaces a company’s inefficient and ineffective incentive compensation management legacy application and processes with an optimized incentive management capability that encourages more appropriate sales force behavior.

Benefits of Improved Incentive Management

The biggest benefit of this optimized capability is the tangible integration of the sales planning and incentive compensation management functions, enabling changes in corporate and sales strategy to rapidly travel through the sales compensation plan and the plans mechanics, and directly reflect in an individual salesperson’s results and paycheck. Why is this important? In many industries, salespeople often are not fully aware of their company’s current sales strategy. They also typically do not understand how this strategy determines their compensation plan (although it virtually always does) and, ultimately, what they actually earn. From their perspective, the incentive compensation process often appears to be a black box. While improved sales force automation capabilities have improved their awareness of recorded sales credits and deal mechanics at the point of booking, the rationale behind the accounting for their ultimate compensation number is a mystery. An optimized incentive management capability delivers frequent and detailed reporting, self-service tools and access to detailed compensation information, with full traceability from strategy to plan to deal transaction(s) and paycheck. As a result, sales participants become better informed of their individual role in delivery to the sales strategy.

One example of this type of self-service enablement is an online earnings estimation capability. Using such a tool, a salesperson can model what his or her financial reward would be depending on how a deal is structured. Reliable, detailed and frequent Web-based reports help salespeople keep up to date on their quotas and other performance goals. And self-service tools currently delivered through next-generation software solutions enable salespeople to more directly manage inquiries and adjustments on their own, resulting in a more timely resolution because they get the right information when and where they need it. Improved sales force confidence results in reduced shadow accounting time salespeople spend independently reconciling sales payouts and maintaining their own mini-compensation systems.

Loving P&C
DC*

MDM Real Time - Think Globally and Act Locally

Dears,

Organizations are now talking about how MDM can improve business activities by linking together disparate data. This ‘think globally, act locally’ approach is translating MDM-related initiatives into significant business benefits; including better customer care, cross-selling and up selling, and more effective business decisions and processes. By now we all know about master data management (MDM) systems and how they can bring about stunning business results. We've heard how they generate and maintain an enterprise-wide "system of record" that contains the consistent, reliable information necessary to perform vital business functions across a large organization. And, we've heard how implementing a strong MDM strategy can increase revenue and profits, improve customer service, reduce time to market, enhance regulatory compliance, and simplify reporting and business intelligence.

While these potential business results are intriguing, exactly how are businesses achieving them? What examples demonstrate how MDM deployments are transforming how businesses manage data?What follows are real-world examples of how organizations in the consumer products, financial services, hospitality, retail and technology industries are using MDM solutions to manage their most important data while adding to the company bottom line.

Increasing Customer Recognition and Loyalty

In the hotel business, guests aren't just the bread and butter, they are everything. So, when an international hotel company with more than $500 million in annual revenues and approximately 15 million annual customers realized it didn't know enough about its guests, the company got serious about customer data.

Although it used multiple systems to track guests, the company was only able to follow those enrolled in its loyalty program -- about 10 percent of its customer base. This meant the company was potentially under-servicing 70 percent of frequent guests who did not have a loyalty program number. With mountains of complicated data from multiple systems, representing 5,000 global properties across eight brands, getting a handle on the data was a daunting task.
The company chose an MDM system that could easily aggregate complex customer data without disrupting source systems, and seamlessly integrate with its loyalty program system. Once the MDM system was deployed, it was no longer a problem to identify frequent guests, even if they registered under different identities (variations on names and addresses without a consistent identifier), did not use their loyalty program number, or stayed at a number of the company's brands for a variety of reasons. By accurately matching guest information according to demographic and historical information, the company was now able to recognize guests, across all brands in its portfolio in real-time at the point of service.

Improving Customer Experience and Top-Line Growth

A massive retailer with a huge online presence and hundreds of brick and mortar stores knew that, even with annual revenues of more than $3 billion, it still had work to do to improve its numbers. So, the retailer began a strategic initiative designed to dramatically improve the customer shopping experience, with the ultimate goal of improving top-line growth.

Plagued by redundant records and an inability to properly recognize customers at any touch point, the company knew it was essential to get a grip on customer data to help it interact with customers in a more meaningful way. With its new MDM system in place, the retailer has created an accurate, real-time view of its approximately 40 million customer records from three disparate data sources. They can now recognize individual and household relationships, and have identified more than 11 million redundant records.

The retailer can now provide a complete view of transaction and customer history at the point of interaction, fulfill online orders at physical stores, better reconcile customer preferences, eliminate duplicate and inconsistent marketing campaigns, and remove the need to repeatedly ask customer loyalty program members for their personal information.

Understanding Customer Relationships and Improving Revenue and Service

When one of the world's largest technology companies decided that it needed to completely reform its global data infrastructure, an MDM system was the only way for it to achieve its goals.The company was losing significant revenue due to incomplete software licensing information and territory assignment issues. The company needed to access composite views of all individual and organization data about customers, partners and suppliers along with advanced business-to-business (B2B) hierarchy management. An MDM system that could create a single view of customer and hierarchical data would help the organization to address its licensing problems and operational inefficiencies, define the true and total value of every customer, identify the most valuable customers within an organization, and even know when a customer purchased through multiple channels.The end results? Enormous. By properly managing organizational-level data, the company has found $139 million in new licensing revenue and recouped $47 million in operational cost savings. The MDM solution also helped improve field productivity since sales reps now can access synchronized data from across the entire organization (CRM, software licensing and financial accounting applications) and gain a better picture of existing relationships and potential for cross- and up sell opportunities. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you are a retailer or a financial services company, business goals are the same: to better understand customers while improving the bottom line. With an MDM solution in place, it turns out that these two goals do not have to be mutually exclusive. Knowing your customers is the key.

The power of MDM derives from its ability to manage data across a company's entire information infrastructure. However, many companies lack the means or resolve to implement MDM at once across all applications, data sources, and physical locations in their enterprise. For these organizations, a phased approach is more cost effective. And for a good many of these companies, the first launching point for MDM should be the realm of customer service. Businesses that successfully implement a customer-centric MDM solution in one area of the company can then move on to other areas as business requirements demand, giving them the intelligence they need to improve business processes, build revenues, and increase competitiveness in the years ahead.


Loving P&C
DC*

Beyond Core CRM

Dears,

The major capabilities provided by core CRM systems are contact management, opportunity management, marketing collateral management, task management, forecasting and more frequently, we are seeing some type of lead management included as well. Many companies go into these types of initiatives expecting that once they get their core system installed, their CRM journey is done. But in the majority of the cases, this is just the beginning of the journey.There are four major areas of technology being implemented by firms over and above the capabilities provided via their core CRM application. These included:

o Sales Collaboration:

Most common are tools such as SharePoint,WebEx, GoToMeeting, Live Meeting, Convoq, etc., that allow sales and marketing to more effectively communicate with customers via webinars, or that support collaboration between sales teams, or sales and other functional areas in the company via Web-based meetings or chat sessions.

o Lead Management:

Systems like Eloqua, Chordiant, SPSS, Unica, Vtrenz, Manticore, etc., that help sales and marketing teams implement direct and Web-based marketing campaigns, and then track and assess the results of those programs.

o Sales Knowledge Management:

Applications such as Pragmatech, Involve Technology, MobilePoint, Savo, Sant, etc., that help salespeople easily access the sales support tools they need (data sheets, presentations, sales best practices, etc.) to help them sell more effectively.

o Incentive Management:

Programs like Centive Systems, Exactly, Callidus, etc., that help sales managers implement the sales compensations programs they have designed to hopefully direct the behavior of their sales teams to sell the right things, the right way, while also allowing reps to easily track how much they are getting paid on each deal.

We now begin to see that CRM is not â one-stop shopping. Your core CRM system provides a solid technological foundation for helping to improve sales rep efficiency and effectiveness, but other add-ons are needed to create a complete suite of capabilities that reps need to address all the challenges they face.

Based on the research,findings are that while three out of 10 firms reported that they have no plans for additional enhancements or add-ons to their core CRM application, seven out of 10 do plan to expand their CRM platform during the coming year. And in addition to the capabilities previously mentioned, we find some new functionality generating CRM project team interest.Lets see some of these capabilities.

CRM and Sales Process Integration:

CRM and Sales Process Integration is one of the Key features in addition to the capability that is available within the Core CRM system we have no vendors provide point solution for the Sales Process Integration.
Sales Management Analytics:

Now that reps are leveraging CRM systems more often in their daily work flow, a significant amount of data is being entered into these systems. Companies are realizing that there is gold to be mined in those databases. This is sparking a growing interest in sales management analytic capabilities. This is a core CRM area in which vendors are making improvements, but we are also seeing robust applications emerging from companies like SPSS, SAS, ShadeTree Technologies, etc., to meet this market need.

Data Cleansing:
A major problem being encountered by many CRM project teams is data management. How do you rationalize the data used to initially populate CRM systems, and then how do you continually refresh it to ensure currency and accuracy so that reps have confidence in the information they are using? This is a task being taken on by firms such as OneSource, Factiva, Hooverâs, etc., as they provide CRM data management services. In addition, we are seeing companies like TrueAdvantage, Before the Call, Generate, Spoke, etc., also stepping in to help populate CRM systems with useful information that can be gathered across the Web on customers, competitors, changes in the marketplace, etc. One now sees why we often tell clients going down the CRM path that they may well find the experience similar to eating Lay's potato chips. Once you eat one, you find you want another, and another and another.

We are seeing the vendor community respond to this hunger for more functionality. One needs to only look at the list of developer alliance partners that companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP are creating to understand that literally hundreds of new options for enhancing CRM platforms are or will soon be available.


But that wealth of options raises a concern. As the chief marketing officer of a technology firm recently shared with us: If I bought every CRM application that promised me an ROI, we would be out of business in six months! This CMO's caution is worth noting. Not every type of application coming to market will be useful to every sales and marketing team. And even if they were, the amount of new that we can drop on our teams at any one time is limited, so we must be judicious in the choices we make in terms of adding new capabilities into our CRM platforms.
That being said, we need to realize that for the promise of CRM to fully be realized, companies are going to have to continue to make new investments in CRM technology for the foreseeable future. To be competitive, we are going to have to provide our front-office teams with the all the tools they need to be more efficient and more effective. Fortunately the CRM vendor community understands these needs and is responding.

Loving P&C
DC*