How can IT help sales to inform, interact with, and impress customers? What tools can it provide, and how can it enable sales to use these tools more effectively? Some sales departments might value more sales. How can IT facilitate this goal?  Another sales department might prefer bigger margins on the sales in hand. How could IT facilitate this goal?  How can IT help sales’ bottom line?
Contributors

• • Gerald W. Shields, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, Aflac Incorporated
  • Peter Ostrow, Research Director for Sales Effectiveness, Aberdeen Group

Transcript (IT as The Enabler of Sales)

Speaker A [00:00:01]:
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Speaker B [00:00:33]:
Welcome to CIO Talk Radio with your host,Sanjog Aul. All comments, views and opinions expressed on this show are strictly those of the host, guests and callers. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:47]:
Good morning and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. Today’s topic is IT As The Enabler Of Sales. Our guests for today’s show are Gerald Shields, who is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Aflac. Good morning, Gerald.

Gerald Shields [00:01:06]:
Good morning.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:07]:
How are you, sir?

Gerald Shields [00:01:08]:
I’m doing very well.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:10]:
So you had a relaxing weekend and I would say a holiday week, and then you’re back in action.

Gerald Shields [00:01:17]:
That’s right. I was off last week and celebrated with all my kids, my wife, all the kids were in from college vacation, so that was good.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:27]:
Beautiful. And we also have Peter Ostrow, who’s the Research Director For Sales Effectiveness from the Aberdeen Group. Good morning, Peter.

Peter Ostrow [00:01:36]:
Good morning, Sanjog and Gerald. Nice to be here.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:38]:
Beautiful. So how’s life treating you?

Peter Ostrow [00:01:41]:
Life’s a little chilly and snowy here in Boston, but it’s a sunny day and I’m deep inside a building in a cube, so I wouldn’t know it anyway.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:49]:
Okay. All right, guys. So the topic that we picked up today, yes, we want to make the best out of every opportunity we have but then it sometimes is the fate of that opportunity is decided at the last mile and that’s where the sales touches the prospect and that’s where we see sometimes that we are good at doing one transaction, but when we have too many, then we have problem with the scalability or if we have the same transaction, we have a problem getting the biggest piece of the pie versus doing a small size transaction. So how do you make the same salespeople more effective? How do you enable them? That is what we would like to explore here. So I’d start with this, which is true for everyone, including each of us, that we hate to be sold, but we love to buy.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:45]:
So what is and I’ll start with you, Gerald. What do you think and what you’ve seen in your experience while you’re a CIO, but with your counterparts and this and other companies that you worked with, what do you see are the typical tenets of a very good, effective sales force and what kind of sales process that they follow with and without IT, which allows people to truly buy and not get the feeling that they’re being sold?

Gerald Shields [00:03:13]:
Well, you know, from our perspective, I think one thing is obviously having a lot of information, that the sales side has to have good information available quickly. So part of what we do is we kind of bridge between marketing and the sales force on empowering our sales organization to have that information quickly. When you say people don’t really want to be sold, I’m not sure I always agree with that. Certain products, because they’re outside the norm of what people buy. Like some of our products, maybe a cancer product, people don’t know how to buy that so they need some information, they need tools the salesforce does that. They can educate consumers to make the purchase.

Gerald Shields [00:04:00]:
So what we do is we sit in between the marketing and the salespeople in order to empower power, that education process.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:09]:
So, Peter, like as Gerald said, some people do not even know more information about the product for them to buy it. So do you think good selling is when we just inform the customer and let them make their own decisions?

Peter Ostrow [00:04:22]:
You know, I think there’s a lot of ways to attack that. My own experience is primarily in the

Peter Ostrow [00:04:27]:
B2B space and a little bit, you.

Peter Ostrow [00:04:29]:
Know, less weighted towards the consumer end. So Gerald would probably have more insight into that area. You know, from my perspective, when you’ve got businesses selling to businesses, for example, and the deal size tends to be fairly large, five, six, even seven figures, the sales cycle can be long, it can be months or even quarters, etc I think that there’s sort of a balance between selling and buying behavior. A lot of your traditional sales training instructors and organizations and providers will tell you that you’re too late if you wait for a potential buyer to start asking you questions, because in all probability, those questions have been motivated or whispered in their ear by a Machiavellian competitor of your own who may already have an inside track. So there’s no harm in cold calling and selling and reaching out.

Peter Ostrow [00:05:21]:
But I think the mistake that a

Peter Ostrow [00:05:22]:
lot of organizations make is that they do it to the point earlier, from an uneducated perspective. One of my favorite quotes is from Louis Pasteur. Chance favors the prepared mind and a lot of the research that we do in the practice here at Aberdeen really focuses on enabling sales organizations of various sizes and flavors. Whether you’re a hunter or a farmer or inside or field salesperson, whether you’re working in a cube or on your iPad at the soccer game with enough information about your prospect, your customer, your own company, etc. So that you kind of head into that battle as well prepared as possible

Peter Ostrow [00:05:58]:
with as strong a tool belt as possible.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:02]:
Now Gerald, in your world, is it primarily B2C?

Gerald Shields [00:06:07]:
It’s really interesting because the first part of our sale is B2B. So what we would do is we would go into a company and we would sell the concept to a company, to a payroll HR manager of offering Aflac as a benefit, as a company benefit there. So first thing we do is we have to sell the business of allowing that as one of the benefits. Then after that, then we deal with the consumer on purchasing that benefit, if you will. So it’s kind of both sides. Now I would agree exactly what Peter said about getting a head start on some of the questions, not just sitting back and being passive. If I’m just allowing the end consumer, the business person to ask me questions, that’s probably too late. I’m going to be in a defensive mode.

Gerald Shields [00:06:55]:
So what we do is through our CRM system, our CRM system, both for the end consumer and the businesses, is provide that information, that critical information such that our sales force can actively attack any concerns or attack the business leaders questions even before they’re asked, empower them to anticipate those questions.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:24]:
So if you think that you wow your customers by informing them, is that putting you ahead of the curve or is it something now expected.

Gerald Shields [00:07:35]:
From us? One of our main goals with technology from the sales force is to improve the attractiveness of our offerings to both the business and to the consumers. But also look, all this doesn’t matter if you don’t have top salespeople. At the end of the day, top salespeople are what we’re looking for, the top insurance agents. So what we try to do is provide the leading edge technology that beats our competition. As an example, we have this enrollment system. One of the advantages of our enrollment system is 94% of our policies, our applications come in electronically. Of that over 75% of those straight through process. Nobody else in the insurance market comes to those numbers.

Gerald Shields [00:08:27]:
So if I’m trying to attract you to be an athletic associate, I can say our technology provides 75% of your policies. You write you’ll get paid tonight, the day you write them. So what it’s trying to do is attract the top salespeople to efficiency, to effectiveness of technology in order to beat the competition and getting the top agents.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:55]:
Very interesting. So Peter, in your view, the way Gerald explained this, it is by design that they give a motivation or incentive for attracting the people. But once they come on board, what is an ongoing set of incentives or motivations or process efficiencies that you offer? The sales force which they truly crave for and they typically don’t get, which is going to be the key to success for many of the sales, the sales function itself.

Peter Ostrow [00:09:27]:
So what I’m really sort of hearing from a question standpoint, Sanjog if you could confirm this is, you know, to what extent do technology deployments play or have an impact on sales success?

Sanjog Aul [00:09:38]:
Correct that and also the fact that we gave information anywhere, anytime and right at that moment is that where the technology’s input or contributions stop?

Peter Ostrow [00:09:52]:
So I definitely can answer that one. You know, in the world that I tend to research your business centric type of professional sales knowledge workers, there is a long standing tradition of a lot of allergy to technology use. It could just be because back in the old days of, you know, Glengarry, Glen Ross types of timeframe or Willie Loman, your classic salesperson is a talker, hopefully a listener as well. They’re communicating a lot, but in an in person, handshake, glad handing type of environment. Of course, moving into the current age of all the technology enablers that we have available to us, the classic sales technology foundation is CRM or Customer Relationship Management, which is kind of an overview or umbrella technology under which falls Salesforce Automation or SFA. The two terms are often interchangeable, but we usually think of SFA as a subset of CRM since CRM is often used by service organizations and customer care groups as well kind of the third leg of that stool of marketing and sales that Gerald was talking about earlier. So getting your salespeople to use the CRM is a classic difficulty in the life of a, let’s say VP of Sales Operations or in a smaller company, just the person who is responsible for running sales.

Peter Ostrow [00:11:12]:
This assumes that most of the salespeople are working for your company. If they are working for channel partners or not on your payroll, that’s a whole other set of problems we can get to later in the show. So around the CRM, how do we get folks to use it? Should we even bother getting folks to use it? I don’t know of any organization where it wasn’t often true that the very best salespeople were the worst offenders and just, you know, didn’t enter their deal data into the CRM or didn’t track their activities because frankly, they’re kind of immune from it if they’re making president’s club every year. If they’re hitting and beating their number, they kind of walk on water and nobody’s going to tell them what to do. Right? So in the world of CRM and sales effectiveness research, we’ve tried to dig into this a little bit more deeply and figure out, well, first of all, is it even worth it to try to drive higher rates of adoption of the basic CRM sales effectiveness technology? What we do know is that companies that perform better and that performance is based on year over year growth in revenue, more reps hitting their quota, growth in the average deal size, shrinkage of the sales cycle, KPIs like that. We do see better CRM adoption overall among the companies that perform better. So we derive from that fact, okay, CRM adoption is generally a good thing. Now how do we get there? So getting there, a lot of companies take a lot of different paths.

Peter Ostrow [00:12:32]:
Usually they can fall into the two buckets of carrot and stick. The stick is, okay, we’re not going to give you your commission check if you don’t enter your deal in salesforce.com or Siebel on Demand or Sugar or Infor or SAP or Microsoft Dynamic CRM or whatever the particular instance of CRM might be. The carrots tend to be the ones that I focus on in my research. And that is, hey, if you actually look inside the CRM, you’ll find that there’s a tab there that feeds you information that’s going to help you do your job better, hit your number earlier in the year, make president’s club, grow more hair and lose weight and so we tend to see that a lot of these technology enablers, which we can go into more detail during the show, when layered on top of the core foundation technology of CRM or SFA, tend to have the most impact positively on getting salespeople to sell more and companies to hit their revenue numbers more efficiently.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:28]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages and Gerald, we’ll start with you. And this is very interesting because IT leaders are always faced with this adoption challenge, no matter which technology that we talk about and now you’ve got this interesting animal who we call as a salesperson who’s walking on water and you need to use your influence management skills and perhaps partner with the sales leadership to make that adoption happen because they don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel because they’re already walking on water and they don’t see the incremental benefit it’s going to bring. So how do you make that it, you know, software or process getting adopted by this particular group of people? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:32]:
So as far as the adoption challenge goes, Gerald, what do you think is going to be the key to success, especially with the sales force or the people in the sales department are the ones who need to be influenced in order to adopt the technologies that are supposed to help them, but they don’t know yet and you cannot prove it yet. But you want them to take a leap of faith, right?

Gerald Shields [00:17:55]:
It’s a challenge that all of us deal with and at Aflac, one of the challenges that we have is, you know, we have about 70,000 associates throughout the country and they’re independent agents so they’re not employees. So I can’t mandate as easily as when I’ve had sales force that were employees I could say this is the company policy this is what you have to do. With independent agents, there’s a whole lot more challenging and Peter brought up a really great point in the fact that if you got a sales agent out there who’s making president’s club and he’s blowing the doors off on his numbers, it’s going to be really difficult to influence him to do anything different.

Gerald Shields [00:18:35]:
So we don’t really what we don’t want to do also is go get him to do something differen and the next year he doesn’t make sales numbers, doesn’t make president’s club, then that he’s going to blame it on the technology one way or another. He needs a reason why he didn’t perform as well. So we don’t really target those guys who are already performing at the highest level. We target some of the ones who are really good, but they’re not quite making the numbers they want. They’re much more eager to adopt and to change and to look for solutions so we really target that level. There’s 10% or so of your sales force

Gerald Shields [00:19:13]:
it doesn’t really matter. They’re going to blow the doors off no matter what. So don’t go mess with them. Go with these other ones and bring them up to that level. Also, we try to work with new people who come to the company day one, getting them to understand this is the process. This is the procedure, this is the technology, and here’s how it works. When we go work with those two sets of people, it’s easy for us then to get evangelists. If we can get evangelists out all through the country, who uses technology, who uses the CRM system, who use the mobile apps, who use the iPad app, then they sell it to the field, they sell it to those around them.

Gerald Shields [00:19:56]:
Pretty soon you get pockets that are really successful and they’re touting how the technology works for them. Our biggest challenge also is the diverse age group of our field force. So one of the challenges is how do we bring technology that while today it may be a little bit leading edge and maybe today I don’t get good adoption. The generation that’s going to come in tomorrow, the generation that’s going to come in three years from now, they wouldn’t even come to work for us if we didn’t have that technology.

Peter Ostrow [00:20:30]:
So that’s a good point, Gerald. Peter here, I would add. We just recently wrapped up some research on sales mobility, and I was talking earlier about sort of the traditional sales folks who might be a little bit technology averse. One of the reasons why that may be more mitigated today and moving forward is because I think the gap between consumer friendly and business friendly technologies is narrowing. You know, for a long time we’ve used all sorts of great stuff to listen to our music and watch our movies and play games and all that kind of thing and yet, you know, some of the core technologies in the workplace, especially if we’re not bleeding edge in terms of our adoption of them, aren’t nearly as cool with the iPad itself and that’s really just kind of the tip of the sword when it comes to the, you know, the form factor of the tablet itself because there’s others that are going to be coming out and soon we’ll leapfrog it.

Peter Ostrow [00:21:21]:
In terms of the cool factor, I think you’re seeing a lot more folks blending their use of personal and business computing as well as obviously from a mobility standpoint. Heck, you know, even those top performers, we own them 247 now and they can work if they so choose or if they feel motivated or pressured to do so from the soccer game, from Fenway Park, a little Boston reference there, from, you know, home, wherever they might be, they can get more done and yet with this form factor change of the tablet computer, you know, I think there’s a big difference that we’re going to see and some of the data bears this out that folks are starting to be able to not just see stuff on their handheld device. You know, previously with an iPhone or a similar smartphone, you know, you could probably look up your forecast or look up some information, let’s say about your sales prospect or your customer before you had a live appointment with them, or if you were multitasking while you were on a con call or webex with them but with this iPad or similar form factor appliances, now you’ve got the ability to do stuff in real time, not just see things because. Because it’s got obviously the gesture based capabilities, the far larger screen and I think because people are becoming more and more intrigued by the coolness of those instruments and devices and the wireless nature of using them.

Peter Ostrow [00:22:36]:
From a consumer standpoint, from a business perspective, I think the likelihood of adoption and enablement using technology and getting some of the sales folks to get over that hump and to say, wow, this will actually help me do the one thing I need to do, which is make more money faster, will probably be more successful and some of our statistics say that the best in class companies are far more likely to enable mobility in general and their sales team in particular with the latest and greatest of these devices.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:07]:
So Gerald, interesting question that comes up here is what is truly making them adopt something like this? Is that the end, you know, the unit, the tablet or the PDA that they’re using? Is it the plumbing which makes the way the data flows to them and then what data flows through them? Where is you can say the success truly lying as you’ve seen.

Gerald Shields [00:23:33]:
Okay, a couple things on that. One is I don’t think there’s one answer that fits the whole spectrum. So what we really look is we really look at four areas to try to get adoption here and we attack these four areas and hopefully one of these four areas hits a nerve with you which drives your adoption. It may be a different one of these four that hits Peter and makes him adopt. One is we really, really work on technology to improve the effectiveness by that is the reach. So I want to empower through the technology to one of our sales force associates that they have greater reach. Whether I’m talking about the CRM system, whether I’m talking about the GPS applications or whether I’m talking about like a good example is we do through our enrollment process. We have this proprietary enrollment system that again 94% of our business comes in 75% of that straight through processes, but is meant for face to face enrollment.

Gerald Shields [00:24:40]:
Well now we’ve empowered that to work within WebEx. We’ve worked with Cisco to have that within WebEx. So now you don’t have to drive the 35 miles over there to have a face to face session with an applicant on there. So that, okay, that doesn’t appeal to everybody, but it appeals to a certain spectrum of our sales agents so it improves their reach, their effectiveness. Another one is efficiency. So we really concentrate on when you’re on a sales call, your efficiency there. You can get more products enrolled, you can get more products sold, you can do it faster, less redundancy, empower everything you need on that laptop unit and you’re there or on your handheld for 80% of our servicing applications. So some people, they don’t care about improving their reach.

Gerald Shields [00:25:36]:
They already can reach all the people they can deal with. They need to be more effective there. So we really concentrate on effectiveness there. The third one is that attractiveness. I’ll show you a great example, we had a business, a good sized business that we were calling on to offer our product in. There was a competitor calling on that same business. The business leader called both our agent and our competitor’s agent into the office the same day, said, look, both of you have been calling on me.

Gerald Shields [00:26:09]:
I just have you both here, let’s see whose is better and I’ll make a decision right now. I know I want to offer these benefits, I just don’t know from who. Our competitor pulled out a stack of papers and started going through the papers on what all their product offered. It was a printed PowerPoint presentation. When he was done, our associates brought out the iPad, went through the iPad presentation right there, flipping the pages on the iPad about halfway through this presentation, the business unit said, wow, just looking at this, obviously Aflac has better technologies, I would think you’d have better products also due to this technology I don’t think there’s much of a decision here.

Gerald Shields [00:26:52]:
I choose Aflac. So that attractiveness to the image of the company, the image of our associates. Okay, so those are the three primary things. The fourth thing we really concentrate on some aspect is the cost of entry so I’m going to recruit you to be an associate. One of our competitors is recruiting you to be an associate to get set up with a PC, to get set up with everything you need. It’s going to cost $8,000 with us. What we do is we have for less than $500, you can have everything you need as an independent agent to sell our product and to go.

Gerald Shields [00:27:32]:
So again, it’s effectiveness, efficiency, attractiveness, cost barrier to entry.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:39]:
Beautiful. So let’s Take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back. And I would love to hear Peter’s reaction on the more areas that Gerald mentioned and how much does he see across the board as the major legs of the stool? Maybe it’s a four legged stool, but so be it but is that stool really standing tall? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:36]:
So Gerald had listed out a pretty interesting four areas where we spoke about reach, efficiency, attractiveness and cost. These are the four legs of the stool which makes the salesperson or the sales function stand tall. What is your reaction to it, Peter, based on what you see out there, people don’t.

Peter Ostrow [00:30:55]:
You bet. So, you know, I’ll start perhaps with sort of the cool factor that we were talking about a little bit. I’ll give you a real life example on the consumer side. I’m a 10 or 12 year owner of a timeshare on Cape Cod. I’ve never actually been there. I’ve never seen it. I trade it in all the time and our family goes to some warmer, more interesting climbs. So last night I’m at home and someone calls and this person, I can tell from the readout on the phone is from, you know, some third party calling organization and proceeds to try to convince me that a new representation company that’s affiliated with my timeshare community needs to actually see me at my house to show me some information that will be very attractive to me.

Peter Ostrow [00:31:41]:
And he promises that it won’t involve any requests for me to purchase anything. So, you know, obviously I wasn’t going to let that happen and I quickly determined that any organization that was still trying to sell anything to me or even create an interest on my part in buying something that was using such an antiquated approach wasn’t really worthy of my attention. So I think that Gerald’s case study of sitting down with a stack of papers versus the cool tablet computer definitely speaks to how people perceive the individual who is selling or marketing or servicing them appropriately. So your example was sort of, I think Gerald, in an in person scenario, there are tons of people who do their selling. The way the three of us are sitting right now, we’re at a desk, we’re at home, maybe we’re wearing our jammies, but we’ve got a phone and a PC and an Internet connection and don’t need a whole lot more in many thought leadership or knowledge worker scenarios to be effective in our jobs. So we just are publishing very soon some research on inside sales organizations which is a pretty significant component of the sort of B2B selling space and there’s a couple of technologies that just as an example, help sort of create that sort of leading edge view and coolness factor

Peter Ostrow [00:32:52]:
even though you’re just communicating with someone by phone. For starters there’s a bunch of solutions available out now that inside sellers are using that we refer to as co browsing or screen sharing. I think most of us are pretty familiar with it in a business sense when we’re on a webex or live meeting or whatever the product might be but we know that companies that use cobrowsing or screen sharing solutions within their inside sales organization typically see about a 73% attainment of their annual sales quota. And companies that don’t are only at about 60%. You know, if you multiply that times the overall team goal for a calendar year, that’s a huge differential. Another technology that these companies are using is real time web visitor tracking.

Peter Ostrow [00:33:35]:
So, you know, it’s one thing when you’re on Brookstone.com or Target.com as a consumer and you see a little window that says, you know, hey, would you like to chat with or even speak with or have someone call you from this retailer to give you more attention? Because you’ve maybe been dwelling on a particular page for a longer period of time than average in a business sense. There’s great technologies available that involve a mixture of sort of cookies and web analytics whereby we actually can get real time understanding in our inside sales organization of who is on our website right now, what they’re looking at. Now, it could be a little bit too obnoxious to immediately pick up the phone and call that person and say, so I, big brother, realized that you were just under my website. Would you like to buy something? But knowing that that person was passively expressing some sort of a buying signal or interest in your solution or product or company can easily be worked in a little bit more subtly into a conversation or communication, whether it’s an hour or three hours or a day from now but knowing that there was some level of interest. So those are a couple of the ways in which companies are enabling their inside sellers, for instance, not just folks who are out in the field with ways to be more effective and to use fairly leading edge technologies. Companies that use this real time web visitor tracking, they actually about 54% of their inside reps hit their number annually and only 40% of the reps for companies that don’t use that technology are doing so here’s a real delta in terms of actual measurable performance.

Gerald Shields [00:35:11]:
Let me follow up on what Peter said there, because I think that’s absolutely correct. We actually had a case here where we have some phone technology that basically if the phone lines are backed up, allows you to schedule a call back and there was a magazine that tracks customer service and they had heard that, you know, again, you call in and hey, the line’s busy, please tell us what time you want to call back and we’ll call you back and we call back very promptly and we’ve saved all the data from that call. So they tested it and wrote an article about it, about the amazing commitment to a promise. You made a customer a promise you’re going to call them back at a certain time and something little like that sets the tone and image of the company.

Gerald Shields [00:36:01]:
It’s not really advanced technology anymore, but what it does do is it paints that image to that consumer, whether it be the business or the end consumer of hey, we’re people who honor our commitment. We told you we would do it and we’re going to do it.

Peter Ostrow [00:36:16]:
I couldn’t agree more. We did a study recently. Here again, tends to be more in the B2B space on the sort of 360 degree customer view because if you think about it, a lot of people who sell are not just selling to fresh raw, never talked to them before customers. A lot of people are upselling and cross selling or renewing or maintaining relationships with existing customers. In fact, in 2011 I’m going to be doing some research specifically around cross sell and upsell. So in this particular study we were looking at the differentials between the top performers and other companies. Huge gaps in terms of customer retention, satisfaction and then some really important KPIs like the customers that were in the companies that were in the top 20% of performers saw an average increase on a year to year basis of 6% in terms of what each of their customers spent.

Peter Ostrow [00:37:04]:
The companies who were at the bottom of the pile of our research saw an actual decline of 9% year over year in NCV or net client value. So the idea of sort of a share of customer wallet makes us realize that you know what, it’s not just about selling skills and selling enablement, but in a lot of cases where folks are perhaps account managers, they might actually be responsible for not just maintaining business or answering questions or resolving problems. But there’s a lot of customer care operations today where they actually have a sales quota to hit. So the skill sets between servicing and selling really tend to blur quite a bit. Actually, you know what, I have a retail consumer example of that myself. A few months ago I needed a really teeny part for my dishwasher, it’s a Sears I think Kenmore product probably

Peter Ostrow [00:37:51]:
and I went online, tried to look for it and there was too much information. As a consumer, I couldn’t slog through all of the different pictures and skus for this 75 cent piece that I needed and maybe we can actually return to the idea of too much information for sellers and how to make that more of an enablement and less of a problem. But anyway, by the, you know, I was on the website and up popped something that says, would you like us to call you to resolve your question? And I’m like, sure, give me a call. One second later, the phone rings, I’m connected within about 10 seconds to someone great, you know, professional person, English speaking, no accent, et cetera. And by the end of the call, I was willingly upsold from a 75 cent piece into a $20 treatment canister for my dishwasher. I felt that it was such a good job of upselling me, I wanted to give their sales tactics and their service approach as a blend, the sort of props.

Peter Ostrow [00:38:44]:
I also felt it was probably not a bad idea for my dishwasher. So to deploy a human being to speak with me about a 75%, a 75 cent piece. Of course, to your point earlier, Gerald, the cost of the technology or the resource there would not have been appropriate. But at the end of the day, if they spent three minutes with me and got a $20 retail sale, and you multiply that out, it actually probably works pretty well and it took the exact right information path from what they call multichannel, which is I started with online and then I went to telephone, and then it was fulfilled through delivery through the supply chain.

Gerald Shields [00:39:18]:
I think there’s a fine line between what is sales and what is retention of customers because you talk about upselling, cross selling. If I can’t retain you as a customer, my opportunity to do that is diminished, especially for a product like ours, because our products are not like buying a TV ao I go in and I buy a Sony television, and they get the money right there. Ours are a product that we have a revenue stream coming in and every month you basically have the ability to renew that sale or to end that relationship. So sales is much more than just that single event of enrolling you on there. It’s the care and feeding of you as a person and the relationship with the company

Gerald Shields [00:40:04]:
and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of our technology has really empowered that. I mean, has really given into our sales force the capability on their mobile device to be able to answer questions and be able to service a policyholder right there on the spot. Have an example of someone who is in a Starbucks, a Starbucks on a Saturday and while they’re in Starbucks, one of their policyholders said, hey, I got a question for you. And it was about a claim. And he pulls out his BlackBerry or his smartphone or whatever and could answer that call on Saturday morning in line at a Starbucks. That policyholder then goes home and is able to tell their spouse, hey, the check was mailed yesterday, blah, blah, blah, here’s how much it was for. Boom.

Gerald Shields [00:40:55]:
You know, that type of care and feeding goes a long way in the cross selling, the upselling because now that image and the importance of that person is magnified.

Peter Ostrow [00:41:08]:
I think you’re right on target with that, Gerald. I mean, we’ve all probably, you know, those of us that are, that are old enough can think back 15 or 20 years and we realize that the customer service that you get today, whether you’re at the auto dealership or dealing with financial services products or anything, is really, really good compared to a generation ago that is spilling over into the business marketplace. And the ability for mobile use of the technologies, the blurring of that sales and service line, I think definitely all contributes to that.

Gerald Shields [00:41:40]:
And it’s getting higher expectations with the newer generation coming. In example, I have four children. I bought three of them new phones for Christmas and I bought the phones, the people at Verizon said, hey, here they are, Boom, boom, boom, boom. Will actually be open on Sunday for you to turn them on to get them activated. And I said, oh no, that’s not going to work. I said, these are 20 year olds. They’re not going to wait a day to get their new phone

Gerald Shields [00:42:11]:
give me the web address where they can do that. And sure enough, I give them the phones and 20 minutes later they’re talking to each other on the phone. There was no expectation that they would wait a day to activate their phone. All those 22 year olds, those 19 year olds, they are our customers of the future and our employees of the future drives much greater expectation of the services we have to provide.

Peter Ostrow [00:42:37]:
Yep, very true.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:39]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages. And we already saw that there are so many different data points that are available. IT is really playing a big role in the way sales is enabled. But what is the wish list? What is left to be desired and what is still to be delivered which will take us over the edge? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:31]:
Welcome back. So Peter, what do you see as the wish list from IT staff from IT that salespeople have?

Peter Ostrow [00:45:43]:
You know, a wish list would be anything that helps.

Peter Ostrow [00:45:46]:
Sorry, I’ll get off the speaker. A wish list would be anything that helps the sales folks make their number. We’ve done a lot of research into whether or not in a B2B marketplace especially salespeople care about anything other than just making their number and making their money. Well, actually they do. They do care about the company’s performance and if the incentive and comp is geared towards some level of group as well as just individual type of rewards, then folks actually do behave in that sort of fashion. So you know, if we talk about the wish list, there’s probably three or four major areas of technology that best in class sales organizations are deploying more often than average and laggard companies. So in no particular order, we’ll start first with the problem that I talked about earlier, which is too much information. So there’s a category called sales intelligence

Peter Ostrow [00:46:37]:
and this is not what we know about our customers that’s already in our system, but what we don’t know about our customers and especially our prospects that’s out there on the Internet. There is so much information about the people and the companies and the markets to whom we want to sell that making a consultative knowledge based sales call or having a well informed discussion with your sales prospect or customer can become difficult because we’re all bandwidth challenged and we only have so much time to figure out what are the appropriate facts that we should have visually in front of our eyes when we’re speaking with someone or on our iPad or in a stack of papers, whatever the situation might be. So sales intelligence allows organizations to often integrate right into their CRM or SFA tool a stream of information about their target markets, their people, the changing of executive roles, trigger events, news, things like that. These can be done through a lot of different subscriptions. Most of these are SaaS. Software as a Service Solution the next category would be sales analytics and forecasting. This is the 29th of December, it’s the end of the month, the quarter and the year, and there’s not a single company out there that’s not sweating it right now. Even if they have hit their annual number, there’s bonuses on the line for going over that number.

Peter Ostrow [00:47:52]:
And for the companies that are at 98 or 99% or even worse, they’re all sweating it right now because a lot of judgments are made about budgets and rewards and comp and job security based on companies hitting their number. So rather than spend a lot of time guessing about what deals are going to close and spend more time on giving the right kind of executive level support, pricing and discounts, etc, to the deals most likely to close best in class companies, more than others, tend to deploy formal sales analytics solutions that allow for real time forecasting. It gives reps the ability to know anytime, anywhere, exactly how far they are from their goal, how they’re doing and that can then tie into a third type of technology solution that folks will lean on it to help support and that is incentive and compensation or sales. Performance management is the broader category in the SPM world. Sales reps always have a complete, clear view into where they are in terms of their compensation, their commissions, their bonuses, their pay, what they need to do and tied into that forecast it helps them understand where they need to be and where they are

Peter Ostrow [00:49:01]:
and of course it helps management understand who is performing at those top 10% levels that Gerald mentioned before and who is not there. There’s probably one other area of technology and it’s sort of the bottom of the funnel focus. There’s a lot of smaller sort of niches of technology that help companies sales reps close business more quickly once they have sort of a lead in their hands of some sort, Whether it was self generated or generated by telemarketing company or by their inside sales team or by marketing. These technologies run from electronic signature capture to configure price quote solutions, to proposal management, sales, contract management, these are all a variety of solutions that help salespeople work more efficiently, close more deals more faster, more quickly, and at a larger, better batting average, if you will. Now, the relationship between sales and IT has changed dramatically. Most organizations tell us today that the line of business, and in my particular research area’s case, the sales or perhaps the marketing owners, the VPs, the CMO, the Chief Sales Officer, etc, in many cases have their own budget for and make their own decision for these technology decisions especially when the technologies are offered in a hosted or cloud type of environment and to be very honest, a lot of organizations that sell to my community specifically go to market around the idea of you don’t need to rely on the IT function in order to make this business result happen.

Peter Ostrow [00:50:29]:
However, most of them would like to get IT involved as a sponsor or a champion of the process because inevitably there is integration that has to take place with information that is behind the firewall. Gerald, I’d be interested in hearing your take on the somewhat controversial, but I think accurate representation in 2010 moving into 2011, most IT organizations realize that there are a lot of solutions in the sales and marketing world out there that can come in and be deployed by the line of business more quickly and that they don’t necessarily need to deploy the resources to build it from scratch in house, but creating a good relationship between the line of business owners and it is always a healthy way to go.

Gerald Shields [00:51:10]:
Yeah, absolutely. And our philosophy is definitely buy if you can, don’t build and we work with our sales organization on solutions. And again, looking at what’s out there, software as a service and things that hey, we can deploy quicker and quickly get the return on it. Same side though, a lot of the value is all the integration points and so how do we manage the integration points? When you look at what the sales force is asking for, it’s really kind of funny. The old adage information and capabilities forgets the need for more information, more capabilities. So we’ll empower five functions out there and they say, hey, we got five of the eight functions, when are the next three coming? Or we’ll take something and put it on the mobile device

Gerald Shields [00:52:02]:
and they say great, I love this on the mobile device, when is sudden such coming so trying to keep up with that. One thing we’ve learned though, the hard way is you have to have an organization, part of your sales organization that prioritizes these requests because sometimes it’s a squeaky wheel syndrome what you get is a small segment of the sales force very, very vocal about needing some capability. We go and power that capability and find out that it was utilized by such a small segment of it. So what we have is we have an organization that is called sales technology and they sit in the sales organization and they get the feedback from the sales force and prioritize what are the biggest bang for the bucks. Again, when you talk about motivating the field force to use this technology, when you hit the big items, they grasp it a whole lot sooner.

Gerald Shields [00:52:57]:
Also we send from it. I’ll send 30 people or so out every year to work with our field force they’ll go to Montana, they’ll go to Illinois, they’ll go wherever we send them out here and they’ll go and make sales calls with salespeople. Then they’ll go work in the regional offices and see how that technology is utilized. What have we done well? What have we done poorly? They also build relationships with those field force people. So then when we’re thinking of concepts or when we have some software or some new technology that we want piloted that gives us those contacts in there but I really caution running towards the people who yell the loudest because that may not be the highest priority.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:45]:
Just on behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d love to of course get more time on this because this was getting very interesting but since we are closing this show, I really like to thank you, Gerald and Peter for sharing your thoughts on how it can truly enable the sales and yes, there will be always wish list. Some of those items might be the star trek version of technology that they want, but definitely it is working very hard as I understand and I’m sure you’d agree to make this happen. Thank you so much again.

Gerald Shields [00:54:16]:
It was my pleasure. Enjoyed it. You’ll have a good happy new year.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:20]:
You too. And so if you guys have any questions listeners, please send us an email to questionsciotalkradio.com. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio this is Sanjog Aul your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless and wish you a very Happy New Year.

Speaker B [00:54:57]:
Thank you for tuning in to CIO Talk Radio to learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio. com. Join Sanjog Aul next Wednesday at 9aM Central, 7aM Pacific, for another hour of CIO Talk Radio.

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