Supercharged Sell

State of the Art

Sales-force automation gives you the power to do everything from closing deals on-site to configuring marketing campaigns. But making it succeed is a risky business

Michael Hays, a regional sales manager for Gulf Industries, a sign-making company based in Torrance, Calif., remembers the old days of selling signs. He'd spend nearly an hour with a potential customer, trying to come up with a design the customer couldn't resist. After cutting and pasting various pictures and shapes from color printouts and having the customer imagine a range of typefaces and logos, he'd sometimes get an enthusiastic response. But it wouldn't last long. As soon as Hays said he'd have to run the artwork by Gulf's designers and engineers to make sure it was executable, he could feel the room go cold.

But recently, when Hays visited a car dealership, he sailed through the entire call. After about 10 minutes of asking the owner questions about his business--How many customers were from out of town? How busy was the location?--Hays whipped out his laptop. To the owner's amazement, in less than 15 minutes Hays had designed the perfect sign, down to the squiggly border and the red Mustang the owner had said was his favorite car. After scanning in the dealership's logo, Hays quoted the owner a price of $5,000--the computer did all the calculations--and set a contract down in front of him. Because Gulf's designers and engineers had already OK'd the design combinations stored in the laptop, Hays knew there would be no problem transforming the digital sign into a real one. The delighted dealer couldn't sign fast enough.

Tired of losing business because of disorganized sales calls and untrackable market information, more and more small companies are turning to sales-force automation (SFA)--the 400-plus computer programs on the market aimed at helping sales representatives do their jobs more efficiently. One category of SFA gives reps tools for designing products and closing deals on-site. Others provide the technology to develop multimedia presentations, to configure and carry out marketing campaigns, or to tap into a company's intranets from the road. And that's just for starters.

With so many options, though, comes a big risk. According to a recent study by the Gartner Group, more than 60% of all SFA projects are not successful. "I've found more tombstones in the backyards of companies in honor of sales-force automation than I have in honor of total-quality-management programs," says Jim Cecil, founder of the James P. Cecil Co., a sales-and-marketing consulting company in Bellevue, Wash. Whether the reason is rebellious salespeople, automation of the wrong processes, or failure to involve key managers in the upgrade, taking on SFA is a gamble.

But before you go crawling back to your safe contact-management program and your easy-to-use automated expense reports, consider this: when used correctly, SFA can boost your sales anywhere from 15% to 35%, according to the Pentech Corp., an SFA consulting group in Atlanta. Indeed, if you follow a few simple rules--like analyzing your sales strategy before you automate and choosing your tools based not on their popularity but on your company's specific needs--you could end up among the 33% of companies that achieve an impressive return on their SFA investment.

PULLING CUSTOMERS IN

Consider Evan Segal. President of Dormont Manufacturing Co., a $30-million manufacturer of gas-appliance connectors in a small town outside Pittsburgh, Segal needed a way to broaden customers' perceptions of what his company could do for them--and his own perception of what the company should be doing with its energy and resources.

Segal puzzled over the first problem for a good six months. He knew that if he could just get people to come inside his factory, they'd stop thinking of it as a place where underpaid workers pieced together dirty bits of rubber tubing and realize it was a clean, spacious plant staffed by dedicated technicians assembling everything from faucets to newfangled coupling devices. But how to get customers over the threshold?

The answer came to Segal when he saw a virtual-reality (VR) tour of Carnegie -Mellon University, his alma mater. If he couldn't bring customers to the factory, he realized, he could bring the factory to them: he'd simply develop a VR tour and load it onto each of his six managers' Gateway Solo laptops. But when he discovered that the VR project would cost him at least $200,000, he quickly changed his direction. Today all his sales managers carry a 10-minute multimedia tour of Dormont, complete with animation, still photos, and video.

To design the tour, Segal hired Tom Dixon, an independent programmer based in Pittsburgh. But Segal did a lot of the legwork himself to save money. He spent a day walking around his company, acting like a guide and scribbling down everything he'd normally explain to a live audience. Then he wrote up a script and turned it over to Dixon, who designed the tour using a program called Director Multimedia Studio, from Macromedia ($999; 800-526-0498; www.macromedia.com). Next, Dixon and Segal hired a freelance artist to design five animated characters--including Monty, a friendly gas-hose connector--and an actor to do their voices. He pinched pennies in less obvious ways, too: moving his characters' bodies was much more expensive than moving just their mouths, so he had them talk more and travel less. The entire project ended up costing only $25,000.

To be sure, Segal's tour may seem a bit crazy at first glance. Segal, an animated character himself, may have pushed the envelope when he decided to feature Monty, the gas hose, singing "Let's Get Flexible." But the tour produced results. Take the case of Barbara Bloecher, purchasing manager for FoodService Purchasing Cooperative, in Louisville, and a longtime gas-hose customer. A couple of months ago, a Dormont sales manager came to her office and took her on the multimedia tour. During the presentation Bloecher noticed the factory workers assembling faucets, a product she'd never realized Dormont carried. She also discovered that the company had introduced a new kind of coupling device--a piece that connects two hoses. The sales meeting lasted a bit longer than usual--about 45 minutes--but she didn't mind. "I felt in control of the meeting," says Bloecher, who could choose which 30-second segments of the 16-part presentation she wanted to see. The outcome? In addition to her usual gas-hose order, Bloecher spent a couple hundred dollars on faucets for one of her clients, a restaurant chain. "The chain will be opening many restaurants in the next few years and will order new faucets continually," she says.