Those who use the laptops are selling in a completely new way. Each week Boren gathers fresh graphics from some of the top design firms in the country and sends them to his sales force on disk or by E-mail to use in creating signs. At any one time, the salespeople have no fewer than 400 pieces of artwork on file. Many salespeople have added portable scanners and digital cameras to their arsenal as well. Boren urges his salespeople to invest in high-resolution screens, even though they add about $1,000 to the cost of the laptop. "People are always hovered around a laptop during a sales call," he says, "so the picture should look good from every angle."
Three years after Gulf launched the laptop program, its sales had increased by 29%--after five years of revenue stagnation. And the salespeople who'd invested in the technology reported an average increase of 25% in sales. In fact, 45 of the 50 reps rewarded recently with a trip to Hawaii for hitting or exceeding their 1996 monthly quotas had laptop computers. That statistic did it for Boren. After returning from Hawaii, he embarked on a two-week tour of 14 states to visit his reps and announce a contest. If the reps reached a certain sales goal within one month, he said, they'd win a free Pentium notebook computer. The results were startling: one rep reached the goal in three days. Boren plans on giving out some 50 laptops and has budgeted $2,300 for each.
It makes you wonder: Maybe his reps weren't afraid after all; maybe they were just short on cash.
OVERHAULING THE COMPANY
While most small companies implement SFA one step at a time, the way Gulf Industries and Dormont did, a few find that automating sales sends a technological ripple through the entire organization. Multicom Communications, a $5-million sound, data, and communications contractor in St. Louis, is one such company.
Multicom is responsible for all the stuff you don't think about when you enter a building--like lighting, sound systems, computer networks, and surveillance. With a fleet of four salespeople and an overwhelming number of details to keep track of, founder and CEO Michael Koenig realized seven years ago that he needed a better way than tickler files to organize historical sales information and sales-meeting notes, and a more reliable system than sticky notes to help salespeople remember to follow up on leads. After researching his options, he decided to purchase Market Master, a marketing-and-sales software package from Breakthrough Productions ($395 to $1,995, depending on the number of users; 916-477-8685; Market Master). And though the program did what he wanted--and even increased sales five times over--it had an unexpected side effect: it highlighted the poor communication among departments once jobs were in the bag. "As sales were going up and up," says Koenig, "I could see the downside clearly: the rest of the company was much too low-tech."
Market Master, a Macintosh program, asks users to set up several general time frames for sales campaigns--including one for very hot leads, one for hot leads, one for cold leads, and one for very cold leads--and then applies those schedules automatically to clients, according to the salesperson's directions. For instance, a salesperson might specify that very hot leads get a follow-up phone call two days after the initial sales call and marketing literature one week later. He or she then designates which clients fall into which category. The software does the rest--collating, scheduling, guiding. When the salesperson next calls up a client's file on-screen, he or she will find a schedule detailing when to do each task. The software also automatically generates follow-up letters.
The prodding capabilities of Market Master appealed to Koenig, but what particularly impressed him was the program's ability to tailor marketing campaigns to different kinds of clients. That could mean anything from choosing what type of information will be sent to the customer to compressing a previously drafted six-month campaign down to three weeks--all at the click of a button.
The latter is what he needed to do to draw riverboat casinos into Multicom's fold. In the late 1980s and early 1990s riverboat casinos were built at a dizzying rate--Koenig saw more than 100 potential clients looming on the horizon. But he had to act fast and get on board before the boats got their casino licenses. Rather than taking time to draft an entirely new campaign, he simply applied Market Master's compression feature to the six-month campaign he'd already outlined for land-based casinos; within minutes the campaign was shortened to 30 days. He then set his salespeople loose with the program to swamp the riverboat-casino owners with carefully timed phone calls and automatically generated letters--all the while tracking every move in the Market Master database.
But with new jobs flowing in like water, Koenig quickly became aware of how creaky the company's other systems were. Multicom's handling of a large customer-- Delta Queen Steamboat--perfectly illustrated the problem. Each year, the historic Delta Queen had a "layup" period, during which the boat would dock and undergo any necessary repairs. Multicom was responsible for fixing the cabin's music system, theatrical sound system, and the like. Every department in the company got involved. Say the engineers on the boat had to fix faulty wiring. They'd have to first get approval from accounting; accounting, in turn, would have to get approval from production; and finally, production would have to go to fabrication, which would see that the proper parts were ordered and that the job got done. Every time information passed from one department to another, facts would get jumbled and deliveries would be delayed. The procedure resembled a long game of telephone.
