The result was that for two years in a row, Multicom's workers remained on the Delta Queen long after it had shoved off for a new season. "Our workers had to sleep in the same cabins the Delta Queen had been hoping to sell to customers," says Koenig.
The situation had always been disturbing, but now that he'd seen how efficiently technology could make things run, Koenig found it unacceptable. His solution was a company intranet, linking every department. Multicom's chief engineer wrote the code for the intranet using an operating system called Linux, which he then ran off two of the company's four servers, along with the company's databases. To make the system companywide, Koenig also had the engineer reconfigure several of Market Master's fields--for example, the one that reminds salespeople to follow up leads and the one that automatically draws up a contract once a sale is complete--for the company databases so that salespeople could tap into the program through the intranet while they were on the road. (The complete Market Master program still sits on a single computer.)
Now every department works off one electronic document per job, which the salesperson begins at the start of a new client relationship. Each week, 5 to 150 leads from the Dodge Report, a commercial lead service, are downloaded directly into the company databases through a program written by the chief engineer. Koenig accesses the leads, assigns each one a rating of one through four (from very cold to very hot), and divvies them up among his four salespeople by downloading the contact information into each person's password-protected area on the intranet. The salespeople take a laptop with a modem along with them on their calls. When a prospect becomes a client, they fill out an electronic "job start form" on the intranet, providing information such as the project end date and any special terms the client requests. Once all the information is filled in, the salesperson hits a button, and an E-mail message is automatically sent to the accounting department. Accounting OK's the project, then zaps the form over to production for scheduling. Last, production shoots the form over to the fabrication department.
The payoff of the system shows up in all phases of a project. Consider the work recently done for a riverboat called Showboat. The job involved four subcontractors, three project managers, and 10 engineers--spread out over three locations (the boat itself, the boat's land-based operation, and Multicom's fabrication shop). Partway into the job, the boat-based rewiring crew realized it needed a thicker cable. Before Multicom's plunge into automation, the project would have come to a halt for several weeks while the accounting department awaited approval from the customer (the thicker cable costs a few thousand dollars more), production waited for the go-ahead from accounting, the fabrication shop waited for production's orders, and the crew waited for the new cable. But this time around, the crew communicated its change of plans instantly to every department. The new cable was delivered within days.
Of course, for every successful automation attempt, there's at least one regret. For Koenig and his employees, the trade-off was obvious. "Now that we're always on time with projects," says Koenig, "we never get to ride on the Delta Queen."
Are you properly automated?
Are you automating your sales force at an appropriate pace? Use the chart below to see where your company falls on the SFA curve.
| PHASE |
TOOLS |
TARGET YEAR |
| One |
Word processing, spreadsheets, E-mail |
Now |
| Two |
Contact managers, electronic expense reports |
Now |
| Three |
Account-territory managers, order-management systems, call-reporting systems, sales-analysis systems, mobile client-server systems |
Now |
| Four |
Sales-configuration systems, opportunity-management systems, marketing encyclopedia systems, telesales, system-administration systems, interactive selling systems |
1998 |
| Five |
Enterprisewide opportunity-management systems, intraenterprise team-selling tools |
2000 |
| Six |
Interenterprise opportunity-management systems, virtual sales organizations |
2002 |
| Seven |
Tools that allow unassisted selling |
2004 |
Source: The Gartner Group.
RESOURCES
Publications:
- "The State of Sales Technology," SMT, December 1996. SMT is the quarterly technology supplement to Sales & Marketing Management (212-592-6412; www.smmmag.com). The article includes a comprehensive list of sales-automation software.
- Sales Process Engineering & Automation Review (SPEAR), a quarterly newsletter put out by the Sales Automation Association (312-245-1094; www.saaintl.org).
Web Sites:
- www.sellmorenow.com , developed by Richard Bohn, president of the Denali Group, an SFA consulting firm. The site includes an SFA needs-analysis questionnaire.
- www.pentech.net , a site featuring an SFA return-on-investment work sheet developed by the Pentech Corp., an SFA consulting group in Atlanta.
Sarah Schafer (sarah.schafer@inc.com) is a staff writer at Inc. Technology.
