Why Sales is Goal & Data, not Process Driven
Sales isn’t process driven, I said that 15 years ago, before I started even really working on data systems. My point was that sales people aren’t driven by processes, they’re driven by goals, by bonuses. The “sales process” in the CRM is actually just an attempt to quantify the demand for the business. There are a lot of things that CRM solutions do these days, but they are almost never around the process, they are about the specific engagements and decisions. It is about recommendation engines, risk management, forecasting. Data in fact. The value in a CRM isn’t that it institutes a process, it is that it helps you better measure your business, and insert key insights
My first run in with this was around a Siebel sales person back in 2001. The sales person was selling Siebel’s “Sales Process” as being the thing that would fundamentally change my client’s business. They wanted lots of money to ‘configure’ a process and argued that the design of this process was utterly critical. He explained that sales people would go through each step, and that each step there would be gates and validation. He talked, at quite some length, on how the initial qualification stage was super crucial and you could never move past it without getting things verified.
So my client wanted to test this, he was a smart guy, so he asked me to take aside the sales person, and say that I had another client who absolutely wanted to buy Siebel, but needed to use up before the end of the financial year. My client also knew it was the end of the financial year for Siebel at the same time. So he had me give the sales guy a fax number and to fax over a generic invoice to the company. With a few million in licenses and a million in services that could be drawn down on in the next financial year, but signed and paid this year. The next morning the client and I had breakfast, the fax number was to a subsidiary of this company, and since the last meeting they’d got the paperwork all the way to being ready to sign. The next meeting went as follows:
Client: You use Siebel internally right?
Sales: Of course
Client: Great, can you show me all of the opportunities that you’ve got with us, including all subsidiaries. I don’t need to see the amounts, just the opportunities.
<Sales person prevaricates, but gives in, this is a Q4 sales opportunity as well>
Client: Where is the opportunity at company X? They’re a subsidiary and I know Steve told you about them, I asked him to
Sales: Errr it might not be linked yet
Client: Ok, just show me the steps that opportunity has been through
And so the client got a better discount, and a simpler implementation, and I learned both that sales doesn’t have a process, but also that software sales people react very differently in Q4. Because guess what…
The sales person hadn’t even entered the opportunity into the system yet.
The reality today is that even in process driven areas we are past the stage where process optimization is business advantage. We’ve done a great job optimizing processes, indeed the current supply chain crunch has shown we’ve almost done too good a job, because we’ve enshrined a perceived efficiency into those processes, and when the data, the reality, changed companies struggled to rapidly adapt.
This is what the Data Inversion is about, its about how the next generation of business advantage will be all about goals, about decisions and about data.
