For many years, technology and programming seemed like a foreign world to many people, even within their own companies, if they weren’t working in IT. Now that so many kinds of technology have become part of daily life, the idea of these systems and processes are a little closer to home and easier to understand as crucial to the way we operate.

Rather than being a part of the invisible background behind a company, technology decisions now involve the entire enterprise. As Mark Lees, Director of Marketing at CSC says, “Any company is the sum of its business processes.” In this video clip, Lees discusses how the future of technology lies in its ability to solve business processes. In an economy where budgets are tight, technology must be leveraged to “provide a competitive advantage and lead to customer growth,” rather than focused on flashy toys (or “cool features and functions,” as Lees calls them) for developers and IT architects to play with. IT decisions need to be customer driven to emerge from the recession.

For example, American Express has a number of initiatives underway that will rely on technology to enhance the cardmember experience; American Express has created a new Global Services Group that unites their U.S. and international cardmember servicing organizations, as well as most processing and support functions across the company, including among others, technology support and certain key processing functions in areas such as finance and human resources.

These kinds of initiatives are technology-fueled programs that cater to the needs of the customer, ensuring that the investment won’t fail to produce a favorable ROI. Mark Lees notes that IT enables “customer growth, customer service, and customer innovation” through its ability to make these business processes more effective, and this is where companies can gain a competitive advantage. He highlights the fact that these processes are executed by people utilizing technology to manage data.

“A credit card company can be described as nothing more than a database. The credit card company mines that database for information on its customers and offers them products that are most appropriate to them.” This is the conclusion Lees comes to in his discussion; companies essential ARE technology.

Whether it is database management or supply chain efficiencies, technology has become the center of organizations today – and their success depends on their ability to optimize these business processes through technology. Knowing that this is the case, there is only one way to approach selling technology to the enterprise: solve their business problems by optimizing their crucial business processes.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Extractable, modifiable, clean, accurate, comprehensive: in an age of customization and automated analysis in mass quantities, these are qualities that we demand of the data we input so that the output is reliable and useful. Whether you’re running through lists of corporate contacts to add to a database for marketing programs or using metrics on consumer buying data to analyze buying trends to optimize your supply chain, we depend on data for so many different aspects of business.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, businesspeople are demanding speed and ease in their data gathering endeavors in order to save as much (precious) time as possible. In marketing and sales especially, there is strength in numbers; blasting a campaign to 80,000 contacts that may not be good prospects is faster and cheaper than handpicking singular people to spend your precious time calling to pitch your product. Dun & Bradstreet understands it’s customers’ need for fast and accurate data; they know that if they can’t provide a platform that is easy to use in order to extract their “commercial data,” which also needs to be kept clean and updated, they will lose market share.

The company expects to spend approximately $110 million to $130 million over the next two years to strengthen its leading position in commercial data and to improve its current technology platform. According to D&B president and CEO, Sara Mathew, “We will create a new data supply chain leveraging outside vendors who have state of the art technology.” The company has migrated its data management responsibilities to Acxiom, who will provide data center operations, technology help desk, and network management functions, which were formerly managed by CSC.

Acxiom was chosen to focus on increasing speed, data processing capacity and matching capabilities. D&B is investing huge amounts of money to provide customers with a seamless integration of higher quality, real time data through a range of “new age” work flows including mobile solutions, social networks, and text alerts. According to CEO Sara Mathew, “Our current infrastructure can be improved. It has impeded our ability to meet emerging customer needs at a time when customers are demanding an increased space of innovation to cope with the softer economy.”

Dun & Bradstreet is clearly tuned into the most recent changes in marketing and technology, and more importantly, how these things affect their customers’ business endeavors. They realize that they must invest in their platform, or their accurate and comprehensive data will be rendered useless. In this economy, people are choosing the easiest and quickest solutions in order to save money, and D&B knows that spending a little extra to optimize their user interface will more than make up for itself with customer renewals and new business.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It’s becoming apparent that technology budgets have finally increased after years of cost cutting and downsizing within the Fortune 1000 and Global 500. With spending finally on the rise, many companies are planning enterprise-wide initiatives to turn their focus back on the customer with hopes of generating more revenue and gaining a competitive advantage. Fortunately, for reps selling technology to the enterprise, countless different technological solutions can be easily aligned to these business needs and help win more business.

H&R Block is a great example of a company that has entirely turned around its strategy and is ready to fully engage with and focus on their customers. Improving issue resolution when clients call their contact centers will be a priority for them in 2010, as they plan to invest around $10 million in the project. The company’s call centers field approximately 90 million contacts annually with nine million of these contacts being fielded by live agents. They plan to:

• Improve functionality, access and connectivity, which will allow appointment setting and other important services at the call center.
• Invest in training and processing system improvements so that they can better solve client issues during the first call.
• Implement 32 initiatives to reduce the need for client calls in the first place.

If you are selling enterprise technology, chances are one of your offerings can help solve customer contact issues, whether it is routing technology, a CRM system or add on, or even something as broad as a customizable business process management solution. These customer-facing initiatives are huge business drivers for companies looking to make a turnaround after the economic downturn, which also makes it the perfect time to solve their business problems; they’re ready to spend money on your solution.

For more ways to solve business problems with technology, check out the free Technology Business Drivers document, complete with 20 free technology sales leads uncovered by Fortune 1000 market analysts.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Due to the turmoil surrounding President Obama’s new health care bill, one of the hottest topics of conversation in this country in 2010 has been healthcare. No matter what school of opinion you side with, both sides of the healthcare spectrum from insurance providers to pharmacies, are continuing to innovate, and therefore providing actionable opportunities to sell technology. This strive to keep a competitive advantage in their respective markets, in conjunction with the continuous industry and political buzz, makes now the perfect time to sell technology to businesses in the healthcare industry.

On the consumer-facing pharmaceutical side, CVS Caremark is taking huge strides and making big investments to improve the customer experience through personalization capabilities and simplification. Not only will it be more crucial than ever to have secure, reliable data storage to host customer and patient data, but CVS is connecting this information with a “customer engagement engine” in its stores. The project, called “RX Connect,” began rollout in the beginning of 2010, and CEO Thomas Ryan stated that CVS will “[make] investments in technology that will position [them] well for the evolving healthcare environment.”

http://seekingalpha.com/article/187379-cvs-caremark-corporation-q4-2009-earnings-call-transcript?page=-1

CVS Caremark CIO Stuart McGuigan said, “The vision behind the merger [with Caremark] was to bring together all the different touch-points in pharmacy care…to create one unified experience for the patient, providing the most cost-effective pharmacy solution for the client or payer. To help make this vision work, our IT organization was presented with the challenge to ensure that we could appropriately support this approach with reliable, scalable technology. This means that we still need to do everything that a good IT department does—doing things faster, better and for less money year over year—but we also need to continually invest in new capabilities to keep CVS Caremark’s competitive advantage.”

http://www.cioinsight-digital.com/cio/200912/?pg=22

It is clear that CVS’ focus for the near future is to create a comfortable, dependable, and personal environment for their customers both in their retail stores and online. Storing all of their patient data and translating it into a functional and personalized service will require huge investments in technology, and it appears that the company is more than ready to take these massive steps.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the health insurance side of the industry and the kinds of initiatives providers are making, and how enterprise technology sales reps can maximize on these opportunities.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Unfortunately, a harsh reality in sales is that, on average, 30% of leads in your pipeline will not convert to close. While sales forecasts are certainly not always correct, because sales can be a very unpredictable line of business, they can be extremely helpful in bringing more deals to close.

Sales forecasts can be helpful for time management for sales reps, as they can highlight which accounts they should spend their valuable time selling to, and which accounts are not highly likely to buy. Then, over time, these forecasts provide historical data on close rates for a variety of types of leads. The more forecasting you do, the more accurate you can become with your predictions if you assess the actual closing rates against your previously forecasted numbers.

The debate of over whether sales forecasting is worth spending time on is a heated issue within organizations and even the blogosphere—and both sides of the argument are valid. It is true that most forecasts are not going to be completely accurate, but it is also true that forecasting accuracy CAN be improved, and also that they can be helpful when they are not 100% correct.

The real issue is how much you depend on your forecast, and even more importantly, what you depend on it for. The worst thing you can do is to treat your forecast as a prediction of the future; depending on not-yet-closed sales to operate your business is, obviously, extremely dangerous, like using a credit card that you might not be able to pay off. In this respect, yes, sales forecasting may not be a good idea.

On the other hand, using this data to analyze patterns in your sales cycle and improve upon the process is a worthwhile endeavor. Sales forecasting templates are a good way to keep this information functional, consolidated and ready to analyze, especially if your CRM system does not already have a sales forecasting functionality. The more you can compare forecasted numbers with actual numbers, the more value you will get out of your future forecasts, and the more accurate they will become.

With a template, you may begin to see patterns in what types of leads are coming to close, which of your products are selling better, and ultimately be able to see how much time you are investing into these deals that is either profitable or a complete waste. Taking the time to fill out a template on a daily or weekly basis forces you to think about where you should be spending your time, and how long it might take you to close the sale, so that you can allocate your efforts appropriately and efficiently.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.