As I speak to more customers and prospects it amazes me how many substantial organisations still do not have access to the basic marketing and sales metrics they need to effectively run the revenue generation side of the business.   By basic metrics, I mean KPI’s like

Marketing

• How many leads are generated?
• Where are the leads coming from?
• How many turn into opportunities or actual sales?

Sales

• What is the sales pipeline for the next x months?
• What deals are closing this month?
• Which deals are not moving through the pipeline?
• What is the customer problem that we  solve for each of our deals?

Although the most effective organisations are adopting ‘Sales 2.0′ approaches to improving sales effectiveness, it seems the vast majority are still using spreadsheets to give them some idea of the sales forecast and don’t have a sense of the basic mathematics that define their sales funnel.

Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0, recently posted a summary of a presentation at Dreamforce on how Salesforce.com uses their own products to manage their sales team.   She makes a great comment about why a lot of organisation don’t get the most out of their CRM applications:

“Most companies don’t have a clearly defined sales strategy and process that helps their sales reps sell and their customers buy.  They don’t focus on designing business processes before rolling out new technology.”

At my company, in the CLOUD, we strongly agree with this sentiment.  Getting your processes right and strong executive management support are critical success factors.  Without them, the technology isn’t going to improve anything.  In our implementation work, we spend a lot of our time up-front, doing a deep-dive into your business process (whether sales, service or marketing) to identify what can be improved and to ensure that the application supports that process effectively.

I just returned from Salesforce.com’s annual conference – Dreamforce, in San Francisco.  Something like 15,000 people attended and the scale and hype were impressive.   Marc Benioff launched the Collaboration Cloud with Salesforce.com’s next product, Chatter, which is essentially a Facebook-like collaboration application.  I think it may have some opportunities inside an enterprise as a way to share information with your teams, but time will tell.  As many observers have noted, the “cloud computing” hype has reached a near crescendo, which can only result in unmet expectations in the short term.  It’s interesting though, when I mention the term to non-IT people, most of them have never heard the term.   Even Salesforce.com is a company that a lot of people are unfamiliar with outside the technology sector.

Regardless, apart from the “Chatter” hype at the conference, there were a lot of incremental product announcements that should render the core Sales and Service applications even more useful.  And I was impressed by the range of vendors marketing applications around the Salesforce.com eco-system.  I’ve wondered about the consulting model around these products, as it doesn’t always seem practical to have the same sort of leverage that you could build a business around with typical Enterprise Applications  (and pre ‘ERP’).   But in talking to some of the large integrators in the US, it appears that it is much the same in the enterprise.  Although configuration times are shorter and there is less IT infrastructure to worry about, that extra effort can be re-focussed in business process design, change management, and user adoption which traditionally got short-changed.  This will be an area of emphasis at in the CLOUD

In The Cloud is my new company – we focus on helping enterprises increase agility and reduce costs through the deployment of software-as-a-service and cloud based applications.  Initially we are providing implementation and development services with Salesforce.com, as well as working with organisations to identify components in their application architecture that may suit development or replacement with internet delivered applications.  We will be adding competencies in Google Apps, Amazon web services as well as some other specific niche SaaS applications in the near future.

I just posted a note the other day looking for information about how people were using social media in relation to CRM – it didn’t take long before I saw this post on Anneke Seley’s Sales 2.0 blog:  Social Networking in Sales.  It has some great concrete examples of sales teams using LinkedIn and Twitter with measurable results.

I wasn’t sure what the definition on Sales 2.0 was, so I looked it up  in Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway’s new book Sales 2.0:

“Sales 2.0 is the use of innovative sales practices, focused on creating value for both buyer and seller and enabled by Web 2.0 and next-generation technology. Sales 2.0 practices combine the science of process-driven operations with the art of collaborative relationships, using the most profitable and most expedient sales resources required to meet customers’ needs. This approach produces superior, predictable, repeatable business results, including increased revenue, decreased sales costs, and sustained competitive advantage.”

It’s a fantastic book for any business interested in improving sales enhanced by technology. You can buy it straight from Amazon below:

I’ve recently started working with dSales, a consulting practice specialising in leading edge processes, technology and skills development to increase sales conversion rates, improve resource productivity, and enhance the customer experience across distributed sales and service teams.   We often enable this processes with technology based on salesforce.com.