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Control your supply chain and own as much of the means of production as possible. Then, "get the prices down to the buying power." That was the guiding philosophy of that great early industrialist and creator of the integrated-mass-production operation, Henry T. Ford. Ford's better idea was to relentlessly cut costs by making production more efficient. The end result of Ford's systematic engineering of the production process was staggering. In just 10 years, Ford went from building one
car every hour and a half to turning one out every
10 seconds.
For all his insight into the role production efficiency plays in driving down costs, Henry was blind to the role of market dynamics, which was about to run him over. On top of the automotive market and in total control, Henry told customers they could have his cars "in any color so long as it's black." Faster than you could say "General Motors," Henry was struggling to maintain second place.
Today there is even less room for Henry's marketing myopia. The emergence of the Internet as a market force has increased both the availability of information and the velocity of change by an order of magnitude. As a result, customers have become better informed, products have become more complex, and mainstay mass-market sales strategies have fallen by the wayside as target marketing became de rigueur.
Out of this bubbling cauldron, the wizards of corporate reengineering distilled a new magic marketing philter dubbed customer relationship management (CRM). The essence of CRM is the coalescing of all contact points for customer interaction. To this end, a broad range of software packages is now available, covering everything from call center and help-desk services to sales force automation (SFA).
The CRM focal point for the majority of corporations today is clearly sales force automation. Most SFA software focuses on pre-sales support, order management, and logistics. Some high-end products add modules to provide sales professionals with knowledge about competitors as well as customers. But while it's not hard to document the occasional success story of a company implementing a Sales Force Automation (SFA) initiative, the nasty reality is that business-reengineering efforts like SFA generally sport failure rates on the order of 50-70%. Why is this the case? Just think about what we are trying to automate (i.e., standardize): a sales management function built on unique sales cycles, unique products, unique customers, and unique training methodologies. And what is the goal of this exercise? To gain a unique competitive edge in what turns out to be a singularly interpersonal experience. Small wonder those reengineering wizards put four caveats on any prescription for SFA :
· It is not going to be easy
· It is not going to be fast
· It is not going to be cheap
· It is not going to be an option
Clearly, the big problem with SFA is the major temptation to make SFA a mere technology issue that simply requires the right hardware, software, and communications components. Giving in to this temptation almost always results in one of two ugly scenarios-the first one bad, but the second even worse. The first scenario is the classic IT bugaboo of taking an inefficient or ineffective process and simply compounding the problem by doing it even faster. Worse yet is the "Career Is Over" scenario of taking a working process and complicating it to a standstill. All too frequently, it is this latter scenario that brings an SFA initiative to a crashing halt.
As a result, the big issue for IT is how best to avoid that latter career-ending fiasco. The natural-albeit not the obvious-solution is an Open Source CRM package. Open Source is not just for geeks applying spin locks to tweak OS performance. Open Source plays perfectly into the three critical success factors needed to make mission-critical applications successful:
· Customization · Customization · Customization
As a case in point, OpenBench Labs analyzed Anteil 1.1.3, an Open Source CRM package from Anteil. In its current release, this software is pure SFA in scope. The Anteil package is an Apache Web application, built on a MySQL database, that makes very heavy use of php scripts. This architecture makes the application easily customizable and makes it trivial for sales reps with PCs running some flavor of Windows to access the application. In fact, the fonts set up as defaults in the application are MS Windows fonts like Verdana and Arial. Unless these default fonts are cleaned up in the application scripts, the screens will look far better when run on a Windows client.
While the Anteil screens definitively look better on a Windows client, there is one minor drawback: Anteil's combination of frames and php scripts precludes the use of Internet Explorer as the sales rep's browser of choice. Fortunately, the Netscape browser on Windows works perfectly well.
At the top of Anteil's logical schema are sales reps and organizations. The sales rep's view of the world starts with a one-to-one link to their goals. Sales reps also have direct links to sales opportunities and events. Events can be those that are scheduled and appear on the rep's calendar or unscheduled to-do-list items. Using sales opportunity references, sales reps also have indirect links to products that they are selling. They also have indirect links to the "players"-contacts-at client organizations.
Given the basic database schema underlying the Anteil package, it should be clear that the package concentrates on providing basic sales activity and sales-management tools. This includes such staples as contact management to maintain customer information and histories, as well as activity management to provide calendars and schedules.
When sales reps log into the Anteil CRM Web site, they are immediately presented with a list of action items related to sales opportunities and scheduled to take place that day or that are past due. These items are different from personal items, which can be entered into the sales rep's calendar just as with any PIM. In addition, privileged users can maintain departmental, divisional, and corporate calendars with relevant events-such as monthly staff meetings or trade-show dates-which all of the sales
reps can access. The sales rep is responsible for entering and maintaining basic contact data on prospects and customers, including includes corporate data about the company being prospected and personal data on the contact, dubbed a "player" in the world of Anteil's CRM.
Looking at the database schema from the viewpoint of the prospect organization, there are one-to-many direct links to sales opportunities and members of that organization. Via sales opportunities there are many-to-one indirect links to players, contacts that have been directly linked to a sales opportunity. Via members, there are also many-
to-one indirect links to the contacts table. It is possible for sales contacts to be part of several organizations that are prospective targets.
In addition to these contact-management
functions, Anteil provides rudimentary sales-cycle management tools as well. These include basic scheduler interface between the calendar and sales opportunities to assist the sales rep in call planning and late-action notification.
While Anteil collects sales-quote details and supports standard sales methodology for estimating the potential value of a sales quote, it does not have any extended features to either build quote specifications, validate those specifications, or convert quotes into orders. These external exercises are left to the sales rep.
This targeted simplicity of Anteil should be viewed here as a distinctly positive attribute and not a negative one. For any SFA system to be successful, every single person must use it. And in the case of any SFA system, it is essential for IT to remember that the typical user is the antithesis of a "techie." For systems being designed for user communities where computer literacy is not a given criterion, making the system "too easy" is impossible.
Attention to ease of use cannot be over-stressed. That's because accepting less than 100% user buy-in is a sure prescription for failure. If you implement an SFA system but using the system is not a requirement of employment, then that system will fail. In the words of that great reengineering wizard Michael Hammer, "To succeed at reengineering you have to be a visionary, a motivator, and a leg-breaker."
The final elements of sales-cycle management handled by Anteil are centered on the reporting of sales opportunities and the forecasting of the value of these opportunities as they go from initial proposals to sales wins. To this end, Anteil includes an number of premade php scripts, which can serve as templates for customized reports. While there are no premade reports designed to analyze sales data for trends or sort reports by marketing campaigns, these sorts of extensions can be readily added by IT.
Once again, we see the advantage Open Source software can bring to a mission-critical application like CRM. It simply makes getting boxed into a proprietary corner an impossibility.
For any mission-critical application it is important that IT understand just what a product does and how it does it. In particular, they must understand the database structure, the programming language, and the report writer in order to be able to expand or enhance the application.
It's a safe assumption that you will continue to improve the way you sell over time. As a result, your SFA system will need to be adapted and enhanced or it will simply become obsolete in short order. In the words of the most famous Shaker song, "Simple Gifts," "To turn, turn will be our delight, 'till by turning, turning we come round right."
OPENBENCH LABS SCENARIO
UNDER EXAMINATION
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
WHAT WE TESTED
Anteil 1.1.3
www.anteil.com
HOW WE TESTED
Siliconrax-Sliger Rax2100 Web server running Red Hat Linux v7.0
www.siliconrax-sliger.com
Dell OptiPlex Gx110 workstations running Windows 2000 and Netscape communicator
www.dell.com
KEY FINDINGS
Out of the box, this Sales Force Automation(SFA) application can be run with no IT
development or intervention.
Even though formal documentation is still under development, the application's structure and database schema are readily accessible to any Web-savvy IT staff for modification and enhancement.
The use of frames and php scripting makes it essential to run the Netscape browser on Windows clients and not Internet Explorer.
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