Sales Enablement and CRM Solutions

As a business, sales is the lifeline of the business. Being able to effectively sell products and solutions to your customers involves marketing, customer and sales education, differentiation and driving value proposition for the various product lines. As the volume of sales and the size of the sales force increases, it becomes increasingly important to develop a knowledge and sales enablement infrastructure that will help sales people compete just in time with the right information, focused at the right audience that will maximize the benefits to the company of the customer interaction.

Sales Enabling your Organization
The Sales people in any organization today are dealing with unprecedented levels of complexity – a highly competitive environment, availability of a large number of products, services and solutions to sell and there is always an ever increasing and complex customer demands. In such a situation, it is very important that all the members of your sales team be able to articulate consistent differentiation factors and value proposition to the customers to effectively close or grow an opportunity. You cannot just tell your sales people to “Sell” your products, solutions and services. You must enable them to Sell. This involves providing an organized repository and a Portal environment of an array of tools, content, documents, data, reports and research organized in a fashion that is targeted and easily accessible, all from a secure, centralized location.

CRM Systems serve only one purpose - managing customer and opportunity information. In fact, Sales people spend considerable amounts of time in creating customer research, documentations, meeting preps, analysis for selling etc., and very less amount of time on the CRM system. This does not mean that the CRM systems have to be completely phased out for some other better solutions. The CRM systems are still a part of the overall process, and it is very essential to understand that the functions of the CRM systems have to be augmented with other very important functions like Document Management, Content Management, sales tools and utilities that will utilize the information from the CRM system and elsewhere to help the Sales teams to efficiently close an opportunity.

The marketing department of your organization is a live repository of a lot of invaluable information. They know precisely where the product or solution stands in the market, what kind of customers can be targeted, what pricing would sell the product or a solution optimally, the expected product life cycle, the exact terms in which the products can be sold and many more essential information. This information can be efficiently utilized by the sales teams to sell the right kind of product to the right customer at the right time. A tighter collaboration between the sales and the marketing teams is also very essential part of the sales process of the organization. More over the marketing team can come up with the necessary materials like case studies, product analysis, white papers etc. and equip the sales teams with a wealth of knowledge.

For all the elements to come together and work efficiently, there must be a platform that will allow the teams to publish information, provide tools and utilities for sales, and deliver the information any time, any where. Microsoft SharePoint is the right platform for such an implementation in any kind of organization. With features that allow for portal implementation, content management, in built document management, metadata management, powerful search, security, integration capabilities with external systems, targeting, and a framework for extending the platform to provide tools, it can be positioned in the organization as a sales enablement system in a short period of time.

Optimus BT, with our experience of catering to the sales and marketing requirements of customers like Impac, Elekta etc, have come up with a effective solution to the sales problem by using SharePoint. Some components that could be very effective to the Sales teams include Sales Portal Implementation, extending the CRM system with features like document management, forms, workflows, tracking systems etc., and providing sales tools like Upsell, Cross sell, Opportunity migration tools, competitive analysis tools, customer reference databases, pain point to solution mapping tools etc.