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How should businesses manage their cost of sales?
Well-run businesses pay a lot of attention to cost/benefit analysis in most parts of the enterprise, but seem to overlook what it really takes to deploy a sales force and bring in business profitably. Where do you think the obstacles lie? What is business doing right? Where can it improve?
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4 Answers
Hi Ellen,
One obstacle is the variety of places and ways in which the information required to deliver cost/benefit analysis is stored and the number of departments involved.
Here one way to better track cost of sales:
Some CRM tools have the ability to set up sales opportunity process steps and campaigns that allow you to track the costs of each step in the sales process or campaign. While the details of doing this and tracking performance require a significant amount of time, the result is a better understanding of your true costs and resource utilization in sales and marketing processes. Long term, information from these tools integrated with information from expense account reporting can be used to identify best sales practices and to help to develop a performance standardization to best practices.
These tools can help maintain a reapeated cycle of measure, report, analyze, adjust and improve.
Good Hunting. . .
You're welcome, Ellen.
You have touched on the biggest and most often underplanned part of any CRM implementation, compliance by the appropriate users. There are lots of ways to suggest, encourage, require or demand user compliance and great upper management reports are at the bottom of the list. In my opinion, the best user compliance method is to make the utilization of the system so easy and the benefits to the users so large and evident that it becomes their own choice to be compliant.
We could have a conversation about different ways to accomplish that if you like. You'll find my phone number at my company website, http://www.amb-marketing.com if you would like to call and talk.
Good Hunting. . .
Thanks, Steve. Your first sentence is the one that really speaks to me - that one obstacle is the variety of places and ways in which cost/benefit analysis is stored or managed. So far, though, I fear that most CRM users fail to keep track of the good old Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle that you reference. I'll be interested in future comments from you and othera.
Steve, sorry it took me so long to get back to you. You're certainly on the right track. We're already crafted an entire methodology around this issue of productivity in the sales force. Most recently we've begun to develop add-on applets for major CRM players like Salesforce.com and Goldmine based on our methodology. We certainly should have a conversation about this isssue; we may find a lot ofo synergy. Give me a week or two.
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