Getting Away from Guided-Selling Misconceptions

Many companies are considering guided selling to cut all costs associated with capturing, tracking, fulfilling and communicating the status of orders back to their customers. But doing so doesn’t create top-line revenue for commodity products that are sold best through taking an automated, order-capture approach to all channels. Squeezed by these user requirements, vendors are either aggressively dropping prices or laying claim to the promised land of low-end configuration. Saying a guided-selling application can transform into a configuration system is like trying to putt with a wedge—you’ll get results, but they won’t be what you can predict or necessarily want. Here is how each strategy can deliver results:

• Configuration strategies often have quote-to-order and quote-to-cash workflows at the center of them. Attacking the inefficiencies of quoting workflows that involve channels, partners and direct sales forces outside a company’s firewall is the goal.

• Guided selling excels at automating commoditized product sales that have predictable option selections. Looking for greater inventory turns of highly commoditized products that have little if any variation is where guided selling delivers the greatest benefit. Companies getting the greatest results use guided selling to front-end order capture in global pick, pack and ship business models. What’s causing so much confusion for users are the guided-selling vendors who are anxious to get into the low end of the configuration arena.  They’re pricing at 20% of what a comparable configuration system would cost, yet they are delivering less than that in terms of comparable functionality. Don’t be fooled. We have seen companies initially be tempted to jump into a guided-selling application on price alone but later pay the price for integration and maintenance.  These companies ultimately have to reset expectations with internal and external stakeholders in the project. Define your business strategy first. If it is driving up inventory turns, driving down costs and dropping Days Sales Outstanding (DSOs), then guided selling is for you. However, companies that target quote-to-order and quote-to-cash and need extensive integration of product knowledge, SCM, ERP and sales systems will need to continue to look to configuration technologies to truly affect sales.

Companies getting the greatest results use guided selling for front-end order, global pack and ship distribution business models. Their products have a standard to them without a vast array of customizable options. Companies that benefit the best with quote-to-order have products that are customizable to meet customer needs. Their products may have a minimal amount of standard configuration and can be unique for a vast array of applications. The bottom line advice: Make sure you have a clear business strategy first, then research which selling system would work best to fulfill that strategy. The product and the selling environment usually have a lot of influence when deciding which system to choose.

This is an edited excerpt from “Creating a Winning Financial Strategy Using Quote-to-Order and Guided Selling.” To view this full paper and others, visit www.cincom.com/lrc.

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Louis Columbus, Cincom’s manufacturing industry analyst, says that you can look at this from an indirect and direct sales force perspective. He says it’s even more emphasized for an indirect sales force. For example, take Cisco, a corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking and communications technology and services.  They have product configuration experts that go into the company and tell them what equipment and software they need based on what they want to accomplish.

“Those product configuration experts are in really high demand,” Louis says. “So, if you’re a salesperson at Cisco, getting those guys to work on your project is golden because you can get a quote finished to build the system and then get it off to the customer. You win business by getting the quote to the customer and beating the competition. The product configuration experts are key.”

A lot of companies that aren’t as technologically advanced have indirect sales channels, which means that there are a lot of re-sellers doing the selling.  The same product configuration experts are called upon to support the re-sellers too.  “As you can imagine, these people are pulled in a lot of different directions at once,” Louis says.  

How can Cincom Acquire eliminate non-selling activities?

Cincom Acquire can help solve the problem of spending too much time on these non-selling activities in a couple of different ways.

“Using Acquire and the quotation engine that we have takes the intelligence that the product configuration experts have and puts it into a quoting system. Then, the quote will go in and automatically get built based on what the customer’s preferences and constraints are. Basically, it’s taking all the knowledge of the corporate resource and being able to multiply it across sales channels,” Louis says.

Cincom Acquire eliminates salespeople chasing the expert and gives the experts of the company the opportunity to use more of their intelligence and skills to go do more difficult things. With the quoting engine, they have the opportunity to slow down and focus on the more profitable and higher margin projects.

How would a business benefit from using Acquire?

1) Accuracy of quotes

2) Profits

3) Time

“The order accuracy from companies that use Acquire usually jumps between 60 to 100 percent because it’s no longer being done manually,” Louis says.  “Having it all automated with the work flow that salespeople go through greatly increases accuracy.”

It also increases profits because you can know – instantaneously — if the order you’re running the quote for is going to be profitable based on how much it costs to build.

Cincom Acquire additionally saves time. “The issue about quotes is if you sit on a quote over 72 hours it’s usually gone,” Louis says.  “Acquire gives you a quote within minutes.”

For more information about Cincom Acquire, visit http://acquire.cincom.com.

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APCs overall objective was to simplify the engineer-to order process, which was very time-consuming and expensive. The manual configurations of every order were taking extensive amounts of resources as well as the engineers’ time.  Cincom utilized Cincom Acquire™, which increased quote quality while guiding salespeople to the best product to suit the customers’ needs.  It also allowed for much more efficient cross-selling and up-selling.

By automating the buying process, customers gained the ability to learn about APC’s offerings, such as how to configure a solution to meet their needs and how to receive quotes and shipping estimates, all in real time. These time savings reduced APC’s quote time from three to five days to just fifteen minutes resulting in the ability to get product information and answers to simple application questions to customers faster.

Click for the full case study PDF.

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The Cincom Acquire™ Guided Selling and Product Configurator® enabled a 50% reduction of Sultex’s sales cycles, and processing time was reduced from days to minutes. Cincom offered efficient answers to multiple problems, all in one solution.

Smart selling element:

Complexity Doesn’t Say Sales

Before implementing Cincom Solutions, Sultex salespeople made note of the customer requirements and forwarded the information to the back office.  From there, a proposal was generated and sent to the customer via mail, sometimes after multiple consultations and corrections. Since this took a substantial amount of time, this slowed down the sales process considerably. Now, using the Cincom Acquire™ Guided Selling and Product Configurator, sales representatives and customers come together to develop a first draft of the configuration using a laptop. Even in offline mode, all series that are released for sale are accessible.  This allows salespeople to offer a binding price while displaying proposal margins and commissions. The configuration draft is then automatically sent to engineering, which is responsible for implementing any special customer requests and for transferring the final order definition to the ERP system.

Learn more how Sultex’s complex problems were simplified through Cincom.

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In discussions with dozens of manufacturers, a simple truth emerges: Quoting systems, even the most manual, are the lifeblood of any sales pipeline. Pricing has become the competitive weapon of choice in many industries; however, it’s the last differentiator in several consolidating markets.

With such a critical role in defining profitability, pricing is getting much attention this year, from the CEO level down.

Amazingly even CIOs who have at times fought re-defining selling systems in favor of spending IT money and time on consolidating ERP systems, databases, or portals, are being driven to make selling systems a priority by CEOs, Sales VPs, and General Managers who all see margin being sacrificed due to pricing inaccuracies and disconnects on quotes. The combination of accurate pricing and quoting is emerging as a priority in 2006, and it’s because so many manufacturers realize that thousands if not millions of dollars are being left on the table due to pricing inaccuracies.

The First Step: Re-defining Quotes With Pricing in Mind

When sales are up and times are good, it’s easy to ignore the occasional pricing mistake on a quote, or solve it through a quick phone call or even a follow-up visit. When times get tough, pricing gets micromanaged because margin on every deal needs to deliver in order for a manufacturer to stay profitable. In reality, manufacturers experiencing rapid growth yet complacent enough to let pricing be managed some of the time, checked for accuracy maybe once a month, and rationalizing all this with “we’ll make it up on volume or that big OEM deal” doesn’t cut it anymore.

Their competitors can sense this on deals where prospects share pricing data and pounce when they find you, their competitor, maybe out of sync with the going price by even 5% to 7%. Competitors are watching, your prospects and customers are watching, and if you’re publicly held in the United States, even the SEC is watching through Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. All of these factors and more are making pricing the competitive weapon of choice in selling and also the most important but least managed part of a quote.

The Second Step: Knowing a Good Deal When You Sell It

For those fortunate manufacturers that have growing businesses, there’s a tendency to use rules of thumb, or what many call the assumption base of their companies to make quick decisions on what price to put on quotes as well. This is different than pricing accuracy, which is the point of the first step, as this step deals with analyzing the mix of customized products, services, and margin to determine if the deal the quote is meant to bring in will in fact be profitable or not. When it comes to this point, manufacturers need to quit relying exclusively on the intuition of their sales managers and executives and truly know if the deal they are trying to get through a quote is truly profitable or not. Only by integrating quoting and pricing along with the necessary tools to figure out margin can a manufacturer hope to charge prices that will deliver the highest margin possible.

The Third Step: Unleashing Pricing on New Products

Manufacturers spoken with regarding the payoff of bringing pricing into quoting remark that their biggest payoffs come from being able to quickly launch new products and pricing together, even into their dealer and distributor channels. Once the connection between pricing and quoting systems have been made, one truck manufacturer has been able to both define custom configurations of its products and pricing for each component within five weeks – a remarkable accomplishment when one considers these trucks are highly specialized and have thousands of parts and components. The lag time for one storage products vendor in pricing updates for their quoting and online sales systems was solved through brute force on the part of marketing directors spending all weekend long every three months loading up pricing tables and ensuring they were loaded and working right.

New product introductions are very tough to align with pricing, especially in to-order customized products sold through channels where each channel partner has a different pricing table. Yet if you are looking for a reason to get your quoting systems aligned with pricing, product strategies and turn them into a selling competitive advantage, the next product introduction is reason enough to look for improving how these systems work in your company. Quotes are literally just the beginning, and the integration of pricing and product customization, when managed to a series of goals is what helps to transform how companies are profitably selling today.

The Bottom Line:  When sales drop off, many companies put their prices into free-fall, sacrificing millions in margins. When sales are up, margins aren’t looked at closely and as a result, even greater opportunities for profits are lost. What’s needed isn’t the start of a price war or premium pricing. What’s needed is the synchronizing of quoting, pricing and product strategies, making selling the competitive strategy.

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The speed of a sale is an important driving force for competitive advantage.  A main hindrance in the sales process is the lack of knowledge a sales channel has about product information relating to customer needs. The problem that many companies encounter is a sales channel that may not have the necessary knowledge available to fully utilize customer’s needs, often resulting in an abandoned sale. When a sales channel lacks effective information regarding new products and enhancements or customer applications, it may not seem like a direct loss, but the company is losing money. Unawareness loses revenue.

For each day that a sales channel is unaware of (or uncertified on) new products, product enhancements and customer applications, revenue is lost. Rapid development and deployment of value streams that support and educate the sales channels are essential to a new product rollout. Sales effectiveness is increased with the knowledge of related products and their fit with customer needs provided at the point of need. Traditional wastes measured in process delays, rework and information defects equate to millions of dollars in lost revenues, market-share erosion and customer retention. Estimating, however, is typically disjointed from the Customer Fulfillment process, resulting in information delays and queue times for the opportunity.

Out of 33 Days, Only Six Yield Value

Based on representative samples from typical complex manufacturing price estimating, the pricing process yields six days of value-added activity compared to 27 days of non-value-added activity. In other words, 87% of the time, the opportunity is either waiting for information from other process tasks, or the information is simply being reformatted without any additional value being added at that process task. Strategic Front-Office Improvements

Strategic Front-Office Improvements

Based on a recent Cincom survey, 75 percent of the companies surveyed report no plans to evaluate front-office infrastructure or processes in the next 12 months. However, the positive spin is that 25 percent will do just that and gain a significant competitive advantage in the bargain. At some companies, it takes 40 hours to turn around a formal quote once a sales rep gathers the necessary specifications. A closer look at the steps involved may show only four hours of real heads-down work in those 40 hours.

The ability to quickly submit new information about a product and how customers can benefit from its new applications can streamline the sales process. Giving the most up-to-date information to sales channels gives them the ability to seek out the best possible solution for a customer’s needs. Paying close attention to sales channels and their knowledge about the products helps create a dynamic system of adaptability increasing efficiency and better suiting the needs of customers. The better suited a sales channel is at identifying and catering to customer needs, the better the ability to increase sales and establish positive customer relations.

This is an excerpt from “Executive Strategies: Raising Revenues.” Read the full report in our Executive Strategies e-book series.

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Chief’s cooling storage units vary immensely due to different size constraints, product variations and differences in terms of the type of refrigeration/ventilation types, lighting and color choices. Chief also needs to consider the fact that these kinds of details change for every customer, across the globe. Making matters more complex, Chief distributes its products from three different locations. Streamlining and improving the efficiency of the three distribution facilities to meet individual customer’s needs worldwide was a serious undertaking. The Cincom inquiry to order software gave Chief the ability to organize and simplify the customer ordering process. The results speak for themselves with savings in time and money. A 50% decrease in misquoted pricing errors is saving Chief €250,000 annually and price quotes take 50% less time to generate. Another complex business situation simplified through Cincom.

More details about the Chief success story

Manufacturers step onto a global playing field each day. The ability to compete and win business, then fulfill orders accurately, reliably and profitably distinguishes the manufacturers that grow versus those that shrink or go out of business altogether. In manufacturing, speed and accuracy already beat out geographic preferences thousands of times a day. It is time for many manufacturers to step up and use field-to-factory strategies to become the global competitors that they are capable of being. The bottom line is that field-to-factory strategies—the ability to have a clear view of what is happening in your channels and align manufacturing to support its fulfillment—will make or break thousands of manufacturers, according to AMR Research. To be pre-emptive and aggressive about your growth as a company is to embrace and excel at a field-to-factory vision. When you consider these facts, you will see that this concept is all about creating competitive strength. Each of the bullets below describes the specifics of how companies are relying on field-to-factory strategies to compete globally.

• Between 70% and 80% of orders from manufacturers need further work and often re-entering, compared to a 20% average across all industries. The complexities of capturing orders in manufacturing make adopting field-to-factory strategies a must-have. Add in the complexities of managing global orders, and the need for delivering a clear and consistent message to customers becomes clear.

• Only one in three orders can be filled the first time. For one heavy-truck manufacturer, only one order out of seven is filled correctly the first time. Think of the competitive advantage this manufacturer could attain from just a slight improvement. Field-to-factory strategies can deliver greater synchronization and results.

• Consolidate and synchronize your channels. According to AMR Research, 51% of companies have more than one order capture system, and in manufacturing companies, the average number of fulfillment systems is 5.3. Synchronizing these order capture systems and creating a competitively strong and synchronized field-to-factory link is critical.

• Only one in three companies that rely on indirect channels has systems that are integrated with each other. Integrating pricing, order capture and fulfillment systems differentiates those companies that are capable of responding quickly to unforecasted product orders.

Think of field-to-factory strategies as the glue that unifies your company’s demand, supply and product processes and organizations. Field-to-factory strategies progress through the steps of demand sensing, demand shaping and defining profitable demand response or fulfillment.

How Do Your Numbers Compare?

This is an edited excerpt of “Executive.Strategies.2, Raising Revenues.” To read the full document, visit  http://manufacturing.cincom.com/forms/CMUS1003116-1ExecutiveStrategyForm.

“You need to educate your sales force on new products and all the new features and options that they may have,” Says Gregor Newland, Partner Channel Manager for Cincom’s Acquire product line. “Problems arise when the sales team starts to repeatedly make mistakes because they are not as familiar as they should be with the products.”

The mistakes usually aren’t little blunders that can be overlooked or corrected easily either. “If sales reps are not up to speed on products it will cause a dramatic increase in costs for the company because they will have to keep going back to the customer saying ‘we can’t build that’,” Gregor says. “Not only does it cause a dramatic increase in costs, but it also causes a dramatic decrease in customer satisfaction.”

“At the end of the day, it’s about two things,” says Gregor. “From the customer standpoint, it’s about getting the right product. From a manufacturing standpoint, it’s about getting the product right. Those are two very different things. That’s the biggest challenge one faces when introducing a new product.”

How do you get sales reps and channel partners up to speed on new and existing products without wasting a lot of time and money? Gregor says to “take the knowledge out of the heads of the experts that you have in your company, automate the knowledge, and push it out to the dealers and sales force where it belongs.” A product configurator would help you do this.

The Role of Product Configuration

A product configurator allows you to easily and accurately change the features of a product in minutes. They can provide a guided selling environment that lets people choose options without tracking down an expert on the phone, eliminating wasted time and money.

“A product configurator makes it impossible to make a mistake,” Gregor says. Why? “Because if an option isn’t offered to you then you can’t choose it,” he says. “You can’t accidently choose an option that’s unavailable.”

“At the end of the day, it’s about moving expert knowledge out into the sales cycle where it belongs,” Gregor explains. “That’s always been the biggest challenge for new products. How do I move the knowledge? A product configurator allows you to do it immediately.”

Image: time and money

Pellerin Milnor’s lead distribution was cut from weeks to days, even hours. Advertising effectiveness was also now recordable so advertising resources could be better distributed. Cincom’s Inquiry-to-Order Solution® helped Pellerin Milnor adapt quicker to customer demands and made them better able to gain market share against the competition.

The value of outsourcing for midrange companies

Midrange companies in particular benefit from the lower pricing available from companies like Cincom, says one internet publisher that tracks the application service provider (ASP) industry. These companies make constant changes to both their business models and technology in order to compete. The ASP model gives them access to sophisticated technology that previously only the largest companies could afford, according to Outsourcing Center. Midsized companies and those enjoying rapid growth are turning to ASPs to supply a cost-effective solution that can grow with their changing needs. The buyers are leaving the training, installing and upgrading of this software to them. The result: Buyers can re-engineer their business practices at a price they can afford.

Click for all the details of Cincom Solutions for Pellerin Milnor

Alliant Energy needed a way to shorten its typical 30-day billing cycle for delivered projects. Serving 1.3 million customers, this could be a complex problem. In addition every project was diverse such as dealing with different schools, hospitals and factories, and each customer was looking for a unique solution a standard invoice just would not work.Cincom Acquire software was able to shorten the Alliant Energy 30-day billing cycle to just three days. This faster communication saves Alliant Energy $200,000 annually. Improved communication, enhanced efficiency and a simplified invoice process, a “textbook” example of Cincom Acquire’s success.

Alliant Energy has also applied the power of the Cincom Acquire Guided Selling and Product Configurator to the agricultural side of its business. At issue was stray voltage in dairy barns with older wiring systems. Stray voltage often generates an electrical shock to the cow during milking and can prevent or reduce the cow’s milk production. Using combinations of grants and financing loans, Alliant Energy can now easily show farmers how an upgrade in wiring to their barns can actually produce a cost savings.

View the full case study here

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One of the most common roadblocks is how product knowledge and information gets used in the selling process. In many companies, there are just a handful of product experts who respond to quotes and support the build-to-order process. These teams get requests for support that can often outstrip the time they have to respond to them. As a result, the best product experts in a company easily get stretched too thin and inevitably quotes and responses to customers’ questions on custom configurations don’t get answered in time.

Start by Getting Bottlenecks to Product Expertise Out of the Way

A few companies set up a knowledge base online that attempts to capture all of their product expertise. Over time, data is captured yet it still lacks the context that sales representatives and prospects need to determine if the company’s products can meet their needs. Knowledge bases are a great idea for setting up a database for internal use. The data often lacks the context of the unique needs, despite many of these being quite large in terms of data stored. The situation in which many companies find themselves is having to republish the content for use internally, hoping to grow more product experts. This just adds more people; it does not solve the process problem. This approach reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

-John Maxwell

What this quote means in the context of quoting and product configuration is that it takes a commitment on the part of companies to take an honest look at how they are making the best use of product experts. Is it the best use of their time to take on every quote sequentially over Microsoft Outlook, research it and then write or respond? Or is their expertise best saved for deep-dive sales calls with the biggest accounts that are looking not just for price and availability, but an entire solution? By automating the quoting and product-configuration process, companies are freeing up product experts to be more effective in their largest accounts. Face time is the ultimate compliment you can pay any prospect or customer, and the best margins come for solutions being sold, not just products alone. Automating the quoting process by transforming product experts’ knowledge into a rules base that can be used for completing quotes 24/7 breaks this cycle that can take nearly all a product expert’s time.

The Hidden Costs of Wasting a Product Expert’s Time

One of the most valuable sales resources any company has are its teams of product experts. Managing their time efficiently has major implications on the performance of any company. If anyone ever doubted that time is money, travel and work with a product expert for a week. See how many quotes, deals and up-sells they make happen with their deep expertise of products, solutions and unique applications. Their titles vary widely depending on the companies they work for. Yet all share a common trait. They are the “go to” people for getting quotes done right, closing deals and getting solutions pulled together quickly.

Figure 1, Finding Competitive Advantage, shows how orders and margins can quickly get recued when a product experts’ time is not maximized. Yet the losses to companies do not stop there. Often companies will add headcount instead of fixing the original problem. CRM, ERP and supply chain management (SCM) systems are often not integrated together either, because the product experts are doing the work of what these systems, once integrated together, could do. There is also a lower sales close rate and a lack of customer satisfaction because errors often results in orders.

Figure 1: Finding Competitive Advantage

[click image to enlarge]

Transforming Selling Time into a Competitive Advantage

When companies choose to streamline their quoting and product-configuration strategies, they often see a reduction in order rework costs, order cycle times drop and there is a significant reduction of between 20% to 50% in engineering and product-expert support. Figure 2, Funding Competitive Advantage, illustrates the most common benefits of automating quoting and product-configuration strategies. The commitment on the part of companies to transform themselves also leads to more efficient system and process integration. The net result is that orders are captured more accurately and lead to great customer satisfaction over the long term.

Figure 2: Funding Competitive Advantage

[click image to enlarge]

Conclusion

Trust is the new currency that is driving sales. To earn and keep trust, companies must deliver significant transformations to their customers’ businesses. Often product experts are relied on to define the solutions and strategies for doing this. Do not risk burning these valuable people out. Consider how you can automate quoting and product configuration, in effect propagating their knowledge through your sales force and distribution channels. Then you can have them focus on your largest customers and drive greater profitable growth by selling solutions rather than forever chasing down quotes and responses to orders.

What do you do? Ask them as a next step to review something for you, says Mark Hunter in “The Sale You Can’t Close,” appearing in this month’s issue of Expert Access, offers tips on how to move the stalled sale.

Check out the article here:

The Sale You Can’t Close

Re-evaluate processes as they are today and set reasonable benchmarks. This is a critical first step since you need to have a baseline measurement of performance that accurately defines where you are today so that improvements can be measured from both the automation of tasks and the selective application of technology.

Define a set of core metrics that best represent your sales, operational and service needs. It’s critical to not set too many metrics of performance as the task of capturing and reporting them will start to outweigh your ability to do anything with the data. Instead, create a streamlined scorecard you can use for monitoring the improvement in quote-to-order, cash conversion cycle/assemble-to-order, build-to-order and engineer-to-order strategies.

Metrics to consider for your scorecard include the following. These are the ones that are most often used.

[For a complete table, visit http://www.cincom.com/lrc and view the whitepaper “Driving Information Closer to the Buyer.”]

Accuracy of orders – Companies have found that when orders have dropped below 60% accuracy, there is something systemically wrong with the order capture, fulfillment and service aspects. Monitoring this metric on a monthly basis gives you a very clear insight into what’s happening with your customer-facing order processes – or more plainly put, how you are serving your channels and customers with order capture.

Cost per configured customer order – While this isn’t a commonly reported statistic, it’s critical to do the hard work to get this figure and track it monthly. The extra effort is worth it because you get a great measure of before-and-after profitability in your order workflows when you define a process to capture the cost per configured order. Even manually redefining this process creates greater value, and having this metric of cost per configured customer order should drop because of your efforts.

Order cycle times for standard versus configure-to-order products – this is a telling statistic that will have a major impact on inventory turns for pick/pack/ship versus semi-customized products, versus the engineer-to- order products custom built to a customer’s exact specifications. Cycle times will show improvement even before any software is used to automate quote-to-order processes.

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) – This is the average number of days your customers take to pay their invoices. Many companies will break this out for both standardized and customized, or to-order products. The reason companies will do this is that often DSOs for the to-order products are longer than DSOs for standardized ones. Often the bigger the gap the greater the potential for improvement. DSOs for configured products can be significantly improved through the use of quote-to-order systems.

Start re-architecting proposals, quote-to-order, pricing and any other process workflows that regularly impact your channels and customers. Both Cincom Systems and AMR Research have seen that even small improvements in customer-facing processes can yield big results. Getting these initial results first will validate that your selection of strategies is on track, and when software is selectively applied to these problems, progressively improving results are typically delivered.

Build a business including an ROI analysis for selectively applying software to quoting, proposals and pricing. By this time, you’re starting to build a track record of results from re-defining these customer-facing processes. The next step is to take a hard look at the software investment and its potential impact on the processes that are showing initial positive results. Cincom Systems can provide templates for handling ROI analysis of your specific to-order strategies. The bottom line on this point is that the larger the number of symptoms of broken processes the higher the ROI. AMR Research and Gartner Group have both defined sales configuration systems as having proven ROI.

This is an edited excerpt of “Driving Information Closer to the Buyer.” To read the full paper, visit http://www.cincom.com/lrc.

Photo: Entering Hyperspace by robotography

So says Tony Parinello in Six Simple Steps Salespeople Forget … Before their First Meeting with a New Prospect appearing in one of this month’s issues of Expert Access, where he highlights six seemingly common-sense steps that we have all seen committed at one time or another.

Such as the time I had a meeting with a vendor and he showed up at our address … from 11 years ago! He didn’t double check to make sure the address that showed up in Yahoo! Maps was the real address of our building. (It wasn’t.) Fortunately, for him I was understanding and rescheduled. But I know others who wouldn’t be so kind.

To see all 6 of Tony’s steps, check out the article here:

Six Simple Steps Salespeople Forget … Before their First Meeting with a New Prospect