Proponents claim that sales force automation systems can improve the productivity of sales personnel. Here are some examples:

• Rather than write-out sales orders, reports, activity reports, and/or call sheets, sales people can fill-in prepared e-forms. This saves time.
  
• Rather than printing out reports and taking them to the sales manager, sales people can use the company intranet to transmit the information. This saves time.
  
• Rather than waiting for paper based product inventory data, sales prospect lists, and sales support information, they will have access to the information when they need it. This could be useful in the field when answering prospects’ questions and objections.
  
• The additional tools could help improve sales staff morale if they reduce the amount of record keeping and/or increase the rate of closing. This could contribute to a virtuous spiral of beneficial and cumulative effects.
  
• These sales force systems can be used as an effective and efficient training device. They provide sales staff with product information and sales technique training without them having to waste time at seminars.
  
• Better communication and co-operation between sales personnel facilitates successful team selling.
  
• More and better qualified sales leads could be automatically generated by the software.
  
• This technology increases the sales person’s ratio of selling time to non-selling time. Non-selling time includes activities like report writing, travel time, internal meetings, training, and seminars.
  

Advantages to the sales manager

Sales force automation systems can also affect sales management. Here are some examples:

• The sales manager, rather than gathering all the call sheets from various sales people and tabulating the results, will have the results automatically presented in easy to understand tables, charts, or graphs. This saves time for the manager.
  
• Activity reports, information requests, orders booked, and other sales information will be sent to the sales manager more frequently, allowing him/her to respond more directly with advice, product in-stock verifications, and price discount authorizations. This gives management more hands-on control of the sales process if they wish to use it.
  
• The sales manager can configure the system so as to automatically analyze the information using sophisticated statistical techniques, and present the results in a user-friendly way. This gives the sales manager information that is more useful in:
  
• Providing current and useful sales support materials to their sales staff
  
• Providing marketing research data : demographic, psychographic, behavioural, product acceptance, product problems, detecting trends
  
• Providing market research data: industry dynamics, new competitors, new products from competitors, new promotional campaigns from competitors, macro-environmental scanning, detecting trends
  
• Co-ordinate with other parts of the firm, particularly marketing, production, and finance
  
• Identifying your most profitable customers, and your problem customers
  
• Tracking the productivity of their sales force by combining a number of performance measures such as : revenue per sales person, revenue per territory, margin by product category, margin by customer segment, margin by customer, number of calls per day, time spent per contact, revenue per call, cost per call, entertainment cost per call, ratio of orders to calls, revenue as a percentage of sales quota, number of new customers per period, number of lost customers per period, cost of customer acquisition as a percentage of expected lifetime value of customer, percentage of goods returned, number of customer complaints, and number of overdue accounts. More complex models like the PAIRS model (by Parasuraman and Day) and the Call Plan model (by Lodish) can also be used.
  

Advantages to the marketing manager

It is also claimed to be useful for the marketing manager. It gives the marketing manager information that is useful in :

• Understanding the economic structure of your industry
  
• Identifying segments within your market
  
• Identifying your target market
  
• Identifying your best customers
  
• Doing marketing research to develop profiles (demographic, psychographic, and behavioral) of your core customers
  
• Understanding your competitors and their products
  
• Developing new products
  
• Establishing environmental scanning mechanisms to detect opportunities and threats
  
• Understanding your company’s strengths and weaknesses
  
• Auditing your customers’ experience of your brand in full
  
• Developing marketing strategies for each of your products using the marketing mix variables of price, product, distribution, and promotion
  
• Coordinating the sales function with other parts of the promotional mix (such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and publicity)
  
• Creating a sustainable competitive advantage
  
• Understanding where you want your brands to be in the future, and providing an empirical basis for writing marketing plans on a regular basis to help you get there
  
• Providing input into feedback systems to help you monitor and adjust the process
  

Strategic advantages

Sales force automation systems can also create competitive advantage. Here are some examples:

• As mentioned above, productivity will increase. Sales staff will use their time more efficiently and more effectively. The sales manager will also become more efficient and more effective.(see above) This increased productivity can create a competitive advantage in three ways: it can reduce costs, it can increase sales revenue, and it can increase market share.
  
• Field sales staff will send their information more frequently. Typically information will be sent to management after every sales call (rather than once a week). This provides management with current information, information that they will be able to use while it is still valuable. Management response time will be greatly reduced. The company will become more alert and more agile.
  
• These systems could increase customer satisfaction if they are used with wisdom. If the information obtained and analyzed with the system is used to create a product that matches or exceeds customer expectations, and the sales staff use the system to service customers more expertly and diligently, then customers should be satisfied with the company. This will provide a competitive advantage because customer satisfaction leads to increased customer loyalty, reduced customer acquisition costs, reduced price elasticity of demand, and increased profit margins.
  

Disadvantages

Detractors claim that sales force management systems are:

• difficult to work with
  
• require additional work inputting data
  
• dehumanize a process that should be personal
  
• require continuous maintenance, information updating, and system upgrading
  
• costly
  
• difficult to integrate with other management information systems
  

Encouraging use

For all the reasons stated above many organisations have found it difficult to persuade sales people to enter data into the system. For this reason many have questioned the value of the investment. Recent developments have embedded sales process systems that give something back to the seller within the CRM screens. Because these systems help the sales person plan and structure their selling in the most effective way they give a reason to use the CRM.
 

TrueSales Corporation released a new version of their Quote to Order Management software and ConfiguratorPlus.
You now can get into a complete quoting software package for a fraction of the price. You can also get the configurator technology already integrated with it. You can get a complete system for cheap.

How can they do it?
Well, they have designed there software to pull data in a unique way that allows users to use the system quickly and not have the sluggish reactions you get with web pages. You actually run the application on your desktop and it connects to the remote secure database and pulls the data as needed and also preloads data so you don’t have to wait.

The configurator run locally and saves and pulls data from the database as well. You don’t even know you are using a hosted system.

Why would someone want to have a hosted system?
Good questions, well the simple answer is it is cheaper. You get into a complete system fast and cheap. But what is great, is the system its self is not cheap. You get a tried and true system that has been banged on and upgraded over the course of 14 years. This is not some little “cheapy” quote system that you can download for free or buy for $200. This is a full blown System Application that can support your entire companies front end solution.

You have Accounts, contacts, parst database, multiple users, price and cost books, the industries most robust and universal configurator, automatic email notifications, reports and much more. This system is loaded! The SmartQuote application is powerful enough to grow with any company no matter the size. It’s just now cheap enough to allow everyone to have a great solution to their business front end issues.

On-line or hosted configurators are way over priced. For the type of configuration you can do on most hosted configurators with the price you pay, you might as well just paid a programmer to build your own custom application.

We all know, custom apps are a serious money drain. Once you create it, you have to maintain it. Why not just pay for one that is already built and fits all your needs?

Usually cash flow or the risk of the true use of a configurator is what slows or evens stops the purchase of configurator software. That is why hosted or online configurators were created. Many say they can do it all, but can they really?

If they could then everyone would be using them as long as the price is right.

I believe that www.configuratorplus.com can host nearly every possible online configuration. With a true rules based and stateless configurator, it is awesome. The price is incredible as well. To have unlimited use is crazy, the only charge is a monthly charge per rule file. That is great considering you can get your entire sales force to configure orders or products 100% accurate every time now for one low price. Not by use.

Finding www.configuratorplus.com, www.wrighttools.com and www.repquotes.com has helped every aspect of my business. Keep up the good work. You could configure a jet (and I know that Joe has) with these tools.

Where can configurators take my company? I have been asked that question a few times.
What makes answering that question difficult is the terminology translations that have to be made because everyone has a different understanding as to what a configurator is.

To some the configurator is a guided selling tool or sales automation. To others it is a product builder or product designer tool and to others it might just be all lumped into a “logic compiler”. But if you ask me, I will say it is the “golden key to many company’s dungeon of doom!”.

What a configurator can do for a company is to allow the company to finally address the horrible dungeon of doom lurking below the foundations. It allows a company to finally address the things that plague them from the point they take quote/order/questions to the point of fulfillment or answer.

Some companies turn to CRM systems like SalesForce.com thinking they need to better know their customers. Some companies turn to sale and order management tools like WrightTools so they can see where they are with the sales cycle. Some try to use an ERP system like Fourth Shift to stuff the order in head first and many, and I mean MANY companies turn to the catch-all of software, Excel. Those are GREAT tools for what they are designed to do.

If you want to properly take “care” of your customer, don’t screw up their quotes, orders or questions. It’s called a pre-emptive strike to failing! And if you don’t, you stand a chance to loosing another to the dungeon of doom! Make sure your sales or support team has the tools to make sure every quote/order/questions is 100% accurate or at least shoot for the 80/20 rule and reduce the number of mistakes by a large margin.

How?

Well that is a much deeper discussion that is unique to every company. But the basic answer, “control your company and product variables.”

But today I just wanted to answer, “Where can configurators take my company?”. If you can see your company improving their ability to reduce the errors they make with customers then you are definitely moving in the right direction. Sometimes and usually that tool is a configurator. Imbed it with any application or tools your people need to increase their success rate with your customers. Help them open the doors to the dungeon of doom and let those people free!

What about using a configurator to build an options package for ANYTHING? Not just a manufactured product. Shouldn’t you be able to do that?

Where business happens!

Everyone seems to have a configurator software package they want to sell you. Some are industry specific and others are a one-size-fits-all package. Which one is the right one?

What is the right configurator software for me?
Do lots of research. Not just for different software packages but research your needs and really understand why you need specific types of features in a software package.

• Why do I need configurator software?
• Who will benefit if I have a configurator software package?
• When and where can I use my configurator software?
• What do I want for a final output?
• What can I do with the output?
• Can I or do I want to host the software?
• Can I customize the interface for my needs?

These are a few basic questions that you need to ask yourself when you want to find what will best work for you.
Lets use an example of a Fence manufacturer.

Why do I need configurator software?
I have a product that is never the same for any customer but every fence uses the same materials and labor costs. The only thing that changes is the type, style and dimensions.

I use spread sheets, supplier manuals and tribal knowledge to put my quotes together.
I am usually pretty close to my estimate and I usually don’t make errors. But when I do, they can be small or big. Either way, errors cost me time and money.

I am so busy making quotes that I can’t grow my company by getting more jobs. I spend too much time estimating the jobs I do have.

I can hire more help to estimate but it will take more time bringing them up to speed than it would be faster to just do it myself. The new person would more likely make more mistakes because they won’t know all the little in’s and out’s.

Who will benefit if I have a configurator software package?
My customers usually have to wait 1 to 24 hours or sometimes even longer to get an accurate estimate from me.

I usually can give them a verbal estimate and will send them an actual estimate by mail, email or call them back on the phone.

When I make an error, my customers usually are not 100% satisfied unless I assume all blame for the error and eat all the costs. I live off word of mouth so I need that happy customer base.

If I can give an accurate quote with in minutes I have a better chance of landing the job because the customer says “yes” if I am standing in front of them. If I leave to finish the estimate my closing rate drops by 50%.

All I do is quote jobs, I can’t grow my company.

When and where can I use my configurator software?
I am out at the site and need to access my software so I can give the estimate right there and then. If I could just have it on my laptop, hand held or even my cell phone. My close rate would be better.

I’m not always working in the office, if I could access my software via the web or run a local version.

I have other software packages that help me track my customers, quotes, orders and billing but none of them help me configure my product.

What do I want for a final output?
I need my buy list of materials.

I need to know how much material/labor it will take.

I just need a price and the special options the customer picked.

I need EVERYTHING. I need cost, price, margin adjustment, I need to show the customer pictures of the product and options, I need have it build the Bill of Material, break down all elements of the quote separating my different labor costs, allow me to use different supplier parts to cut costs and anything else I can think of!

What can I do with the output?
I am not a very computer or technical company. I just need a simple output like an email, excel file, text document or even just to see it so I can write or type it in my proposal.

I need something that will save me time. I need it to integrate with my other software packages. I need it to integrate with my current quoting software.

Can I or do I want to host the software?
I am a very small company, I don’t have the staff or the knowledge of hosting or maintaining a software package.

I have the staff or the knowledge and can easily manage software.

I have older slower computers that I run software on.

Can I customize the interface for my needs?
I want to allow my customers to come to my website and configure the fence of their dreams!

I have a corporate image that has to be followed for any public display.

My marketing department want to make sure it is “flashy”.

Do I have to be in a specific industry to use ConfiguratorPlus?
No. Good configurator software packages know one size can fit all IF you give them the right tools. Industry specific software works well for company only if your company fits the mold. But, they may be exactly what you need. Usually industry specific software packages and help cut down on the little extra work that is needed for setup and or maintenance.

This site is dedicated to the concept of bolt on configuration technology for order entry systems. Call it Guided Selling. If there are options or choices to be made when buying a product, then a configurator is the way to go. Educating customers and sales people is what this is all about. Think about all the interdependent choices you make everyday. So many things hinge on a complex and nuanced series of options and choices that we often aren’t even aware we’re doing it.

Is life a series of compartmentalized yes/no decisions? Sometimes it seems that way. This blog examines the art and science of choice mangement and recognizing the amazing number of things we use and do that are actually “Configuration Engines.” An example? How about any of the popular tax preparation software programs, like TurboTax. Taken a step further, a manually prepared tax return is a configuration engine, too. Using the same set of forms, you can create a one page 1040 EZ or a 100 page Corporate tax return.

A more abstract example is the recent movie “The Butterfly Effect”, where someone goes back in time making only small changes to his past, which result in monumental (albeit disasterous) changes in his life. More on both of these later. Anyway, the theory of configurators is our playground. Have at it!

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