Sales Portals

Despite alluring promises of improved efficiencies posed by information technology, our clients are still faced with daunting sales management problems. Today, our clients speak to us about sales forces that spend too much time in the office executing the administration of selling, or spending too much time gathering information from too many sources for prospects and customers. This results in not enough time spent in front of prospects and customers.

With increasing time and costs associated with complex sales processes, our clients are seeking new ways to integrate the many sales tools available to them and organize the information and applications in a more meaningful way. In short, a sales portal will create a more effective single source for the information and tools most critical to sales people and their management.

An equally difficult problem that our clients face is the global nature of their sales organizations and their ability to respond to changing market forces both globally and locally. An example is developing effective selling strategies for a remote global sales force that considers local market conditions and customer relationships. These complex conditions demand that a portal be designed with attention paid to personalization strategies and user interface design. The manner in which sales teams work at a local level needs to be strongly considered when launching a global sales portal.

Included in these challenges is the ability to communicate the most recent and accurate information on pricing, products, tactics and metrics that reflect performance against objective. Whether by region, product group, office or industry sales portals are most effective when they reflect the ongoing success of each level of the sales organization. Sales dashboards are common tools implemented in portals since they provide any level of view, combined with the ability to drill-down to the detail by region, product or customer.

Essentially, effective sales organizations want to integrate all their business development activities and sources into one portal to increase productivity. The goal is to develop one integrated solution to inform, motivate and train their sales people. The most successful companies measure their success with increased sales force effectiveness and better return from the sales technologies they've invested in.

Companies use sales portals to:

• Provide quick and easy access to customer information and transactional applications that can streamline the order-to-delivery process for sales people (e.g., CRM solutions)
• Provide customer, industry and regional news on product pricing, quotas and other management data to the specific sales people that need timely information
• Provide real-time information on products, product pricing, quotas and other management data
• Provide reports that measure more than quota, but can help sales and marketing executives understand sales force effectiveness
• Provide a platform for collaboration among the highly dispersed sales teams
• Provide training on new products and sales techniques remotely that can be viewed on demand by sales people.

Of course, adoption of a sales portal is highly contingent on the value that it provides to the sales force and the sales force's willingness to change their behavior to adapt to these new tools. It's difficult to promulgate change in a sales force if efficiency and effectiveness cannot be realized quickly. Sales teams often eschew portals that are designed to promote efficiency if the portal requires an inordinate amount of training or time to get familiar with the interface or find what they want. In order to assure adoption of the portal it is important that a portal launch be accompanied by a communications and roll-out plan along with the necessary e-learning components that effectively point out the benefit of the portal and expertly guide them through the new portal interface. These change management programs are critical to the success of a sales portal.

A highly adopted sales portal will provide sales people with the tools they need to become higher performing sales teams and reduce the costs in managing and coordinating those teams.

Find out more about our enterprise management solutions.