Setting The Agenda: The Next Decade for Sales & Marketing Automation
	By Barton Goldenberg President, Information Systems Marketing Inc.

Sales and marketing automation (SMA) is entering an exciting era. SMA development is marked by a new emphasis on identifying and responding to new business trends that will impact the next decade.

Users continue to want SMA software that fully integrates the needs of senior management, sales and marketing management, sales and marketing personnel, and customers. The concept of fully integrated sales and marketing software is not new, but many SMA automation software vendors are only now realizing what users need.

To meet the needs of the marketplace of the year 2000+, sales and marketing automation software therefore needs to provide the following integrated solution:

• Sales assistance -- contact management, activity management, opportunity management, call reporting, lead tracking, order entry and support, customer contact, and telemarketing;
• Customer care -- leading indicators, account management, maintenance/service reports, and field engineer applications;
• Market intelligence -- competitive intelligence, marketing intelligence and trends, supplier availability, customer financials, and ownership;
• Executive information -- performance analysis, marketing planning, sales forecasting, and human resource management.

In addition to providing the above solution, SMA software also needs to offer new applications within this integrated approach. These new applications -- or software "requirements" -- arise directly in response to the following six major business trends, whose impact will be significantly felt by most major businesses over the next decade.

1. Reengineering requires channeling customer intelligence into corporate information systems.
   
   The first trend is the reengineering of key business processes, defined in 1993 in Reengineering The Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy. They encourage companies to reengineer their business processes to facilitate the manufacturing and delivery of products and services to the customer. To accomplish this, companies need SMA software that feeds customer information through the distribution channel and into larger corporate information systems that are being built by the manufacturing and service departments.
   
   
2. Speed marketing requires speedy feedback on customer preferences.
   
   Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School identified the second trend, speed management and speed marketing. Companies are compressing the product life cycle. For example, IBM builds and ships PCs within 24 hours after receiving an order. Westinghouse has halved the time it needs to issue an invoice. Gillette has decreased the time it takes for a global product launch from three to two years.
   
   Speed marketing is a natural outcome of speed management. For example, to create products or services that have a high chance of quick market success, companies increasingly are turning to product development teams that include research and development personnel, engineers, production personnel, sales and marketing personnel, customers as well as suppliers. To address speed marketing, SMA software therefore must capture and easily disseminate the stated needs and desires of customers and suppliers to all members of the product development team.
   
   
3. Mass customization requires easily identifying customer needs.
   
   Joe Pine, Bart Victor and Andrew Boynton described mass customization, the third emerging business trend, in their article "Making Mass Customization Work" in the September/October 1993 issue of Harvard Business Review. Mass customization provides techniques whereby companies can obtain traditional economies of scale as they master their production processes while customizing products and services to meet the unique requirements of individual customers. For example, Freightliner trucks now offers more than 100 customized versions of its base model, yet continues to mass produce these trucks to maintain lower production costs. To support this emerging business trend, SMA software must make gathering and dissemination of information about customer needs easy.
   
   
4. Relationship marketing requires enhanced knowledge and communication.
   
   Relationship marketing may be the most important emerging business trend of the 1990s. This involves creating close relationships throughout the distribution channel among suppliers, manufacturers, distribution channel members, and customers. The automobile and global chemical companies have led this trend. For example, rather than painting its own cars, Chrysler has engaged PPG to set up a paint shop within Chrysler. It pays PPG per car painted. Dow Europe has created electronic links with trading partners to speed the identification and production of market-driven new products. The results include the creation of a new packaging material based on end-user needs.
   
   To support these relationships, SMA must provide simple, direct links with multiple trading partners. It must support the move from "instruction" to "information" in the field; in other words, rather than facilitating a company's need to tell sales personnel how to sell a product, SMA software will need to support leading companies who are equipping sales personnel with information from both internal and external sources. This information includes sales to date, sales potential, competitive positioning and contacts at the account, as well as financials of the account. In other words, SMA must assist these leading companies in their desire to empower their sales personnel to manage each account or territory.
   
   
5. Customer satisfaction programs require monitoring satisfaction levels and service goals.
   
   Companies are increasingly turning to customer service/satisfaction to keep clients and to differentiate themselves from the competition. Studies confirm that it costs up to five times as much to obtain a new customer as it does to maintain an existing one.
   
   For example, in 1991, Xerox Corp. launched a customer satisfaction guarantee in addition to its customer satisfaction program to reverse its sliding market share in the copier marketplace. Xerox's thrust was to fix the customer, not the machine. This required a close coordination between Xerox's sales, operations and services organization, but the effort has more than paid for itself in terms of increased market share and profits.
   
   SMA software will need to play a key role in customer satisfaction programs. SMA software needs to provide easy formats to allow field personnel to capture and to monitor information concerning customer satisfaction levels. SMA software should link to existing customer service and satisfaction reporting programs to generate customer satisfaction ratings that will help the company meet pre-determined customer satisfaction goals. This requires effective data synchronization tools such as file sharing middleware.
   
   
6. One-to-one marketing requires efficiently collecting customer profiles.
   
   The trend toward one-to-one marketing will revolutionize the marketing strategies of many companies. Defined in Don Pepper and Martha Roger's 1993 book, The One To One Future, one-to-one marketing suggests that companies can segment markets down to single clients.
   
   For example, Ritz Carlton makes a customer profile for each of its customers and makes this profile available to all its hotels worldwide. When a client checks in, the desk clerk can see exactly how that person likes her room -- e.g., no-smoking, feather pillow, close to the exercise club, and a Wall Street Journal in the morning.
   
   While this trend has limitations both within and outside of the services industry, this trend will nonetheless grow as customers take on the larger role of helping companies to design products and services. SMA software must support one-to-one marketing by providing an easy facility to capture customer needs from field personnel and customers through the Internet and other channels. SMA software also must integrate internal and external information such as demographic/lifestyle statistics with information currently held about the customer in the company's databases. Moreover, SMA software must store large quantities of data, which requires compliance with emerging database standards.

The six trends impact the way companies deal with their customers and the way companies will be using creative marketing mixes to penetrate existing markets and to identify and enter new markets. These six trends also imply that SMA software must become more flexible. This means that SMA software vendors must expand their software tool kits to allow customers to create, add, remove and customize business modules within their existing SMA applications.

These six trends also imply that SMA software must easily store and disseminate information on increasingly sophisticated customers to sales personnel in the field. SMA software must also support mobile computing technologies, so that customers and sales personnel can access information directly from the field.

Those vendors who focus on increasing the flexibility and ease-of-use of their SMA software to meet the challenges of these six emerging business trends will be the industry leaders. Customers who leverage the more powerful software that these vendors produce to meet the challenges of these emerging trends,will prosper.

Barton Goldenberg, president and founder of Information Systems Marketing Inc. (ISM), has established his Washington, D.C.-based company as a premier research, market analysis and consulting firm in the area of sales, customer care, and marketing automation, with a specialty in mobile computing. Mr. Goldenberg is also the publisher of the benchmark Guide to Sales, Customer Service and Marketing Automation. He is featured at DCI's Sales Force & Automation Conference.