Traditionally companies have constructed their customer facing processes and systems on a departmental or functional basis. Each area – marketing, sales, finance, service, provisioning, support, etc. – made independent decisions about the people, process, technology and data it needed to accomplish its objectives. Unfortunately, this has left many companies with an inability to understand or in some cases even identify their true customers. The result?. . . An inability to optimize revenue and poor customer satisfaction. Case in point, here's what one buyer indicated at an IDC Sales Advisory Service Buyer Panel: “I get at least 2 to 3 calls per week from the same vendor from different sales people, not knowing that the other one called. Do you have a CRM system?” The reason is that there's no overall connection for the entire customer relationship from an organizational as well as a data perspective.
To address this problem, large enterprises are starting to define customer creation as an enterprise process. This has transformative implications for every customer facing function, application, data repository, and business process. One of the critical features of an enterprise customer creation process is customer data standardization. Customer/prospect data must come into and flow through the process in a way that enables transparency and immediacy to all the relevant decision makers. You cannot manage the customer experience without knowing what becomes of a lead, how it performs in the sales pipeline, what kind of deal results, how profitable the relationship becomes, in addition to all the account and contact attributes that accumulate throughout the process. All customer facing functions, in particular sales, need visibility into the whole customer relationship in order to make decisions that have optimal impact on business metrics like revenue and margin growth – instead of departmental KPIs like lead and call quotas.
Companies will need to implement new data standards, governance policies, and infrastructure in order to get there. Sales operations is in a great position to drive impact in this area across the organization: If not leading the charge from a strategy and execution perspective within sales, then at least representing sales and the customer to communicate the importance of this effort to executive management. Companies will have to apply these standards to all customer facing activities. The buying process for customer facing applications will become a multi-functional activity with sales and marketing influencing back end implementations and conversely, finance, fulfillment, etc. influencing technology decisions at the front end. This has big implications for how technology solutions will be sold as the industry consolidates and repositions to reflect the changes on the buy side.
For more details on this subject as it relates to improved sales pipeline management and customer management throughout the buying cycle, please come to our upcoming Sales Leadership Board meeting in Boston on October 25th and 26th. Contact Michael Gerard at mgerard@idc.com to inquire about attending this highly interactive session. Also see the new IDC report Best Practices in Customer Data Management. You may also contact me via email at gmurray@idc.com.
Posted by Gerry Murray
