General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt is willing to face what most CEOs are still hiding from: Efficiency has come at the expense of the customer. The business press continues to cover G.E.'s efforts to find growth through innovation. The company once known for absolute efficiency (Six Sigma--based processes) has finally discovered that having a good product is simply not enough these days. Tightly designed, efficient processes and methods alone just don't seem to catch a customer's eye.The search is not exclusive to G.E. Growth-and-innovation is today's mantra; the pendulum has swung from cost reduction back to growth in the past few years. Executive management is rushing to find ways to drive growth and innovation. The question is, how do you drive growth? The incorrect answer is to raise sales quotas..
Business performance. We all think we know what it means, but try to define it and there will be many disagreements. This is because a business involves many stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, partners, suppliers and others. Performance means different things to each of these groups and, in practice, their interests often conflict. How do you handle these conflicts in your company? Are you meeting one target while causing more serious damage elsewhere? What is required is a fresh approach to business management and measurement. Enter the "line of sight" concept. "Line of sight" is a systemic approach to business and business measurement that is underpinned by a fundamental belief that:
Sustainable business performance is achieved through gaining commitment and sales from customers who are, or can become, heavy spenders..
Although diversity can certainly make life more interesting, chances are that companies with too many different IT systems are longing for more uniformity. Enter SAP Enterprise Portal, bringing together different applications, information and services through a single access point to overcome an all-too-familiar challenge. For example, a large corporation might want to unify data from a legacy human resources system, differing regional salary standards from the Web, and employee evaluations residing in a document management system...
Companies that embrace predictive analytics can gain a competitive edge, according to Tom Davenport, professor of information management at Babson College. Davenport, who's written and coauthored several books on knowledge and information management, says that the first step in embracing analytics is to have a CEO who sees analytics as a corporate differentiator. "Corporate executives have to be willing to spend the money on the technology," Davenport says.Before former Harvard database analytics professor Gary Loveland became CEO of Harrah's, the company (which received a buyout offer in 2006) was floundering. "The seven years before Gary came in, Harrah's failed to meet its numbers," Davenport says. "The eight years since he came in, every measure of financial performance has gone up." Ask Loveland how, Davenport says, "and he'll tell you it was an analytical transformation." Saleem Hussaini, senior manager, data warehouse group for Continental Airlines, credits analytics as one reas..
Salesforce.com on Monday introduced ApexConnect, a new family of integration tools that connect its on-demand customer relationship management solution with back-office systems. Features include ConnectOut, an on-demand outbound messaging application program interface; ConnectOracle, which integrates Salesforce with Oracle 11i; and a new ApexConnect category of integration partners on the AppExchange. Taken as a whole, ApexConnect will facilitate a range of integration tasks...
Businesses today are challenged by serving "two masters": financial cost management on one side and the consumer-facing aspects of sales, services and marketing on the other. The integration of the front and back office has long been a dilemma to organizations of all sizes, but it has yet to become a reality for most.
Today, it's even more critical to bring the two together, as companies look to enrich and profit from customer interaction. Otherwise, how does management know how to invest in the right channels to deal with customers, while extracting the most from the sales and service dollar? How can companies be sure they're not missing opportunities to better engage their customers—by letting information that should be at their fingertips slip out the back door? To be financially competitive while building loyalty, companies must be able to determine the best tradeoff between cost efficiency and customer performance..
Throughout the technology boom of the late 1990s, investors lost billions of dollars backing companies that owed their "success" to the creative use of smoke and mirrors. When the inevitable meltdown hit, scandals involving WorldCom, Tyco and Enron drew national attention to the fact that many corporations did not have proper financial controls and corporate governance in place; in response, the U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to force companies to create a paper trail of financial information so that data could be easily tracked. One of the areas that wise companies are beginning to monitor more closely than ever before is sales compensation management.
Most companies use Excel to manage their sales compensation programs. Spreadsheets are fine for sorting tables of data, but they weren't designed to provide the kind of sophisticated financial transparency that businesses need to manage sales compensation..
UpShot.com President and Chief Executive Officer Keith Raffel uses this analogy to describe why his product makes good sense in today's business world: In the nineteenth century, faced with the lack of a readily available power source, textile mill operators built their plants next to waterways so the mills could generate their own power. But what was a sensible arrangement in the 1800s is, of course, sheer lunacy today, Raffel says. A modern business would never struggle with the hassle of trying to generate its own power.While most companies are happy to leave the practicalities of doing business--such as electricity--to the experts, many are still grappling with the challenges of creating and maintaining databases and systems for automating the sales and customer relationship management processes. For Raffel, this isn't necessarily the best business practice. "In looking at industry trends, one of the most important is the idea of Internet business services, which people also call a..
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) has announced its first move in what is likely to be a larger push into the content management space: the acquisition last month of Koral Technologies. Salesforce.com is leveraging the small company's technology and content management platform as the building block for Apex Content, its own content management initiative.
Apex Content is a major extension of the Salesforce platform, built specifically to create content-based applications .
Salesforce ContentExchange, the first application slated for Apex Content, is designed to help companies manage their unstructured data -- that is, data that resides anywhere in the enterprise except in a relational database...
Many company executives would agree that the most important factor in the sales process is the close. But getting customers to actually make a purchase can be a difficult journey. This is especially true for companies that have similar product lines. Ask Ken Wirt, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Palm Inc. After discovering that many Web-based customers prematurely ended the buying process because they were confused when choosing between Palm's different handheld products, Palm began looking for ways to close the loop. "We heard from many customers that they would come to our Web site, wanted to buy a Palm handheld, but didn't know which one to get," Wirt says. "Because of this, many customers would not buy a device at all."To rectify this problem Palm turned to San Mateo, CA--based Active Decisions, makers of what the company calls guided selling lifecycle solutions. Basically, these are automated sales applications that virtually walk customers through th..
