MIS implementation in IBM

1) High dollar / high value products or services for large corporate clients

2) Long, multi-contact intensives sales cycles, and

3) Expert, multi-disciplinary sales teams.

Complex sales often involve services priced in the thousands or millions of dollars, are typically sold from one large business to another business, and are framed as being strategically vital to the client organization.

Today, for strategically minded enterprises, the traditional approach no longer works. Many products and services have evolved to become complex solutions, often requiring the minds and talents of hundreds to successfully configure and deliver. Companies are now global in a strategic and tactical sense, genuinely coordinating and integrating across the world. Communications and technology have evolved. The world has become “flat”. Buying sophistication and customer demands have increased to the point that reliance on hawkish sales techniques and personal relationships has been replaced by strategic, value-based partnerships between smart enterprises. The role of Sales is transforming from a promotional spokesman to a trusted advisor, and underscores the value of influencing clients’ strategies and decision-making processes.

The cost of complex sales is high, both in direct costs and the economic impact on the enterprise. A long sales cycle, with large, highly-compensated teams, travel, subject matter expert participation, legal reviews, document production, and other costs, can add up to a very large expense. This said, the direct costs of Sales paint too small a picture of how critical and costly a dysfunctional Sales organization is to a company. Client relationships are too important to fail. They often require multi-year investments, and the value of an existing client is not just the thousands or millions in revenue of the first sale, but the growing annuity it represents for years and years of reorders and cross-sells.

As the fountainhead of demand and revenue, Sales also drives overall business performance. Sales must either dictate or comply with the output of product development, manufacturing, infrastructure planning, and delivery staff. Framed this way, poor sales planning isn’t about the deal that was lost; it’s about the staff that wasn’t deployed, the inventory that wasn’t sold, or the years of product development that were wasted. Knowing how Sales is going to perform is often more valuable to a company then how well Sales performs.

This ability to foresee opportunity cost is an important complication in the imperative to improve Sales: at the field/client level the Sales organization must get better at doing its job (e.g. courting prospects, closing deals); and at the enterprise level Sales must also play a vital and integrated role in informing and working within the rest of the business operations (e.g., reporting revenue, accurately forecasting performance).

5. THE PROBLEM WITH SALES

When looking at problems with the IBM Sales force, there were breakdowns at two distinct levels. The first was performance at the field/client level, and the second was integration of Sales processes and information into the rest of the organization. Both of these problems contributed to the amount of Chaos in the environment.

(Source : )

At the field level, the Sales force lacked a unified sales strategy. Sales strategies were based primarily on products and geography. Sales teams were encouraged to be independent and heroic, meeting their sales numbers at any cost, consistently driven to a mania towards each quarter’s end. Sales leadership had little visibility to information. The lack of information resulted in a further dependence on individual skills and passion within the field. Sales mavens were made and promoted based on their relationships and personal skills, and sales performance was dependent on their attitudes and migrations.

At the field and client level, these issues caused many problems. Global clients were looking for solutions that would span across product lines and geographies. Clients found themselves often with tens or hundreds of vendor relationships with IBM with no one having a clear view of the entire relationship, leading IBM to lose leverage and credibility. Instead of being seen as a strategic vendor supplying hundreds of millions of dollars in solutions, IBM appeared to be a thousand small vendors, sometimes competing against each other. This made it hard to lock down clients into non-competitive relationships and to coordinate service delivery. The marketing message for IBM said “we’re global, we can help you with all of your technology”, but clients could see the truth: IBM was really many independent Sales teams, each with its own agenda.

The results were

1. Missed sales
2. Lost accounts
3. Degeneration of brand
4. Increased sales costs, and
5. Loss of revenue.

1. SALES TRANSFORMATION BY IMPLEMENTING MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

IBM was able to transform the whole sales process by implementing the Management Information System. Some of the important application which helped IBM are-

1. CRM Siebel: Systems to address core sales processes, such as contact management

2. Sales Data Mining, Reporting and Analytics e-business Enablement: A suite of tools for performing adhoc analysis on sales data

3. Call Center Process and Technology: An integrated approach and technology project focused on inside and direct sales forces.

4. Market Insights Initiative: Business Intelligence initiative focused on marketing performance

5. Single View of the Customer: A data focused initiative to reconcile customer records and information

6. Database Marketing: Best practices in database marketing for use in direct campaigns

7. Market Intelligence and Market Management: A data-driven approach to obtaining market intelligence

2. CRM (CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT)

What is CRM?

1. A customer-centric business strategy with the goal of maximizing profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
2. Concepts applied by companies to manage relationships with their customers.
3. Collecting, Storing and analyzing information about the customer.
4. Not just a technology, but rather a holistic approach to an organization's philosophy in dealing with its customers.
5. This includes policies and processes, front-of-house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management.

Vendors providing CRM application:

1. Amdocs
2. Entellium [an early pioneer of hosted CRM solutions]
3. Epiphany
4. Frontrange Solutions
5. Maximizer Software [a leading provider of proven and affordable CRM and contact management solutions]
6. Microsoft (Microsoft's Dynamics CRM)
7. Netsuite [leading provider of integrated business application software for small and midsize businesses.]
8. Onyx
9. Oracle
10. Pivotal [only CRM company that is 100% purpose-built to serve the demanding requirements of mid-sized enterprises]
11. RightNow
12. Salesforce [Market and technology leader in on-demand CRM]
13. SalesLogix
14. SAP
15. Siebel Systems [Through its "CRM for Everyone" strategy, Siebel provides CRM solutions for any kind of organization, any type of user,and any budget.]
16. SugarCRM

Factors to consider when buying CRM

1. Requirements:: Before you can compare CRM applications, you must determine which features and capabilities you need to solve your problems and achieve your goals.

2. Budget:: Because many mid-sized businesses are working within tight financial constraints, finding the right balance of affordability and functionality in CRM applications can be challenging.

3. IT Resources:: How much strain will the CRM application put on your IT team? Do you enough staff to handle both implementation and ongoing maintenance? And, do they have the right skills and training to support the project?

4. Technology Infrastructure:: How well will the CRM application fit within your current environment? Can it be easily integrated with your ERP and other critical business systems? Be sure any CRM application you choose will enable you to continue leveraging your existing investments, and won't negatively impact the other technologies you rely on.

5. Industry-Specific Needs:: Does the vendor have experience working with companies that are similar to yours? Do they offer products and services designed specifically for your industry? A vendor who has an understanding of your business can help you structure your solution and your processes to maximize the value of your CRM application.

6. Complexity of Business Processes:: How intricate are your sales and service models? How many departments will be impacted by your CRM application? Do you need to make the CRM application available to external stakeholders, such as business partners and customers?

3. IBM’S CRM DEPLOYMENT

One example of a successful transformation initiative was IBM’s CRM deployment. IBM integrated and enabled Marketing, Sales, and Sales support employees on a single application supporting common worldwide processes. The results were very positive, providing employees with improved visibility and collaboration among team members and significant reduction in administrative tasks. The Sales opportunity Discovery system and account planning system are now connected, and over 400 account plans worldwide have been fully documented and completed in the Siebel-based CRM system.

IBM implementing CRM Siebel solution based on the following strengths

1) Leading provider of CRM Software to large enterprises

2) Deepest focus on industry-specific solutions

3) Provider of both hosted and on-premise CRM Software

4) Large company with lots of resources - Safe Buy

The CPT team (Client Transformation Team) in IBM is a single business transformation organization with responsibility for client-facing processes and the supporting IT platforms across all channels, brands, Geos, and customer sets.

The processes related to Client Process Transformation are divided into three process groups:

1. Manage Client Relationships: Establishing account and territory records, executing account and territory planning, establishing and maintaining contact records, building relationships with key client contacts via the Set/Met process, and managing client requests and expectations.

Managing contact is at the center of the CRM. Each organization does not want to just note the name of the organization and its address. For knowing the customer better, not only the address but key information like revenue, number of employees etc are required. Generally, all such information is hard to obtain and require face to face delegation. Apart from this, sometimes we want some other information like outstanding order of the customer from financial application etc., so integration between different applications is required.

2. Sell Solutions, Products and Services: Creating leads, managing opportunities, designing, configuring, and pricing solutions, Proposing and managing sales commitments.

The purpose of the Opportunity Management process is to help IBM sellers and our Business partners win business for IBM by making them more efficient and effective. This is achieved by taking opportunities, which will benefit from opportunity management, through a carefully designed set of opportunity sales stages.

The efficiency comes when opportunities, which cannot be successfully Validated or Qualified, are No Bid and thereby removed from any, further sales activities. A design point of the OM Process is the deselecting of opportunities in the early sales stages. This reduces workload and avoids costs in the later sales stages.

One source of effectiveness is because ownership is always clear. The Accept / Reject / Withdrawal sub-process requires that one person is always assigned and responsible for an opportunity. The responsible person is the Opportunity Primary, and that person is totally responsible for the opportunity, until it is passed and ultimately accepted to someone else. The management chain of the person in the Opportunity Primary role is fully responsible for the management of the opportunity.

3. Manage Client Service: Provide client care based on client care service strategy within the pre and post sales environment. This includes developing the strategy, managing client complaints and measuring client satisfaction.

A simple layout of CRM application

Architecture of a simple Siebel CRM system:

CRM interaction with other applications in the IBM

4. BUSINESS BENIFITS

The various benefits derived out of implementing CRM in IBM are-

1) Streamlined sales and marketing processes

2) Higher sales productivity

3) Added cross-selling and up-selling opportunities

4) Improved customer service, loyalty, and retention

5) Increased call center efficiency

6) Higher close rates

7) Better customer profiling and targeting

8) Reduced expenses

9) Increased market share

10) Higher overall profitability

(Source: )

5. CONCLUSION

The story of IBM’s ongoing transformation from Chaos to Cadence provides a provocative foundation for overall understanding of transforming complex Sales organizations. The specific issues, imperatives, solutions, and steps were suited to IBM’s unique business situation and environment.

IBM’s journey has been incremental where IBM has taken careful, manageable steps, with each one expected to return small but meaningful results and lessons while paving the way for the next phase of transformation. One of the greatest lessons is that Sales improvement is not just about improving Sales performance itself, but is about understanding how the role of Sales must align and collaborate within itself and across the organization. This is a far cry from the days of independent selling where the Sales organization was the uncontrolled wild bunch, expected to execute without constraint. Today, the journey is ongoing with Sales as a leader and innovator in integration, working to bring both the Sales force and the IBM organization into tighter alignment.