Managing sales with software - sales-automation programs - includes article on the best sales-software available

Nation's Business, March, 1996 by Steve Ditlea

Sales-automation programs can help a small firm organize and focus its efforts to increase business.

It took Peg Ostby about six years to increase the annual sales of Creative Cruises, the travel agency she founded in 1988, to the $500,000 level. It took her only 18 months more, however, to double the annual revenues of the Sterling Heights, Mich., firm. That growth spurt is all the more noteworthy because Ostby, a self-styled "non-techie," says it came about in large part through use of a computer program that made her operations more efficient.

The program she used, GoldMine for Windows, by Elan Software Corp., is one of many so-called sales-automation programs available for IBM-compatible and Apple Macintosh computers. With the deftness of a Swiss-army knife, these compact programs, priced from about $150 to $500 per user, can be employed effectively for various tasks. They include managing telephone and written contacts, scheduling, word processing, and organizing outgoing and incoming faxes and electronic mail.

Used imaginatively and intelligently, sales-automation programs help small-business owners organize and focus their all-important efforts to gain new customers and retain existing clients.

Ostby's four full-time and four part-time employees use GoldMine and a network of four computers for everyday business tasks, ranging from scheduling bookings to reminding themselves to check with cruise lines for cancellations prior to sailing dates.

Moreover, GoldMine has earned its weight in precious metal by helping create a dramatic increase in Creative Cruises' group-sales business, primarily in the beauty-salon industry.

Ostby started pursuing group sales by mailing press releases concerning Creative Cruises to salon trade magazines. The releases generated some stories, which in turn brought inquiries to her firm; her staff members entered respondents' names and addresses into GoldMine. The software then enabled Ostby to send out follow-up letters and brochures "the same day, not once or twice a week, like when everything was done manually," she says.

Ostby has used the system to compile a list of 9,000 current and potential salon clients and to gain co-sponsorship of cruises from two trade magazines.

Organize For Growth

As intense competition drives down profit margins while business costs continue to rise, small-company owners in many industries are pressed to broaden the scope of their businesses. Like Ostby, many owners are achieving growth in part by replacing paper and other traditional sales-management tools with software such as GoldMine and related computer hardware. This transition, they reason, will help their firms to meet not only today's growth challenges but also those of the future.

A challenge in making the transition from pencils to PCs is choosing software that's right for the task. "There are literally hundreds of sales-automation programs out there," says Richard Bohn, president of the Denali Group Inc., a business-computing consulting firm in Issaquah, Wash., and publisher of the 12-year-old newsletter Sales Automation Success. "My short list of programs has 65 choices, each fairly different in style," he says.

Details that a firm should consider in choosing a sales-automation package include not only the company's size but also its number of accounts, sales development cycle, customer-related procedures, and the needs and computer expertise of sales personnel. (The needs-analysis questionnaire used by Born during his client consultations is available on the Microsoft Network. Type "DENALI" after choosing the Go To option in the Edit menu.)

Once a sales-automation package has been installed, the biggest hurdle to its successful deployment is often resistance from sales personnel accustomed to traditional sales methods. Says Bohn: "A lot of salespeople shoot from the hip and don't like to be told what to do. The idea of a structured selling methodology may not be to their liking at first."

The effort required to overcome internal resistance; however, will be worth it in the long run, he says. No matter what software is chosen, sales automation ultimately will be a boon to salespeople by tapping "their greatest professional resource, the personal computer," Bohn contends.

Fax For Sales

A sales-automation package's integration of selling methods takes some getting used to in theory and in practice. Many new users find that some feature of the software that appealed to them before they bought it is never used once they get into other real-world applications.

"It's been a year, and I've never used the scheduling function, which is why we got this software in the first place," says Andy Miller, sales manager for The Kids Stop, the trade name for Hudson Distributors Inc., the nation's largest reseller of close-out children's clothing.

The 14-year-old, privately held business, with more than 100 employees at the main office in New York City and at warehouses in Newburgh, N.Y., and South River, N.J., grosses $25 million a year in sales, generated by four people, including Miller. They share a single desktop PC running ACT! software by Symantec Corp.