Operator Software Package Gordon West
|
Creating a successful business requires a lot of preparation, planning, exploration and a little bit of luck. But the one characteristic of any profitable business, huge or small, is that they have customers! The legendary Henry Ford once said this: “It’s not the employer who pay the wages. Employers only handle the money. It’s the client who pay the wages.” Makes finish sense, doesn’t it? So, in order to trade to, service and retain these customers, each institution no matter what industry or sector they are in has to introductory find customers. The creation and success of a sales and selling arm may thence be the main resolving factor to whether a company survives or is vanquished or flourishes. The bottom line is, and had always been, that without sales and marketing, there are no clients or clients, therefore no revenue. It then stands to reason that with no revenue there’s no survival. So now that we’re clear that sales and retail are indispensible, let us review where they started, talk about where they are now, and stare forward to where they are going. A outstanding author once said, “I find it utile to remember, everyone lives by retail something.” OK, how a great deal of of you guessed Zig Ziglar? (If you don’t know who HE is, then you’ve never been in sales or are just wholly not paying attention!). How a good deal of thought Tom Hopkins (see above)? Maybe not a sales guru, perchance it was the great Napoleon Hill, who wrote one of my favorites, Think and Grow Rich, right? Maybe it was a movie character, like Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas’ unscrupulous reputation in “Wall Street“)? You’re not even close. It’s not even someone from the 20th Century, nor an American! Would you believe it was the prolific Scotsman who penned Treasure Island in 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson! So even before the Industrial Revolution, the importance of sales was evident. If you think regarding it, even if you are not in the retail profession, you are merchandising each day. Are you a parent? Yep, you’re in sales! Trying to negotiate your seven year old to go to bed, eat their vegetables, or the myriad other issues that you face makes you a sales person. Dating? Oh yeah, sales. You are attempting to convince this person that you’re the perfect, compatible mate for them, whether it is for that evening or a lifetime. Looking for a better grade on a test in school? Interviewing for a new job? Pulled over for speeding? You get the idea. In olden days, we’ve heard galore stories which make us laugh. Like in the Old West, when men would travel from town to town in their mysterious wagons with “magic” elixirs, mysterious medicines, and even rainfall to drought-stricken farmers. Ever heard the phrase “snake oil salesman”? That’s right out of the time the West was a lawless wilderness. So the selling profession in truth didn’t have a great reputation as a result, the lively and on occasion agreeably diverting sales pitches were just as empty as the piggy banks these charlatans left behind. It got a bit better after the turn of the century, peculiarly with the Industrial Revolution. Very mutual was the “travelling salesman” who went wherever he had to in order to make someone buy something. While more reputable than their Old West predecessors, there were more than a few who found trouble in a good deal of dissimilar circumstances. I’m sure you’ve heard the one with regards to the travelling salesman and the farmer’s daughter, right? But these guys were the face of the company they were marketing for, and it seemed that it didn’t matterhow they got it done, as long as the sales were coming in, heads were turned. What proficiencies were used? Well, of course, being old-school you would have used such things as a wholly stocked sample case, a in truth well maintained ledger, and a lot of shoe leather. When the phone came along, it was a bit having little impact to call your clients and then go visit, but it was still up close and personal. And syndication came in the form mainly of advertising. Early times there were posters and other print media. As communications media grew, so did the advertizing realm, with attentiongetting jingles on old radio serials, to the cute early commercials and direct sponsorships of shows on television. It was just another way for the company to support the sales professional in doing their job. Of course, there was the tried and true personal connection that remains as valid as ever today – the personal networking. Just as was the case back then, having somebody refer you to someone they recognise is as valuable as a gold bar in the safe deposit box. Not all proficiencies were as effective, and one in queer is still widely used today – cold calling. It comes in a lot of forms, from the door-to-door introduction to the often-used but seldom fruitful phone calling frenzy. In the Sixties, the cold call was more the former, the guy knocking on doors, like the Fuller Brush Man or the guy marketing Encyclopedia Britannica. But as the telephone grew more popular and was in each house and business, the time saved by calling a whole bunch of locatings while sitting in your office seemed to make more sense. But in reality, it’s a lot more comfortable to hang up on a salesman on the phone than it is to slam a door on one at your business. While a lot of Fortune 500 companies insist their salespeople browbeat themselves into a quivering pool of Jell-O by banging out hundreds of calls a day, the smarter ones have either ditched the cold phone call completely or made it a share of a structured merchandising strategy. Even with the archaic reliance on a lot of of the old ways, the business world couldn’t have foreseen the affect the PC revolution would have on the way sales and merchandising works. While there had been use of computers for inventory and more using “dumb” terminals connected to a mainframe, the personal computer or PC permitted more selective information to be processed locally by the user. In essence, the mainframe had come to the endpoint! Tools such as databases and spreadsheets tracked client information, orders, even preferences, all at the user’s fingertips. But this turned out to be the tip of the iceberg, as the development of the Internet permitted for more and more connections and more outstanding reach. Suddenly, the magic world of electronic mail, or e-mail, would speed forward and leave postal mail in the dust as a way to send info to clients and prospects. And with the advent of the World Wide Web, companies started to build websites to grant Internet users anyplace on the planet to see what they do or what they may provide. And web sites were not just for customers, they started to become tools for the smart businesses and their employees. This was original habit built apps for inventory tracking, sales contact management, and the financial operations, like billing, collections and renewals. I will exaggerate on that later in the article. This quantum leap forward with engineering science has spurred ever growing ways for sales and marketing to be more effective and omnipresent. In the 1990s the rise of the cellular telephone was looked at as a revolution in the way companies would work internally and externally. But the primary appliances were bulky and not altogether reliable, calling for huge bags to carry and ordinary call drops. But in the years since, the engineering has speedily bettered while the prices and sizes of the gimmicks dropped, and the access has become more and more stable and reliable. So much so that even the cellular companies could not have prevised the widespread adoption throughout the popular buyer space 15 years ago. When my stepson got his basi phone at 12 years of age, I knew that it was the end of that world as we knew it! Go to a local mall and see for yourself if you don’t have kids or are skeptical! But just having a mobile phone was only the start. The conception of “mobility” for the little to mid-sized business has grown from just the capacity to reach and be reached on the phone no matter of where you are, but the infusion of other office staples like email that has taken it to a whole new level. While office computers were more and more getting mobile as laptops, the capacity to use them away from the main emplacement grew as well. The development of the “virtual private network” connection, or VPN, made it possible for a worker to connect a computer by creating an encrypted, inaccessible tunnel from the machine to the corporate network. Even that technology has improved, with the early VPN a software client on the PC that could be clunky and required frequent patching and maintenance. These clients evolved to a more or less “clientless” version, the SSL VPN. In this engineering science a worker produces that same encrypted tunnel, but uses fundamentally a web browser, requiring far lower overhead on the remote machine. Sounds cool, right? But now the remote sales or retail professional has two gimmicks to deal with and lug around. So naturally the world of engineering science continued to fabricate and the “smartphone” was born. Many think of the Research in Motion flagship product, the BlackBerry, with launching that revolution. But in truth venerable, old-school IBM actually developed the basi version called Simon, shown as a conception product at the huge COMDEX show in Las Vegas in 1993. BellSouth subsequently sold the device, which contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games. But the device with no keypad didn’t fare well enough, and other companies tried to tap the market. From Nokia, to Ericsson to the Palm, it was RIM’s entry in 2002 with BlackBerry that genuinely combined email and phone functionality in a little sufficient package to be functional. 2007 saw a ramp up of the wars, with the release of Apple’s iPhone and in 2008 with the advent of the Android open source-based OS. Today, the BlackBerry user base is well over 32 million users, but is seeing contest from the latest iPhone, Android gadgets and the hard charging Windows Phone 7 handsets. This number may go nowhere but up, with predilections each for the person user and organization. These appliances are terrific tools, but apps that they access have become just as significant. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is described as is an data industry term for methodologies, software, and normally Internet capablenesses that support an enterprise manage client relationships in an coordinated way. A bit too techie a definition, I would simplify it to say an application that allows you to track and stay in close contact with your best clients and prospects. From the early days of sales with a ledger, to the following Rolodex, to computer apps like ACT! and Goldmine. Now, with Microsoft CRM on premises and hosted apps like salesforce.com, the functionality that sales and merchandising needs may be found in one place. Maintaining contacts, setting up reminders, sending email, logging quotes, even processing orders may be done in a self-contained system. It’s not a quick repair – it requires a heap of skill and talent to deploy and custommake these applications, but once they are set to your liking, the sky is the limit to what may be done. And of course creating retail materials? With Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Publisher, etc., you may have each aspect of the project done, shared and approved; you just have to find the right printer! One last thing goes well beyond the website to the networking tool of the new millennium – Social Networking. Web tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter were developed in the young person’s world, but have now transitioned into the realm of business. More and more, businesses of all sizes are leveraging the reach of these applications, and even creating specials purposed to those who subscribe, follow and/or tweet. I believe we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg on this, and the next decade will show even more integration amidst these forms of contacting prospects and clients and CRM tools. No longer is hitting the local chamber of commerce networking event enough. That stack of business cards is much posing no difficulty to manage as a list of “friends” or “fans” and logged into CRM. So the bottom line is, engineering is a necessary piece to what sales and syndication is in today’s business world, both huge and small. And to get more out of them, having a trusted engineering collaborator or staff is critical to their full usage and availability. Or, you could go find the guy with the plaid coat and cigar and hope that he may get those prospects to believe in you… when it comes to as likely as there being flavored water ice found on Mars! |
