Client Type: ERP
This customer sold an ERP for a specific industry. With clients in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia the firm had proven its value. In this case, the product also had a customer relationship management tool as part of the product.
The CRM tool was, truthfully, little more than a contact manager.
It could set and track goals and actuals but the heavy lifting of pipelines and customer profiles were beyond is capabilities.
What to do?
The CRM product was not well differentiated and existed in name only, just to say we had the item.
The team was interviewed to come up with a generic sales process mapping the sales process steps. Then I interviewed several customers to map their sales processes.
The result was that we could see where the feature was used, not used and how customers worked around gaps.
The solution
There were two gaps:
- Sales pipeline management tools traditionally associated with CRMs.
- Sales operational data for sales agents.
Adding traditional CRM functionality in the short term would be impossible as well as expensive.
I pivoted to solve the second problem: converting the ERP’s data into actionable dashboard for their sales team.
Rather than spending millions on trying to compete with Salesforce, Hubspot and the many other CRMs out there, dashboards were designed that would help sales agents and managers optimize their activities and inventory.
The impact
The sales dashboards designs were:
- Role-Based
- Trend based
This would breathe new life into the sales tool. True, it did not address sales pipeline management and contact management but giving the sales team visual at a glance insight into the performance of their territories and proposals added critical and immediate sales value. To be blunt: the dashboards showed the sale team the way to their commissions.
This energized the product and also bought time so that the pipeline management gaps could be addressed in the future.
As I was also responsible for the firm’s user documentation, I was well placed to undertake this analysis.
