When Not to Buy
Suppose your sales staff write really bad proposals. What do you do?
Track down advance copies of Word 2010 to solve the problem?
Of course not. The writing will still be bad!
Yet business leaders are often tempted to think new technology can fundamentally improve sales or customer service or operations or fulfillment, when the root problem is a shortage of quality skills and processes.
Sales are down? Bring in a Sales Force Automation system!
Customer satisfaction is low? Deploy a Customer Relationship Management database!
Online revenue is slipping? Upgrade the e-commerce site with improved business intelligence metrics!
These businesses will fail. Why?
Because technology makes good business practices better and bad business practices worse.
At best, technology is simply wasted on bad business practices, like the poor sap cranking out mediocre proposals on the greatest word processing software imagined.
A sales team without solid pipelines, methods and value propositions thrown onto a Sales Force Automation system will still be an underperforming sales team. Only now they’ll be an underperforming sales team busy complaining about having to use the new system.
But give a Sales Force Automation system to a sales team with solid processes, and you’ll get less lost leads, increased touch points, better collaboration and more closed deals.
The same idea holds true for every process in your business.
Teach the skills. Define the processes. Then use technology to amplify it.
