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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A sales and marketing veteran with more than 30 years’ experience, Neil Saviano is president of CRM International www.crminternational.com , a sales and marketing organization that focuses on helping clients combine proven sales and marketing techniques and strategies with state-of-the-art CRM and Sales Force Automation solutions. He can be reached by phone at 800-782-1534 or by e-mail at neil@crminternational.com.

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     Since most conventional industry sales training focuses heavily on new customer acquisition, it’s not surprising that a key measure of success, both for new and experienced company sales people, is generally how many accounts they can open in a set period of time. 
Unfortunately, the traditional emphasis on customer acquisition usually means that customer penetration—“harvesting” existing customers to their full sales potential and driving higher margin business—typically gets less attention, even though most sales and marketing experts agree that it requires five times more effort to open a new customer than it does to sell more to existing customers.  
     Since most industry sales compensation plans are based on margin, it would seem to make sense for most sales training—both for in-house programs and for those offered externally by wholesalers or buying groups—to place a stronger emphasis on customer development. A training shift, however, needs to come from companies themselves for that to happen. 
     Effective sales training needs to highlight the tactics and skills required to penetrate customers deeper and reach marketing plan objectives. One way to identify those skills is by examining the work habits of successful sales people.  
     Star sales performers are primarily excellent business people. They run their sales job as a business, with a sound business/marketing plan that serves as a microcosm of their company’s business plan and defines a course of action to produce their share of their company’s business objectives.  
     If reaching marketing plan objectives at both the company and individual sales person level is part of a sales training program, another key area must be emphasized. This area is sales intelligence.  
     Business intelligence is simply all of the customer sales history that resides in a company’s ERP software system. Using this intelligence strategically provides both companies and their sales people with the information needed to identify opportunities to drive customers to buy a wider range of products and subsequently increase margins. At the sales person level this process is directly tied to higher compensation.  
     Sales training programs need to focus on using business intelligence, and business intelligence software. Business intelligence software  transcends the use of customer information provided by traditional ERP systems and gives sales people and companies the ability to track customer buying patterns at unprecedented levels. 
     In conjunction with using business intelligence, sales people and companies also need to be taught to place greater emphasis on understanding higher levels of customer needs and behaviors.  
     This business intelligence comes from information gathered at the customer level instead of the ERP system, for example, gaining a deeper understanding of a customer’s office processes, workflow and special product applications.  
     This strategic focus goes beyond traditional areas of needs, such as delivery requirements or reduced back orders. Instead, it focuses on identifying opportunities for deeper customer penetration and higher margins. 
     As sales people and companies are taught the expanded use of customer intelligence and information, penetration can be greatly enhanced by subsequent sales and marketing campaigns. For example, customer intelligence might reveal a certain group of customers have stopped buying a particular product or product category, suggesting the need for a focused marketing campaign to regain that lost business. Or, analysis of a customer’s business processes may uncover a previously unexploited need for audiovisual products or similar items. 
     Campaigns are simply strategic sales and marketing actions that evolve from placing customers into categories or classifications. In the customer categories listed above, examples of campaigns could be a planned series of faxes, e-mails and customer calls or visits.  
     Conventional sales force automation/customer relationship management (CRM) software packages have functions that can help a company not only gather and store sales intelligence and information, but automate campaigns as well.

    Gathering, processing and using customer and prospect information across the enterprise provides the basis for the benefits most companies realize from using CRM and Sales Force Automation software.  This is truly the case for Davis Publications, an art education publisher in Worcester, MA.  Davis Publications has been a GoldMine CRM software user for five years.
     Toni Henneman , marketing manager at Davis, (left in picture)  is exuberant when she talks about what GoldMine means to their operation.  “We love GoldMine”, Henneman said.  “It keeps all of us in the company, from customer service to sales to accounting, on the same page as we communicate with our customers.  Nothing falls through the cracks in our effort to build strong relationships with them and continue to earn their business.”    Lynn Babineau, sales support coordinator, echoed Henneman’s sentiments:  “GoldMine is such a valuable tool. I have all of the information in front of me when a customer calls.  I immediately have access to notes of past conversations as well as emails and other interactions.  My customer’s needs come first and I have everything I need to address them.” 

     Davis Publications provides art textbooks for grades K thru 12 as well as School Arts magazine, a publication written by art educators for art teachers. Davis Publications provides resources for educators all the way up to the college level.  Thus, a strategic focus is current customer penetration across product lines.  Henneman and Babineau both agreed that the proliferation and sharing of customer information enhanced penetration, especially by being able to identify needs ongoing and target customers accordingly.  GoldMine’s sales force automation functionality helps to target customer groups at Davis by filtering according to roles such as teachers, supervisors and administrators.  E-mail marketing plays a key role here, as well as automated processes; with automated processes Davis can schedule a series of repetitive tasks such as e-mail promotions and activities to be scheduled at whatever intervals needed.   GoldMine sends the e-mails and schedules the calls automatically; in essence, they have a virtual sales assistant!

     Both Henneman and Babineau were quick to point out that GoldMine’s sales force automation wasn’t just used with current customers.  They have a structured prospecting program to drive new business.  As prospects inquire on Davis’s website to test drive an E-book, an automated process begins that alerts a sales rep by e-mail of the prospect and their interest-and three weeks later the sales rep is alerted that the test drive will be ending in 10 days and it’s time to follow up.  As Henneman pointed out above pertaining to current customers – the same can be said for their prospecting program: “nothing falls through the cracks.”

     Davis Publications is now looking to GoldMine for help in addressing the economic downturn.  As Lynn Babineau summed up, “with the economy the way it is we are looking to save costs by marketing much more via e-mail than through conventional mail.  We can quickly download prospect lists into GoldMine, create specific groups and have information in their hands – sometimes the same day.  Since we can save considerable money in printing costs and postage, we’re looking real close at this as a way to go to market.”

Learn more about Davis Publications at:  www.davisart.com