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Most organizations see improving the effectiveness of sales as a way to increase productivity. Those organizations that take advantage of the latest sales applications and technology are finding themselves with a competitive advantage, but many organizations lack the time and resources to assess and deploy appropriate platforms. That’s a shame, since most sales organizations have plenty to improve in their selling, forecasting, incentives and planning according to our latest research on sales performance management. We found a high demand even for many of the basics; for instance, many organizations still use personal spreadsheets or outdated applications that are costly to manage. At the same time, marketing organizations are investing heavily to be more revenue- and sales-focused to ensure they maintain relevance and contribute to their organizations’ performance and profitability. Both sales and marketing have fixated on specific processes and how they can work better together.
Our research agenda for 2013 calls for us to examine how organizations can maximize results through new business technology, adopt dedicated applications designed for sales effectiveness and marketing, and use best practices to be faster, smarter, better and more cost-effective in operating sales.
The top three technology trends in sales are analytics, collaboration and mobility. Together with advancing technologies such as business and social collaboration, they are helping increase the flow of information to help 
managers coach and increase employees’ learning potential. Mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets are becoming more common, tied to dedicated sales applications and tools that now become more accessible at any time or any place. We will conduct more research in 2013 on the growth in social and mobile sales to see how early adopters are doing and where the industry is improving with these new technologies. At the same time a lot of new software is available through cloud computing; you can rent and configure the software for your organization, reducing the need for IT resources to implement, deploy and maintain it. Advancements in dedicated sales analytics can help organizations understand performance, and help plan and predict sales, providing a path for increasing optimization and letting users more readily share information with finance and operations. We plan to conduct more research into the next generation of sales analytics and build upon our existing research, making sure that the metrics and plans adapt to the existing economic and industry environment.
Many sales organizations realize that traditional sales force automation is mostly for tracking accounts, contacts and opportunities. In 2012 many SFA providers started to expand to a broader sales performance management platform, with integrated forecasting, collaboration, document management, quotas and territory management. This new focus, along with a rapidly expanding set of dedicated applications that have evolved from sales compensation, can bring better incentives, quotas, territories and analytics. This evolution of sales application suites was evident in our 2012 Value Index for Sales Performance Management.
My personal perspective is that 2013 will be even more competitive. While sales compensation management software has been evolving over the last 15 years, it is still finding its place in increasing numbers of sales organizations. In 2013 we will assess how and where sales should be managing compensation and incentives. Many sales organizations that are still wedded to the use of spreadsheets will come to realize that the use of such outdated software impedes their ability to manage sales effectively. It’s not easy to manage forecasts and pipelines that have specific time series and change level analytics in a spreadsheet; a better approach is to use applications designed for the task, and designed not just for sales operations but for the entire sales team. Our recent research in sales forecasting finds areas of improvement that could have dramatic impact on course-correcting sales activities and moving beyond the probability of sales to the confidence of the forecast, which is probably why forecasting was the top application priority in sales according to 65 percent of sales organizations. Sales is also starting to realize the advantages of using marketing in demand generation processes, which nurtures leads into opportunities and can provide a wealth of information to help sales organizations better engage with prospects.
Sales organizations with limited resources and time need to use best practices and not waste time on technology that’s not ready for deployment or that fails to match up with the competencies of their teams. Interactive social collaboration across sales teams is a better and more effective practice than a myriad of emails. In addition, the use of product information management through all channels of sales and marketing is essential, but our product information management benchmark found significant room for improvement as organizations work to ensure proper representation and highest customer satisfaction. Our assessment of PIM vendors finds many addressing these needs and delivering benefits for sales.
As the configuration, pricing and quote (CPQ) process gets more automated, sales organizations find better consistency in their business processes, including in the fundamentals of contract management. Sales organizations have significant room to improve in supporting non-direct channels and ensuring that data and processes are aligned to the overall sales target. As marketing gets its act together on demand generation, the scoring and qualification of contacts for their true interest through a lead nurturing processes that include behavior, demographic and relevance will help identify the right opportunities for sales to act upon. Sales organizations need to address technology best practices and use analytics and metrics that can be harvested from modeling and planning methods in order to increase the quality of their results. I expect that big data and predictive analytics also will make inroads with innovative sales teams in 2013.
What’s old is still new with sales, and improving upon forecasting, compensation, coaching, collaboration and learning will be job one for those that really want to drive excellence. Applying talent management process with adapting the existing sales team and hiring the right team members, and help ensure that everyone contributes to the business of sales. The rapid increase in the use of smartphones and tablets in sales is leading to a new generation of applications and technology that can better meet sales teams’ needs. I expect to see more reengineering of marketing and sales processes, improving leads and materials and using automation to enhance the quality of leads and move beyond just the process of passing a quantity of useless leads. Finance organizations can also demonstrate their commitment to improvement in sales processes by offering to help argue the business case that delivers the benefits they care most about, which is profitability.
Being more timely and proactive in sales is the mantra for 2013. Those organizations that are prepared to use technology to those ends will be the ones that maximize their potential and retain sales teams that can contribute to financial profitability and customer satisfaction.
Come read and download the full research agenda.
Regards,
Mark Smith
CEO & Chief Research Officer
Salesforce.com made a surprising announcement of its agreement to acquire Rypple, a software company that defines its product as a social goals application. I call this a surprise because although Salesforce has been extending its reach beyond sales and customer service to IT in providing a platform, tools and a database for building applications and storing data in the cloud, until now it has not entered directly into other lines of business. After its annual Dreamforce conference last summer, I analyzed the company’s strategy and products. Now I want to consider what this acquisition means for Salesforce and the human capital management market.
Rypple provides a new type of application that operates within the confines of cloud computing that enables managers and team members to collaborate in accomplishing specific objectives in an interactive manner. Perhaps Rypple’s largest challenge has been waiting for potential customers to catch up to this innovation and be willing to try a new approach to coaching team members. Unlike traditional HR and talent management applications, Rypple addresses goals and objectives, coaching and feedback, and performance reviews in a social environment.
I decided to check out the application for myself and ensure my analysis is as accurate as possible, which I think its uniqueness makes necessary to understand what Salesforce.com has acquired. Rypple focuses on three key activities: coaching toward defined objectives, recognition of work accomplished and feedback on the performance of the individual who has done it. The application runs in the cloud, which no doubt pleases Salesforce. It took me just minutes to set up in its cloud computing environment with the application and engage members of my team with it, even accessing it with its native application on the Apple iPhone. Rypple provides a comfortable user experience and intuitive methods for people to work toward common goals and socialize the focus.
Rypple has been active in getting testimonials from its customers, which include Facebook, Spotify, Rackspace, Kobo, Jive Software and other newer companies mostly in the Internet technology sector. Rypple had a simple pricing plan that offers some basics for free and charges $5 to $9 per month for more functionality for goals and reviews, coaching and feedback along with enterprise-level integration and support. Rypple also provides integration with Google, iPhone, Jive and Pivotal Tracker, which demonstrates its ease of access from other environments.
Now the question is what Salesforce.com plans to do with Rypple. It will create a new business unit and rename the produce Successforce and is likely to integrate this with Chatter as part of an effort to make that an enterprise backbone for social collaboration. This layering of applications complements Salesforce’s strategy for Chatter as it has done with its Service Cloud. In the short term I doubt that Salesforce will jump into the larger market for talent management and try to sell Rypple to human resources departments; this requires focused investments into this line of business, which it has not been doing as much as it has with IT. So the impact of the acquisition on the human capital management software market is not clear. Salesforce will also need to address the future of its partnership with Jobscience which applies aspects of CRM to administer and support HR and human capital management and has been providing them some significant proof points of its efforts.
Salesforce’s customers in sales and customer service should be eager to examine this application as should those looking to build upon its use of Force.com in the enterprise. Rypple also could help Salesforce gain an edge on Oracle’s Fusion for HCM that I assessed and its recently announced Oracle Social Network that lacks the vision and demonstration as this announcement. This move puts Salesforce.com more in line with the direction of what Saba and SuccessFactors (which is being acquired by SAP) are doing to advance social collaboration into human capital management. At the moment it is not clear if Salesforce will continue to support the existing stand-alone offering and pricing of Rypple, let alone the free version, so users should be cautious until the deal is final and Salesforce communicates the new direction. In any case this is an interesting move as Salesforce continues to surprise the market with its progressive applications of social collaboration for enterprise lines of business.
Regards,
Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer
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