Mature computers lend a hand in improving sales efficiency

Sprained your wrist working the starter crank on your car lately?

Backed up any hills because you just knew you had better rubber on the reverse belt?

Can you explain how, when and why to double clutch?

Of course not. Chances are you don't even have a clutch pedal in your car. The days of Model A drive belts and the charming practice of backing old models up hills have long passed -- never mind hand cranking the engine to start it.

Now this sounds like -- and is --- one of those patented left-field excursions. What, pray tell, is a history of the development of the automobile doing in The Cole Papers?

It's simple, actually. The technology of the automobile is now mature and stable. There's little difference between this year's model and one from a decade ago.

Computers, of course, are another story. Computer technology changes so fast that it has become a nightmare for MIS types. Consider: Even if you standardize on a single make and model of computer, chances are that different machines in the same order will have different video cards, hard drives or other components. And forget about getting the same machine if you need a couple more, say, next month.

The good news is that every technology goes through these phases before settling down. And just as we now have no idea what to do with a hand-cranked starter, we'll someday laugh at much of what passes now for required computer skills.

There's a very practical reason for this. Again, take the example of early automobiles. Those first vehicles had so little power that every bit of it had to be devoted to the primary task of moving. And there were basic design points to be worked out, such as: "Hey! What if we got rid of this tiller and put a steering wheel in here? And wouldn't a roof be peachy for when it rains?"

But as cars grew more powerful, power became available for tasks beyond making the wheels go 'round. Engineers began to use that power to make autos easier to use.

Take, for example, today's ubiquitous automatic transmissions. An automatic tranny takes between 15 and 25 horsepower; that's one reason an identical car with a manual transmission is faster. But the larger point is that early autos simply couldn't spare that kind of horsepower and still make it up hills as well as down.

Now, of course, autos have power to spare, and designers use it lavishly for every sort of amenity. It's nothing now for even a fairly inexpensive car to have an electronic starter and ignition, automatic transmission, power door locks, power windows, air conditioning, a CD-based stereo system better than most people had at home 10 years ago ... well, you get the picture.

Computer systems are starting to make the same transition. For years, computers lacked the power to accomplish what was required of them. But the inexorable march of Moore's Law (two decades ago Intel Chairman Gordon Moore said that the power of the most powerful chip doubles every 18 months) has crushed that problem.

Here's a frightening thought: Today's Windows NT workstation with dual Pentium Pro processors that you can buy for $4000 to $5000 from Dell or Gateway has roughly the processing power of a $10 million super computer of a decade ago.

Faster, automated access
Now some of that power is being devoted to the task of making life easier for users.

Take, for example, SpanLink's use of Caller ID.

Think about it. Sure, Caller ID is fine for figuring out that those darn insurance salesmen are calling during dinner again. But SpanLink Communications of Minneapolis has found a better use for Caller ID by integrating Automatic Number Information -- the technical name for Caller ID technology -- into its call center software.

Picture this: A customer calls display advertising at your newspaper. The call is routed to the next available ad clerk -- who has the customer's account open on the screen when the phone rings.

The integration of ANI into the call center software allows the software to identify the customer, pull the account information from the database and route that information and the call to the next available clerk.

There are two points here. First, the call center software is now fast enough to do things beyond simply storing and retrieving data. Second, there are computers everywhere -- in this instance, in the phone system.

Here's a scary thought: There are around 60 microprocessors in the average automobile, and there's a good chance most of them are more powerful than your first computer. (Memo to everyone born in the '80s about to dash off a note saying their first computer was a PowerPC: Shouldn't you be in school?)

SpanLink's system supports 17 languages out of the box, by the way.

Over at Media Marketing Inc., Chief Executive Officer James Theall said his company had a similar --- if more complex -- plan. The company's Immediate product line includes live and videotaped training based on John Gorby's "Selling Against Broadcast" strategy for newspapers.

Theall said Boulder, Colo.-based Media Marketing decided to code Gorby's strategy into its Sales Assistant line of software. The software includes a module called NextStep.

"A salesperson can sit down and say, 'What should I be doing next?'" said Theall. NextStep includes a set of built-in filters that can sort that salesperson's accounts by interest, by activity -- showing all accounts with no scheduled activity, for example --- as well as a range of other options. The software also allows salespeople or their companies to write custom filters, said Theall.

Theall said his company took this step because the need for computer skills was overwhelming the other skills necessary for a sales force. Complex systems that reward those best at, say, Boolean searching were stymieing those who are terrific salespeople but only mediocre computer jockeys, Theall said.

"We want to make it possible for companies to hire sales people who are good with people and make the system work for them," he said.

NextStep also has a radio analyst editor module that "looks at your current radio advertising plan, analyzes it, then suggests best approach by station, buy and so forth," Theall said.

There are similar modules available for TV and cable, both of which do what radio analyst does for their respective media. More modules are in the works, Theall said.

Push to laptops slows
Gannett Media Technologies, Inc., has a new sales position for the Mobile Automated Sales System: Mass is no longer offered outside the Gannett company, said Kurt Dressel, vice president for sales and marketing.

"The market was not very mature. There was no agreement what a product would be in that area," Dresselsaid. "Rather than plow more money in, we decided to stop and let others reap the benefits when the market matures. It just was not something most newspaper ad departments had budgeted for when we last looked at this."

In fact, said Dressel, Gmti found that most ad departments had much more basic technological needs.

"We found that very few of the sales reps were using laptops or PCs of any kind, let alone using spreadsheets, e-mail and word processors," Dressel said. "Most of the advertising departments we looked at need to do basic things: get people laptops, basic office software. Then they can look at the benefits of linking everything together.

"Until that (technology) foundation is in place, it didn't make a lot of sense to try to sell them a graphic sales tool like Mass."

But that doesn't mean Mass is no more.

"We're going to continue some development. It's being rolled out across the company," Dressel said. "We're also evaluating whether to roll out some of the extensions as stand-alone products."

For example, Dressel said, Gmti has developed a presentation extension to the main Mass program. The presentation extension presents content to clients for upselling advertising, he said. Gmti is considering whether to package the presentation extension and other such items as stand-alone products, said Dressel, but no decision has been made yet.

Say, why automate your sales force when you can transform it? Another IBM offering is the Sales Force Transformation enterprise solution for Lotus Notes, which is also less awkwardly named OverQuota.

With a Lotus Notes foundation, it's no surprise that OverQuota includes such groupware basics as enterprise calendaring. But the system also provides opportunity management, forecasting and quoting, reporting and graphic modules and replication for mobile users.

Like any Notes system, OverQuota can be customized to your heart's content. It operates across all major hardware platforms and software operating systems.

The system offers sales forecasts by multiple levels of management and territory, or by product-line, competitor or other user-specified criteria.

OverQuota also links into legacy applications such as IBM AS400 DB2 databases, SAP AG business system software and call center applications from Early, Cloud and Co.

On the other hand, perhaps you'd rather have your sales accelerated, rather than transformed. SoftAd certainly hopes so. That's why the company based in Mill Valley, Calif., is offering the Media SalesExcelerator.

The Excelerator is now a 32-bit application, according to Bill McNey, SoftAd's vice president and general manager of media products.

From the users' standpoint, though, the news is the new mapping module, said McNey. This new module allows users to identify areas by pointing and clicking on distribution zones or setting radius around store locations in miles.

From there, the Excelerator module can provide a wealth of demographic and sales data for the area in question, McNey said.

"Part of the system tells who the customer's customer is, for example, so you can identify where demographics are best met for a particular target customer," he said of the 12th module in the Media Sales Excelerator product line.

"You can get statistics on any area at any time in a wide range of demographics -- household income, median age, anything.

"Once you have identified distribution zones, Excelerator brings up scheduling windows and calculates costs. It can even electronically send everything back to the office."

-- Christopher J. Feola

Gannett Media Technologies International,
(513) 665-3777,
e-mail: info@gmti.gannett.com;
Media Marketing Inc.,
(303) 440-7855,
e-mail: mminc@immediatesfa.com;
SoftAd Inc.,
(415) 332-4704,
e-mail: softad@softadgroup.com;
Spanlink Communications,
(612) 971-2000;
e-mail: mktg@spanlink.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.