>>SNAPSHOT
Cognos, an IBM Company
www.cognos.com
Employees: 3,500
Revenue: US$1 billion
Oracle products: Oracle’s Siebel
High Tech and Manufacturing
Service Base, Siebel eService,
Siebel Tutor
Partner products: Cognos 8
companies to get the business intelligence they need to successfully meet
new business demands. Although CRM
implementation and use has finally
evolved to the point where companies
are seeing return on investment (ROI)
and benefits—Cognos executives say
the company saw a significant return
on its original CRM investment—there’s
still so much more that companies
can do, explains Denis Pombriant, the
managing principal of Beagle Research
Group, a CRM market research and
analysis firm and consultancy.
“We’re finally at the point where we always thought CRM
was heading in the early days. We’re getting payback and
ROI, but people still think of CRM as an investment that
will prove itself out over time,” he says. This may not be
the best tactic for executives to take, however. CRM can
and does provide ROI—Pombriant notes that most companies have lots of low-hanging fruit in the form of the need
to help salespeople track deals and help customer service
agents streamline communications. But the real promise
and benefit of CRM, he says, is when you can take it one
step further and combine it with analytics to turn data into
usable information—not just use the systems to make your
salespeople’s and customer service agents’ lives easier.
Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals
www.bayerhealth.com
Employees: More than 350
Revenue: US$450 million
Oracle products: Oracle’s Siebel 8,
Oracle Database 10g
“Where CRM is today is that the
forward-thinking companies are taking
it upstream one or two levels to the
point where—rather than trying to identify which customers are going to leave
you—you’re working with customers
to identify things that they may want,
before they know they want them,
so you as the vendor are poised and
ready,” emphasizes Pombriant. “CRM
is being used to obliterate the whole
attrition cycle.”
PILING MORE ON TOP
CRM use is also changing because there’s functionality and
compatibility built in that, in the past, was either impossible
or extremely expensive to add. This, in turn, makes it possible for CRM users to do more with their systems and actually change the way they do business, says Pombriant.
“We’ve got things being added to CRM incrementally that
maybe five years ago weren’t part of the core functionality,”
Pombriant says. “And some of them weren’t even on the
radar for most people back then. Things like social networking technologies and communities of interest. Companies
can form online focus groups that are much more powerful and allow vendors to repeatedly ask their customers,
‘Does this meet your needs?’ or ‘Which marketing message
WEB 2.0 POWERS CRM FOR SALES
ORACLE SOCIAL CRM BRINGS POWERFUL COLLABORATION FEATURES TO SALES AND MARKETING.
Salespeople want to sell, not spend
hours managing and tracking
the sales pipeline with customer
relationship management (CRM)
systems. But the implementation of
Web 2.0 technologies within sales
processes—or social CRM—is
actually saving sales team members
time by cutting down on data
management and helping them use
CRM to complete a sale.
Oracle Social CRM applications,
which are built on Oracle Fusion Middleware, are productivity applications
that pull from the collective knowledge of the broader sales community.
By making the process collaborative,
social CRM applications are mirroring
the social nature of sales activities—
from generating leads to closing a
deal. The Oracle Social CRM offerings
include Oracle Sales Prospector,
Oracle Sales Campaigns, Oracle Sales
Library, Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant,
and Oracle Deal Management.
Generating leads used to be a fairly
random process, driven by luck
and word of mouth. Oracle Sales
Prospector turns this process into a
science, pinpointing what to sell to
specific potential prospects based
on the buying patterns of similar customers, and providing a mashup of
knowledge from within the company
and on the internet.
Creating targeted, customized
e-mail campaigns is another focus
of the new software. Oracle Sales
Campaigns employs user ratings and
historical response rates to determine
the most effective e-mail campaigns.
Oracle Sales Library provides a
shared library to facilitate finding and
sharing sales content.
Because much of a sales team’s
work is done on the go, they need to
be able to interact with information
while they’re away from the office.
Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant enables
users to collaborate with team members, communicate with customers,
and update leads and opportunities
within an easy-to-use interface.
Oracle Deal Management provides
best-in-class pricing capabilities to
support the negotiation process. “
Traditional CRM systems will take you
up to the opportunity and the quote,”
says David Trice, Oracle’s vice president of product strategy for price
