Startup Chief Says One Popular Sales Idea Is Totally Wrong

Rather than packaging the advice in the form of a book, or a collection of charts, Employ has built the advice into a coaching system that can give a sales rep advice as the rep goes through a sales process. Sur describes the system as the equivalent of a “sales GPS” system.

That system has been on the market for four years. CNA Financial Corp. is already using it, and life companies have shown serious interest in adopting it, Sur said.

The coaching system will probably work best for a large company that generates a large amount of sales data, and is offering many complicated, but prestructured, products, rather than for a small company that offers loose packages of services that reps create on the fly, Sur said.

Emplay is now developing a system that can use similar types of technology to scan a prospect’s email, determine what the prospect is likely to need, answer basic questions, and generate a personalized email telling the prospect what she might need and what similar prospects have bought. The system brings a prospect to the attention of a live-human rep only when the prospect seems to have a serious interest in making a purchase.

While Sur and other Emplay employees were developing the coaching system, they found that system data contradicted a long-cherished sales idea: the idea that great sales reps have high sales because they talk to more prospects than other reps do.

Peter Dubowchik shows off a wall-size, touch-screen storm risk dashboard. (Photo: Allison Bell/TA)

In reality, the team found, system data suggested that the top reps tend to be the top reps because they go after better prospects, and because they offer the prospects they approach a wider portfolio of products.

Low-performing sales reps usually talk to about as many prospects as the high-performing reps do, Sur said.

Data Hunger

Peter Dubowchik, a solution manager at SAP’s own Newtown Square, Pennsylvania-based U.S. headquarters, showed off a homegrown tech system SAP itself is using: a dashboard system that a corporate board can use to make data-based decisions on the fly, while in a meeting, without sending database administrators racing off to get answers.

One version of the system, on display at the New York Leonardo Center on Thursday, could combine streams of weather data and many other types of data to help funnel detailed, easy-to-grasp summary information to a property-casualty insurer’s board.

The Leonardo Center version used a touch screen that was almost as big as the wall. An executive could stand by the screen and advance slides, or sort spreadsheet tables in a series of different ways, by tapping the screen.

SAP could easily create a similar dashboard for a life insurance company board that wanted to have an easy way to manage mortality or other types of risk, Dubowchik said.

One challenge is finding, or creating, relevant data streams, and another challenge is the fact that the existing data stream creators typically lack any kind of standardization, Dubowchik said.

Because of the lack of data stream standards, plugging streams into a dashboard system still takes a fair amount of time, Dubowchik said.

— Read SAP Unveils Software for Doctor Data-Sharing After CEO Accident on ThinkAdvisor.