Opportunity Management. This has been the heart of the Sales Enterprise from the product's inception. Everything in this product is based on the opportunity transaction set. Activities are tied to opportunities, quotes/proposals are tied to opportunities, etc.
Marketing Encyclopedia. This has been part of the Sales Enterprise from day 1. It is a repository of product information, literature, etc. The sales guy would use this module daily in providing product and company information to his customer.
Marketing Enterprise. This is new with Siebel `98. Think of this as a Siebel data mart that replicates information and transactions from the sales and service enterprise to support marketing and trend analysis. This is a tool for corporate data crunchers -- not the average sales guy. I understand that this sort of replaces their EIS approach which was a module accessing the `operational' sales and service data directly (Note, I've only seen high-level descriptions of this new module, I haven't reviewed it in detail).
ROI from Opportunity Management. You missed my point on this one. I agree that automating the generation of quotes and proposals in an SFA product have a limited ROI potential. However, for a company competing in a very dynamic marketplace, implementation of an opportunity management business process can have a massive ROI. The basis of this ROI is:
1. Sales -- collecting every significant new business opportunity.
2. Information Systems -- providing visibility of these opportunities to the enterprise.
3. Sales + the Enterprise -- acting on the opportunity to close and then deliver the business.
Without a structured opportunity management process, these steps can take weeks/months. And for some companies -- companies with very long product development cycles as an example -- that's OK. For many companies, huge benefits can be reaped by reducing this cycle. With a structured opportunity management process, these steps can be accomplished in days. The moment the sales guy quantifies a customer's potential business in the form of an *opportunity*, the enterprise can be given visibility to it and then act. Again, the idea is very powerful, but so is the implementation challenge. Sales guys must collect quality data, and then different groups in the enterprise must first believe and then act on the data in a structured manner.
Clam, what do you think of my theory that Siebel's future success will be tied to customer service business, rather than SFA? I can see this happening in the near-term. |
