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Technology Stocks : Vantive Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: P314159d who wrote (2823)	3/21/1999 9:36:00 AM
From: seth thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3033

In this context, the Internet is a communications tool, not a sales mechanism for large scale software. The issues of SFA exist (with respect to sales force use) whether stuff is being sold via the Internet, or face-to-face. My company (cybergold) is as hard core Internet as you can get - we are an Internet-only company, and our clients are all extremely Internet savvy. The way to close deals: go see the people. You can (and should!) use the Internet as a way of tracking customer visits, making it easier to transfer information to HQ, or to the customer, etc., but the sales rep human is still firmly in the loop. I think too many SFA products fail to grasp what a salesperson really does and wants - few SFA products are designed and implemented by sales reps. Imagine a software development tool designed and implemented by salespeople - how many engineers would use it? Oh sure, most SFA development teams have interviewed some salespeople, done some focus groups, etc., but how many have sat in a lonely hotel room late at night, trying of make sense of how to put their day's activity into a system, trying to balance the need for reality with the sales manager's short term view of "get your forecast and activity level up". It is really, really hard to get accurate forecasting because there is the human factor - one man's 50% probability is another's 75%. Because you have humans making buying decisions, and humans doing the selling, it is extraordinarily difficult to get any level of precision. Look at the things that can happen: - a customer buyer quits or gets reassigned - a customer buyer dies - a competitive salesrep leaves - the competition changes the salesteam on a deal - the competition decides they can't win (mistakenly!) and pulls off most resources - a new person joins the competitor's buying team - someone you have either a great rapport/conection with, a pre-existing relationship, or someone who can't stand you or someone who can't stand a competitor, or has a bad/good pre-existing relationship with the competitor - the customer's business needs and/or technical environment/needs change in mid-sales cycle, throwing the balance of power either toward you or away from you. - a major business change occurs with the customer - acquisition, sale, stock plunge, stock spike - all of which might be good or bad for you, the sales person. There are a thousand more unpredictable things, none of which have anything to do with the actual product offering. I could tell you stories about everyone of the above that's happened to me over the years - and mostly, they worked out well, when I was losing. The longer the sales cycle, the more likely some extraneous factor works its way in.