I started my sales and marketing career in 1977 as a sales trainee for ASG Industries. My tools were a legal pad, a couple of Bic pens and a secretary named Darlene, who typed everything on an IBM Selectric typewriter. I sat at a Steelcase desk actually made from steel and painted gunmetal grey. This was before fax machines (at least reliable ones), FEDEX, email, cell phones, desktop publishing, the Internet, and all the other tools and technologies available to marketers today.
My first taste of technology and computers came in 1978 when I was selected to administer Harvard/GE’s PIMS program – (profit impact of market share) for ASG. In 1981 we were using handheld TRS80’s to calculate steel pricing during a sales call. Later, I was the co-founder and EVP sales and marketing of an early artificial intelligence pioneer (circa1982). I had one of the first IBM PC’s and bought the first Macintosh. We were using using cell phones back in 1988 to speed up our selling cycles. My firm did the positioning and launch of one of the first large scale B2B internet sites and one of the most successful (Marshall Industries) back in 1994. We have had a front row seat to the SFA/CRM wars as a user, critic and a participant (our client Moss Software was sold to E.piphany for $40 million in 2001). This blog entry is written on a brand new Apple 15" PowerBook G4 with 2 gigs of ram and 13 applications opened at one time.
This experience has caused me to be both a champion and a critic of technology in the sales and marketing suite. What I have learned specifically over almost 30 years and more than 500 campaigns is that technology applied to sales and marketing generates a trade off between agility and efficiency. At one end of the trade-off is the efficiency gained by using technology to automate those tasks that are repeatable and predictable. At the other end of the trade-off is the agility to change on a dime in response to competitive threats and opportunities. The implication of this trade-off being that technology while creating potential efficiencies does so at the sacrifice of operational agility.
Technology applied to sales and marketing competencies should be viewed from the standpoint of generating agility as opposed to creating efficiencies. The reason for this is that sales is not like accounting. While there are many activities in the back office that take place on a predictable and repeatable basis, like sending out invoices and running the general ledger, the same is not true in sales and marketing. The problem with most technology solutions is that they try to force back office solutions rationalized on assembly-line infrastructure models on front office operations. The result of which are very efficient but very rigid operational infrastructures.
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