Oracle Corp. today announced the latest version of Oracle’s sales-side customer relationship management (CRM) applications that will help companies grow revenue by enabling effective enterprise selling.
Selling is an enterprisea process that touches all aspects of an organization. Creating a model of effective enterprise selling means aligning groups within the enterprise to work together toward the same goals, providing parties involved with direct access to enterprise information and collaborating and coordinating selling efforts across all channels. The new versions of Oracle Sales, Oracle Marketing, Oracle Partner Relationship Management and Oracle e-Commerce 11i.10 will deliver capabilities to drive sales success through improved enterprise alignment, effectiveness and collaboration.
“Oracle 11i.10 moves Oracle’s CRM applications into the next stage of CRM functionality – beyond siloed automation to enterprise business processes. As the CRM market begins to rebound, organizations want and need applications that unify processes and information. In this release these business processes extend across all areas that touch selling initiatives to help drive corporate objectives,” said Mary Wardley, research vice president, CRM Applications, IDC.
Enterprise-Wide Alignment
Enterprise-wide alignment, a key aspect of successful selling, ensures groups within an organization work together to support corporate objectives through better communication, consistent information and incentives.
Marketing and sales alignment. In order to focus marketing and sales activities around common objectives, companies need to have consistent information shared between the sales and marketing departments. The new Oracle Audience Workbench, a component of Oracle Marketing 11i.10, spans both marketing and sales functions to provide an integrated flow of information. Using the Workbench, a marketing or regional sales manager can access information on existing customers to identify the best up-sell targets. Then, the Workbench provides the tools necessary for the creation of marketing campaigns and associated sales kits. Sales kits and accompanying proposals can be automatically tracked as leads.
Aligning sales efforts with organizational goals. To ensure sales efforts align with organization goals, Oracle Incentive Compensation 11i.10 provides “projected compensation” capabilities. This enables sales management to design compensation plans that strategically support the overall sales goals of an organization and sales reps can see how selling various products or giving discounts will effect their compensation. Integration between Oracle Quoting and Oracle Incentive Compensation provides reps with the visibility into how a sales quote would impact compensation.
Aligning internal and partner sales organizations. The latest version of Oracle Territory Manager, a component of Oracle Sales, helps promote sales alignment between internal and partner sales organizations. New functionality in Oracle Territory Manager gives sales managers the ability to plan territory alignment for both direct and indirect sales forces and analyze effectiveness against corporate goals.
“Aligning our sales and marketing activities has allowed National Instruments to focus our resources on the most profitable customers to drive bottom line results,” said Lisa Glenn, National Instruments Sales & Marketing Business Solutions Manager. “Using Oracle Sales and Oracle Marketing, National Instruments can now measure the success of our marketing and sales efforts by lead conversation rate and revenue growth. And, we’ve been able to gain additional customer insight to build a more customer-focused enterprise.”
Selling Effectiveness
Selling is complex, and in an effort to achieve greater effectiveness throughout the sales process, companies need to provide information and enterprise business processes to help marketing and sales professionals drive revenue more effectively. And, by making sales and marketing professionals more effective, organizations can more efficiently run their operations and reduce costs.
Effective sales approach. Oracle Sales Coach, part of Oracle sales 11i.10, helps increase the effectiveness of a sales rep by outlining the corporate methodology for the sales process. Giving sales reps easy access to the sales techniques and strategies that are most likely to close deals in the most efficient manner increases sales effectiveness. Additionally, Oracle Sales Coach provides a system to automatically capture information about each step of the sales cycle, which enables easy analysis and reporting at the close of a deal.
Efficient proposal generation. Oracle Proposals helps a sales rep generate a proposal by pulling information from other systems across the enterprise, or from a central repository of proposal information, significantly reducing the time needed to generate an accurate, personalized proposal. Tighter integration with collateral generated by the marketing department also ensures sales reps are always using the most accurate and up-to-date product collateral.
Accurate sales quotes. Oracle Quoting enables a sales rep to select terms and conditions from a comprehensive library allowing contracts to be automatically constructed based on current quote, order and negotiation information. Edited versions of contracts are tracked and approval of non-standard terms and conditions are automated with workflow and audit trail functionality.
Collaborative Selling
Companies are quickly moving to a blended sales approach, which coordinates selling activities across multiple channels – direct, indirect and online – by integrating processes, sharing information and using the right sales channel at the right time. Oracle Partner Management and Oracle iStore 11.i.10 improve selling success through collaboration between a company’s direct sales force, customers and partners.
Increase partner collaboration. The Partner Dashboard, part of Oracle Partner Management 11i.10, provides tools for partners to perform all of their sell-side activities online and collaborate with channel managers. Partners can access co-op marketing funds, register deals and make special pricing requests. Through integration with Oracle iStore, partners can now collaborate on sales opportunities, manage accounts, seek assistance, initiate returns and place repeat orders.
Identify channel trends. The Channel Manager Dashboard provides channel managers with a complete, personalized view of channel activity. Comprehensive key performance indicators display important metrics such as total sales year-to-date, opportunity close rates, available and committed funds and open claims. With this information, channel managers can proactively identify channel trends and work with partners to improve selling success.
“At ViewSonic, the sales process touches many aspects of our business, including marketing, customer support and multiple sales channels such as our direct sales force, the web and partners,” said Robert Moon, CIO and vice president of Information Services at ViewSonic Corporation. “We are very excited by the latest release of Oracle’s Sales-Side CRM applications and believe they will play an important role in the continued success and growth of our business moving forward.”
Comprehensive Analytics
A key component of driving enterprise selling is having insight into comprehensive analytics. With 11i.10, companies have analytics available to sales users at all levels through daily business intelligence, transaction reports and ad-hoc analysis. Information such as current status, historical comparative analysis, predictive analysis and opportunity and pipeline reporting significantly improves how a company manages its sales efforts for greater effectiveness.
Beyond Sales Automation
“Selling is complex, and companies need to provide the entire network of organizations involved in the selling process – the marketing organization, the sales force, partners – with the right tools and information to make them successful,” said John Wookey, senior vice president, applications development, Oracle. “With our latest release, Oracle can help companies drive enterprise selling by delivering software that provides access to enterprise information, align groups to work towards corporate objectives and enable collaboration between a companies’ network of relationships.”
