At one level, sales is easy. Well, maybe not easy, but certainly repetitive, and repetition implies you should not be making the same mistakes twice. Still many organizations (and yes, I am guilty too) approach many repetitive tasks with a people-driven ad hoc approach that saps both efficiency and effectiveness. The problem is that in many cases, these processes are not so much data-centric (e.g. forecasting, and so amenable to existing sales force automation tools), but are people-centric. These rely upon primarily document driven content and approvals, and have been largely resistant to automation attempts. A prime example in my department is the RFP process.

There are of course a number of RFP template software tools, but these all focus on the content at the expense of the actual approvals process. Secondly, in taking as their unit of granularity the RFP question, they paint a fantasy world where responding to an RFP is as simple as selecting from a database of pre-approved questions. If only… The reality is every RFP has a substantial custom element – if all the client needed were stock responses, they would not have gone to the trouble of creating an RFP and instead simply reviewed your stock marketing material. Further, I’ve never seen the same substantial question phrased the same way. Always there is some subtle unique twist, typically requiring not just a rewrite, but also a further approval cycle.

It’s far to say I used to dread RFP’s. Upon receiving the RFP, it would enter a black hole, ideally remerging when complete, but with little or no visibility of progress to me. Account managers would literally have to walk backwards and forwards between legal and engineering to get approval on a form of words. The final product would be sent to me for approval with a helpful cover note like “this has to go out in the next 2 hours”. Thanks team.

We’ve now implemented a formal process with the BoardVantage Portal. Through real-time chat and conferencing, product management, sales, legal, and engineering can all agree on the language. Automatic versioning means the latest version is always at hand with no danger of the wrong version being used. The whole process from start to finish is more efficient and this is crucial as it gives my team back time on deadline. I can’t stress how important that is. The typical reaction on finishing an RFP used to be “if only we had more time, we could have added…”. Now, RFP’s are finished days ahead of the deadline – time for a proper review. Time to sleep on it. Time it make sure you really have put your best foot forward.

As an executive I also win with real-time status updates on the RFP which mean I don’t have to just hope it will be finished on time, but can intervene if I sense issues or sticking points developing( management through visibility). By putting an automated process in place, I can be confident of higher quality, and better RFP’s mean more sales. Sales force automation tools are great and the bread and butter for Sales’ data-centric processes. With the BoardVantage Portal, I have that same capability of process discipline with people-centric processes.

A few months back I sat in Denver, waiting for a connection back to San Francisco, and checked my email on my BlackBerry. I had 73 unread emails collected over the previous 5 hours, of which:

1. 25 referred to the same contract negotiation. I’d been copied on every single minor detail, as my sales person thought this is more likely to get legal to agree (it isn’t).

2. 14 were asking me to approve the account manager getting hold of a copy of the original contract from Legal for the annual renewal.

3. 15 were asking me who could answer this question or another. Basically using me as a switchboard operator to route their request.

4. 3 were from the VP engineering with product status details

5. 15 were spam or solicitations.

I think most execs have a similar problem. Email overload, with no way to separate out on the basis of urgency or importance. “Managing chaos” seems as accurate a description of my job as any, but the BoardVantage Portal has transformed both my inbox and my overall efficiency.

Since we started using it internally, one of the first things I did was to take advantage of our gold-standard security to implement a company-wide contracts database, administered by Finance, but accessible by account managers to the specific contracts only they should have access too. The result? Those 14 emails asking me for access – gone.

Then we implemented our RFP and contracts process within the portal.  Since the BoardVantage Portal manages all of the versioning – I need never have to trawl through 100 odd email attachments to find the latest (why does everyone title every email as “Latest”?). With the BoardVantage Portal, the latest is always the one visible. Also, by moving the approvals process to BoardVantage, I can choose to prioritize the urgent and the important, and make sure that out of the 100 things I ought to do today, the 50 that I really, absolutely, positively, must do today, get done. Another 25 emails vaporized.

One of my favorite aspects of BoardVantage Portal is the rich personal profiles. This means that my reports can go directly to the source (“discover expertise” is the phrase used) and get me out of my role as “switchboard operator in chief”. Of course, a lot of these requests are not so much about not knowing who to contact, as seeking my approval to contact. That is really a cultural question – one in which I rely on the Wall to drive team behavior .

Perhaps the biggest single benefit of the BoardVantage Portal lies in the fact that the combination of functionality drastically improves overall visibility. It lets me control the chaos by moving activities off email and implementing process discipline , a topic about which I will write more…

I hold my team accountable as the public face of BoardVantage, and to that end there are some standards of behavior and performance I expect to be maintained. Communicating those standards to a predominantly dispersed team can be a challenge. In the past I’ve really relied upon two main vehicles: Quarterly sales meetings and group emails. Both help, but neither completely address the issues of keeping everyone on the same page. In person get-togethers can only be done infrequently, and group emails often get buried.

I’ve found a new tool within the BoardVantage Portal to be a godsend. The Wall is our sales portal landing page, and directly editable by me to include whatever’s on my mind. The beauty of it is that it’s “always on”. I can control not just the content, but crucially I also control the order in which content appears and make sure that my top-of-mind, is their top-of-screen. Because I can control the branding and presentation, I can again emphasize important points as well as reinforcing that “quality begins at home”.

The Wall is basically my opportunity to give a pep talk to all my reports every morning, no matter where they may be. It gets everyone on the same page.