5 Emerging Sales Productivity Tools

Socializing Travel and Expense

Product: Concurforce, a mobile travel and expense product
Price: Pricing is transaction-based (the more you use, the less expensive each submitted report is). The mobile app is free to individual users but must be tied to a corporate account.
Company: Concur
Web address: www.concur.com

For many field sales reps, the end of the month comes as both a blessing and a curse. On the up side, they can count on being reimbursed for travel expenses incurred on the road. But what happens if a sales rep loses one—or a few—receipts? And what if a company wants to integrate travel and expense costs directly into its total opportunity costs while keeping a paper trail of all the activity right in its CRM system?

This is what online travel and expense management company Concur looked to solve with Concurforce, a mobile solution streamlining the travel and expense process. Concurforce also allows a rep to enter travel plans, receive dining recommendations, and share itineraries through an integration with Salesforce.com Chatter, and to turn TripIt itineraries into expense reports.

"If you know, for instance, that you're traveling to San Francisco on Tuesday, it automatically looks through all of the opportunities you're working on, and it goes, 'Well here are four clients you can see in San Francisco, and here are the prospects' and some details on them," comments Michael Fauscette, group vice president of software business solutions at IDC. "If you think about it, that's very useful from a salesguy's perspective—tying CRM and travel together."

One client, Cascade Orthopedic Supply, one of the largest independent distributors of prosthetics and orthotics in the country, needed a way to better organize and track travel expenses for its sales reps.

"Prior to using Concurforce, we had an Excel template and salespeople would have to scan all their receipts into a PDF or big-picture file that went to our accounts payable group," remarks James Mayfield, a business analyst for Cascade. "You'd have to try and match those receipts to the spend, and it was just a very, very slow process."

Cascade's accounts payable department manually went through and assigned transactions to the correct general ledger accounts, then hand-entered the information into the company's ERP system. The manual nature of the process did not provide a whole lot of visibility into the expense process, and there was no historical reporting. Using Concurforce, the company can tie a specific expense record to a customer account record in its Salesforce.com system, and sales reps can photograph their receipts with a smartphone and submit expense reports right from their mobile device.

"We wanted to design the solution around the heaviest business travelers and most frequent expense report filers—who are people in field sales and the client-service function," says Mike Hilton, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Concur. "We built it in a way that was very similar to how you think about opportunities."

Crushing the Competition

Product: Crushpath, a lead management and alert solution
Price: $29 for standalone license, $49 for license for Salesforce.com integrated license user per month
Company: Crushpath Systems
Web address: www.Crushpath.com

Think of Crushpath as a personalized customer portal in which a salesperson also gets a visualized version of how a sales story has unfolded. Through Crushpath, salespeople can gain access to all of the activities surrounding their particular deal flow in chronological order, not unlike a Facebook timeline. When a rep makes a client call, the action appears in the Crushpath platform as a geolocated map. If there is a customer email exchange, that and other communication between sales reps and their team members show up in the Crushpath application.

Through a recent integration with Twilio Voice, Crushpath is able to transcribe phone calls when sales reps call contacts from the Crushpath application. An audio and text transcript of the call can also be pushed back to a user's CRM system.

"There is a play-by-play of [the call] as it's happening," says Sam Lawrence, cofounder and CEO of Crushpath, adding that sales reps can review phone conversations and email exchanges. "It's all there. It's searchable. You don't have to go back and record it for other people or take notes or anything like that."

Crushpath customers range from high-tech companies to ad agencies and financial services companies. More than 75 percent of Crushpath's clients transact with their customers using its collaborative customer-facing portal, which can be accessed via a mobile device. Here, customers get a personalized site, where they can interact with their sales rep and access files, case studies, and data sheets, as well as a form that lets them communicate and request more information.

Sales Training 2.0

Product: Learn for Salesforce, a sales training platform
Price: Pricing is based on an annual subscription model, varying by user bands or specific user counts.
Company: Blackboard
Web address: www.Blackboard.com

Although the name Blackboard has become synonymous with higher education tools and technology, it is perhaps the company's CRM-integrated sales training platform designed for businesses that has the most unique growth potential.

Announced at Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce.com and Blackboard teamed up to launch Learn for Salesforce, a platform that gives sales teams a social learning experience by integrating with Salesforce.com Chatter, and by tailoring dashboards and reports to sales performance and business objectives. "You can build social communities around courses and facilitate project-based learning," comments Heather Bennett, vice president of the Cloud Division at Internet Protocol phone systems provider ShoreTel, which started using Learn for Salesforce last January.

ShoreTel's People Team, which was developed to make training across the enterprise a social learning experience, gives the sales team peer-to-peer engagement, with implications for sales performance as well. "We've had great adoption, because we are adamant believers that a learning system needed to connect to the way we do business."

Because Learn for Salesforce provides key metrics and flags areas for improvement, there is more transparency. Bennett says the company had previously struggled with on-boarding sales reps, but as a result of empowering the organization's People Team with its learning program through Blackboard, the zero-to-quota target of six months has become much more attainable.

Lee Perlis, senior marketing manager for Blackboard, says that one Learn for Salesforce customer company is now on-boarding 20 to 30 new sales reps per week, with a resulting 12 percent increase in net revenue.

"It helps them to get people to stay within their training environment, too, having something right within Salesforce.com," Perlis says. "It not only increases their sales, but increases their completion rate for the number of courses that they're offering."

The New Normal

Whether your organization is using social, mobile, or collaborative applications to facilitate sales cycles, one thing is for sure: Today's consumer technologies are having a transformative effect on businesses.

"Frankly, when it comes to social, being able to interact collaboratively either with colleagues or your prospects and customers is just critically important," says Carter Lusher, chief analyst for enterprise applications at Ovum. "The old way of doing business—the 'I'll give you a phone call, or we'll exchange emails'—is just as necessary, but inadequate because of the consumerization of IT. People's expectations are being changed by their everyday interactions."

Associate Editor Kelly Liyakasa can be reached at kliyakasa@infotoday.com.