What Gets Measured Gets Funded

In the next twelve months enabling both your own and your channel partners’ sales forces with sales and product configurator applications, pricing, warranty management or contract management apps is going to take a convincing argument.  Anchoring arguments in the potential for performance improvements based on the results achieved by others in your industry is what many vendors wills tell you to do. 

It’s an even better idea to define your own scorecard and do your own pilot.  From the work I did at AMR Research I began to realize the following facts about doing a pilot program for automating sales and product configuration, pricing, warranty management, or any other app that involved serving channel partners:

1.    Define a specific process are and measure its performance in its current state today.  Too often I’ve seen pilots get this halo effect, as if they are a panacea.  In fact the hard work of re-engineering the process is what matters most.  Smart companies benchmark their process even before it is re-designed so they can measure the impact of their re-engineering and automating of the process.

2.    Pick only three to five metrics to measure the pilot. This is heresy to many engineering-centric high-tech companies I have worked with.  The tendency is to boil the ocean when it comes to metrics.  This is a huge mistake as the pilot gets bogged down in over-analysis.  Pick three to five (max) metrics and set objectives around getting them to show progress.  This also solves the tricky problem of isolating which strategy or system is impacting which process.

3.    Run the pilot a minimum of ninety days. The table below shows a series of the metrics used in pilots and later in actual system installations.  The results were obtained for operationally-oriented metrics within 90 – 120 days.  Financial metrics take 9 months or more to see results.  

4.    Must have executives sponsor this for change management to be real.  Get our executives to sponsor the pilot and show they are behind it by changing how they do their jobs, so resistance to change will drop.

5.    Evaluate and publish the results quickly, broadly inside your company and with truth behind him. Use this last phase of any pilot and is critical for the credibility of the project.  If there are lessons learned freely share them.  Best of all this sends a message to your organization that change must continue and improvements must be continually made for your company to move forward.

Bottom line: Accomplishing channel management, sales and product configuration, pricing, or contract management implementations in 2009 is going to rely on quickly and accurately measuring results.  Use a pilot to see how a proposed strategy is going to contribute to your organization and get your executives onboard early to minimize resistance to change as well.  In the coming year what gets measured gets funded.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus, Perfect CEM