I have just returned from a from a lengthy discussion with a client. We have beed asked to review the client's sales processes with particular emphasis on why sales personnel haven't been using the systems. The issues were not driven by a need for greater detail in corporate reporting or lack of information about forecasting, but simply that sales don't use the systems put in place to help them do the selling. It seemed that the client had done all the right things, involving the sales teams in building the systems, making it as easy as possible to complete forms online, monitoring usage, getting feedback. But none of these good things had produced the desired results. "They still don't use the system".

Sales people are notorious amongst the IT fraternity with respect to using (or not using) IT systems. It perplexes the developers who have conscientiously responded to the gripes from sales and added little tweaks and changes to make the system just that little bit easier to use. "We added an interface to their Blackberry to make it easier for them to work but they still don't fill in the g'damm product number! and they said that was their biggest problem!".

The issue is that Sales staff are also conscientious. They are out there doing the selling and their time is best used in this way. Who wants to be filling in some arcane form on a website at 9pm at night after a long day on the road.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to getting people to use systems correctly, but I have listed below some techniques we think are useful.

·  It has to come from the top. Its no good having a system which is not sponsored by the senior people in the business - who understand it, know its benefits, expect it to deliver and can communicate this to their staff. The boss expects you to use the system!

·  Reasons for using the system. Its no good having people fill in mandatory fields on forms when they don't know what the fields do. Worse still having fields that are necessary and everyone knows no-one ever looks at them on a report - this can easily be resolved by the developers - Review the forms and remove unnecessary fields or hide them on and "Advanced" tab. However, for necessary fields, explain what they are used for why they are there, who is looking at them and what the consequences of not completing the form correctly can do to the business.

·  Communicate early. Non-use is often a result of poor training (or no training). Induction training for new sales staff should include an introduction to the systems. Where possible use sales staff (as opposed to IT or operations) to do the training. Better still have your top flight sales guy (no gender implied), winner of this year's porsche 911, do an introduction. Tips and tricks for getting the best out of the system wouldn't go amiss and use real world examples with nice big numbers.

·  Online Training. You should have good (and up-to-date) on-line documentation. 5 Minute spoken tutorials on specific subjects, How to log a quotation, How to promote a lead to an opportunity etc. These are easy to create using something like PowerPoint or adobe's range of tools and can be done incrementally. Saleforce.com have spent a lot of time creating online tutorials but they apply to the out-of-the-box system. Your system is probably customized for your business needs, you should customize the training at the same time.

·  Monitor usage. This is the big brother approach yes but it doesn't need to be an intrusion on anyone's civil liberties. If a user hasn’t logged on without legitimate reason for a lengthy period of time then flag it to their boss. But be sympathetic you wouldn’t want to be told off for not logging onto a sales system as you breast feed your newborn.

·  Monitor Time Spent. "but it take 20 minutes to fill in an opportunity form!". It probably doesn't but how do you know? A simple timestamp on opening and saving a form might give you an heads up on time spent. If this isn’t possible then ask the question on your regular usage feedback survey - how long does it take you to complete an opportunity.

·  Regular user feedback. A simple set of survey questions on usability emailed to your sales force would suffice. 5 questions at the most with radio button selections. Bottle of Champaign draw for all those completing the survey.

·  The big stick. Tie system usage and accuracy into the bonus.

This is not exhaustive but its a good start.

We were recently asked to comment on why a company's emails were not arriving at their destination. The company in question had recently sent out an invitation email to a list of clients and subsequently ended up on a black list. This was our advice.

It’s difficult to make a complete assessment since we don’t have some relevant technical details however there are several possible causes: 

a)      Local black lists: If you have been black listed once then it’s possible that email systems at the recipients sites could have cached this information and it will take some time before your IP address is removed from the local black list – it’s possible that it may never be removed in a small number of cases on poorly managed sites. I think this is least likely of the possible problems but I include it for completeness.

b)      Junk Inbox: Email could be ending up in the personal junk mail of recipients. This is the downside of junk filters, they use weird and wonderful algorithms to identify junk mail characteristics. This often means that legitimate emails end up in junk mail. If an email goes to junk once (for whatever reason) then other different email from the same recipient may also end up in junk. There are a couple of ways around this: subtly changing email address policy (for instance tony.sprague@crmtechnologies.com instead of tsprague@crmtechnologies.com) then make sure that the recipient adds your address to their safe-senders list.

c)       SPF records. This seems to be emerging as the standard means of identifying legitimate email senders (there are other methods SenderID and DomainKeys). SPF is the easiest to set up. Again I think this is unlikely to be the root of the problem, unless you have an incorrect SPF record in which case this would be bad. You need to talk to your technical guys about SPF and if its set up for the DNS record for your email server http://www.openspf.org/

d)      Reverse DNS look ups. Make sure you have “reverse DNS” looks ups to your Email server. You need to talk to your ISP for this. They don’t know you need them unless you tell them. Some corporate email recipients may block emails that cannot be identified by reverse DNS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_DNS.

e)      Open Relay. It’s possible that you were placed on a black list because you had a period where your email server was an open relay. This is like a hole in your firewall that is exploited by spammers. They use your email server to send thousands of emails. You get blacklisted or you close the hole then they move onto some other poor unsuspecting sod. In my experience this is the easiest way to get on a black list. To be honest, sending a load of invite emails from your outlook email address is an unlikely reason to be blacklisted. Black lists make use of thresholds which are sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of emails. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_mail_relay

f)       Domain Name : Backlists use IP addresses to identify the source of spam so its unlikely to be the domain name. Although the heuristic algorithms in some email content filters maybe prudish bordering on puritanical.

g)      Delivery monitors. There are several services out there that can check your deliverability against blacklists and the most popular junk mail filters. Lyris.com has a good one. These are most useful if you are sending lots of emails.

Conclusions: Personal Junk folders is the most likely issue you have. Because you ended up in the junk folder some point (probably due to a corporate junk filter) the personal junk filter (most often on Outlook) may remember this and score you highly. This would also account for the fact that some people at an organization get your email whilst other do not – the ones who get your email probably didn’t receive email from you whilst you were black listed. We had a similar issue when testing an email blast with some high scoring spam characteristics in the content. The first email went into Junk. From then on all subsequent emails arrived in the junk box even thought we changed the content. Try subtly changing your email address to test this.

Welcome,

As we've been working in the Marketing Operations environment for 8 years we thought it might be worth sharing some of our experiences and expertise through a irregular blog.

We welcome your comments, be they good or bad, on our ramblings. But we are wish to make this relevant to marketers who face the day to day problem of reconciling technology and creativity.

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