Breaking down the walls.

When Chase Bank of Texas, a subsidiary of Chase Manhattan Bank, embarked on a reengineering program three years ago, it primed itself for dramatic change. Largely a cost-cutting initiative, the move incorporated a substantial investment in new office technology in an effort to streamline business processes. Along the way, employee roles were reexamined, including those of the bank's sales force of 1,000 loan officers. Rethinking its sales operations introduced Chase to the rapidly emerging field of sales force automation (SFA), which allows salespeople to manipulate and share data more easily and efficiently.

"One of the changes that came about as a result of our new sales culture was the idea of loan officers becoming 'relationship managers' instead," says Scott Tuggle, vice president and sales product team manager. This development meant that the sales goals would change from a certain number of calls per month to a renewed effort on cross-selling products to actively managing a relationship with a client. "Their responsibilities became far greater than just handling, say, the credit needs of a client," says Tuggle. "Now they were responsible for introducing this client to other products. They had to build strong relationships both with these clients and with other Chase relationship managers who sell other lines."

But there was a big and not uncommon problem: an invisible, but highly tangible wall between departments. "We just didn't have a consistent way of sharing information, of operating across state lines and distinct business lines," Tuggle says. "We didn't have a single robust database system where a middle-market person in El Paso could exchange information quickly and efficiently with a capital markets person in Houston. So, while we didn't start with a technical solution in mind," Tuggle observes, "we were driven to that kind of solution because of the cultural changes."

Improving processes first and implementing technical changes later is the smart way to revamp a sales system, according to re-engineering guru Michael Hammer, whose latest book, Beyond Reengineering, covers the topic. "An organization really needs to look at how sales is performed on a total basis," says Hammer. "This is especially so as all industries realize that they are no longer selling a mass product off the shelf, but that they are selling solutions."

So only after committing to a cultural change did Chase set about finding a technical solution. John Adams, then a vice chairman, played an integral role in introducing new procedures and technologies. Now Chase Texas's chairman and CEO, Adams unequivocally states that "more than anything else, Chase Texas's investment in sales force automation has helped us coordinate our client calling effort in a manner that is more timely and strategic." Adams says that since the bank's implementation of an SFA software package, "Sales Enterprise," from Siebel Systems, "our clients are better served, our relationship managers are more satisfied, and our organization is more profitable."

Chase selected Siebel after distributing an RFP late in 1995 which drew four or five proposals. "Siebel was one of the few at that time that could offer us a working model that was ready to go," Tuggle says. "We also deemed its product to be the most scalable, the most feature-rich, and the most easily configurable." The modular qualities of the program appealed because as Chase got its SFA toes wetter and wetter, it anticipated adding more capabilities and features.

Working with a team of consultants from Andersen Consulting, Tuggle and his sales force had the program up and running within three months. They began by conducting a comprehensive survey of the relationship managers to determine which features they'd like to have included in the system. Integration emerged as a critical factor. These days, a bank salesperson can look at a contact's record and get a list of that person's own contacts in turn. Or they can quickly grasp the different relationships a contact has with other Chase bankers. "In these ways," says Tuggle, "we're doing a much better job of understanding the client."

That understanding, of course, is aimed at more successful cross-selling, the original reason for re-engineering the sales culture. For example, the software allows data to be manipulated so that the right people are invited to the right marketing events. "It's just so much easier now to target people who might be interested in the ideas and issues being discussed at something like an estate planning seminar in Dallas," Tuggle explains.

The third way in which the revamping has helped is perhaps the most important: it's allowed relationship managers to cut down on the time they spend on administrative tasks and to increase their actual time in the field. "One of the things that came up repeatedly in our surveys of relationship managers is that they were doing a lot of manual entry at the end of the month when they were producing sales reports," Tuggle illustrates. Now the user just inputs brief notes into the system during the course of the month and an executive manager can pull together a report when needed.

So far, the great majority of the Chase sales force is tapping into the system over local and wide area networks. Only about one-tenth use laptops on the road, since most relationship managers cover a tight territory close to their office. Those who do travel for two or three days can connect via a remote access dial-up to their office computers. In the future, Tuggle says, Chase may purchase another module from Siebel that allows salespeople to work on .and update the database independent of a modern connection. "You'd work on your computer on an airplane, for example, with the program resident. Then you'd return to your office, dock your laptop, and any changes would be automatically synchronized," he says.

Although the system is the most dramatic element of Chase's wired sales culture, there are others. Its corporate intranet, for example, features a sales section that answers frequently asked questions and will, in the near future, offer computer-based training. Currently, training is offered through a series of one-hour telephone courses that are essentially conference calls through which trainees can participate from their desks.

Vocabulary Builder

Customer-aligned selling: A movement to bring the customer deeper into the sales process. This might be accomplished via a more proactive type of selling that remains alert for opportunities that match specific customer needs, or it might involve a more direct integration of customer sales representatives and their records into sales.

Data synchronization/integration: An overall heading for a number of methods used to keep data up to date and in touch with other data. These include: tapping into legacy mainframes, where disparate corporate systems or business applications that share some of the same information are linked via a single mainframe (critical when, as in Chase's case, consolidations and mergers have left information distributed over several distinct systems); remote synchronization, which allows people who are not connected to the network, such as salespeople on the road, to enter new information into the database and then synchronize their changes when they return to the office and dock their laptops; and real-time synchronization, which allows salespeople in, say, Austin, El Paso, and San Antonio to view the database at the same time and to instantly make and access changes.

Marketing/Sales Encyclopedia: Your company's entire sales kit on an external disk drive, CD-ROM, or via a network connection. Usually contains product information (descriptions, configurations, delivery, pricing); may also include an entire sales presentation (with music, animation, graphics), customer records, file copies of promotional literature, and even technical manuals.

Object-oriented client/server architecture: Instead of being based on code, this programming language manipulates chunks of code, allowing software to be more flexible and easily upgradable.

Thought Leader

Michael Hammer, author of Reengineering and Beyond Reengineering, has called sales force automation "one of the great computer scams of the 1990s." He notes that "the great majority of implementations have been unsuccessful. Too often, organizations see SFA as a magic potion. That thinking is based on a faulty assumption: that improving task productivity improves business results."

Hammer contends that in order to succeed, such tools must be used holistically, as part of an overall re-engineering of sales systems. He cites a hardware manufacturer who brings in researchers to gain a better understanding of its market demographics, logistics people to help retailers better schedule deliveries and manage inventories, and technical staff to train retailers to sell the product. "Sales is an environment in which this kind of process thinking is less familiar," he says, so sales force re-engineering has come rather late to the party.

When a company does take a systemwide approach to sales, SFA works because "salespeople aren't wasting effort on unlikely opportunities and energy in uncoordinated efforts." Avoiding those kinds of mistakes can drive down costs dramatically, he adds. "Sales re-engineering represents a huge cultural shift for salespeople," Hammer concedes. "They have to shift from being lone wolves to becoming team players."

"SFA can help put more power and responsibility into the salesperson's hands," Hammer says. "Instead of just receiving and delivering sales orders, they can access product specifications immediately and present the customer with a customized configuration. The sales rep and the customer can work together over a matter of minutes, so that the customer gets exactly what he wants that much faster." As the sales rep's role broadens, only half will adapt, Hammer projects. "But it needn't be that way," he adds. "Sales is a certain kind of talent; these other things are skills that are learnable. But none of this is a substitute for sales talent. It's an enhancement."