bSelling from the Top Down (and bottom up)

When we first developed bSelling Opportunity Management Software we had a choice: Focus on bottom-up or top-down issues.

We chose bottom-up first: Make the software easy and fun to use, and useful to the individual sales rep.

Almost immediately, our early adopters made us very aware that as much as they loved what we already had, there were burning top-down issues that needed to be addressed asap:

1. How can the sales manager get an effective overview of all open opportunities?  And then drill down.
   
2. Similarly, how can an individual salesperson get perspective of all his opportunities in order to better gauge where and how to focus effort?
3. How can a sales manager customize the qualification process to fit her team's needs?
4. How can a sales person or manager share insights with other team members, or present a pitch to clients?

We listened and have carefully crafted some exciting new features, again blending visual flair with smart functionality:

Better overviews: The bSelling Opportunity Explorer

The bSelling Opportunity Explorer is a new dashboard that shows every open Opportunity and positions it graphically based on its qualification percentage -- the likelihood of success as determined through the bSelling flip-card based Qualify tool -- and the expected Amount in $ from a successful close:

Click to view a larger image

The size of the bubble shows how much effort the rep. has been devoting to the opportunity.  Hovering on an opportunity identifies it and gives precise numbers.  Clicking opens up bSelling for that opportunity.

Overview

Looking at the overall distribution gives an at-a-glance overview of where all opportunities are at, and where the effort is going.  The four quadrants are labelled to assist interpretation:

1. Excellent: The upper right contains the best-qualified, highest amount opportunities
2. Safe bets: The lower right are well qualified, lower amount opps
3. Pie in the sky: The upper left contain the high amount, not yet well qualified opps
4. Poor: The lower left contains poorly qualified, low yield opps

Reading the patterns

With very little practice, certain patterns should start to leap out as meaningful:

• In the image above the line of small circles on the vertical axis are unqualified opportunities.  Why haven't they been qualified yet?
  
• Large circles in the left quadrants reflect opportunities where a lot of effort is going in without much progress.  Some of the "pies in the sky" may be worth persisting with (for a while), but the "poor" opps need to be quickly qualified across or dropped.

For the individual salesperson this overview can be a powerful tool to help manage his pipeline.  For the manager, it allows her to see how the team as a whole is performing, and focus action where needed.

Customization: Tailoring the process

The bSelling Qualify Tool adds rigor and guidance to qualification by asking the salesperson to flip through virtual card-decks that rate all the important factors associated with an opportunity.

It is now possible with bSelling premium to customize this standardized tool across a team or organization to meet a preferred methodology or to cater to specialized needs:

And here's an in-depth overview.

Sharing: Exporting to PowerPoint

Sales and account managers often need to report on key opportunities to executives and other non-sales colleagues.  To illustrate their understanding of an opportunity and to help their audience understand the client contacts' perspectives, bSelling premium now includes a convenient "export to PowerPoint" facility in the Diagnose Pain tool.

When pitching to a customer, diagrams prepared in Present & Sell can be turned into a sequence of PowerPoint slides in the same way.

Conclusion

bSelling remains fun and friendly, but has grown more power-packed.  

It blends bottom-up advantages (usefulness, simplicity, fun) with top-down virtues (overview, customizability) and communication (visualization, PowerPoint export).

We'll keep refining it, and can also further customize to meet more specialized needs.

To Customize is Cool

It's cool to customize! It practically has the word "customer" in it, so what's not to love?

Seriously: When prospective customers see the Qualify tool -- part of Austhink's bSelling add-on to Salesforce crm ...


they say two things:

1. Wow!
2. Can I customize it?

The "Wow!" reaction is because here is a tool that really helps the salesperson with a vital but difficult task -- sales qualification -- in a fun way. It provides useful feedback -- an overall percentage, and sensible concrete ways to boost the score. Ok: Most of the wow is because of the fun factor and groovy way it plays (like flipping through photos on a Mac).

The second reaction -- the wish for customization -- is natural. Although at Austhink we believe that the out-of-the-box system is quite generic, sales teams do of course vary in their terminology, types of customers, and overall slant sales.

So, I recommend a suck it before you salt it approach:

1. Try out the generic version (that comes with the free version of bSelling) on a few opportunities to get the feel for the process. Just pick a neutral "card" if a factor doesn't seem to apply.
   
2. Make notes about where the terminology needs revision, which "factors" don't apply, and which (if any) are missing.
3. Upgrade to the premium version of bSelling and make use of our soon-to-be-released customize feature.
4. If you need extra help, we can arrange consultation!
   

The customize feature allows your company to change the wording, options, factors, and weightings -- i.e. everything -- of the Qualify tool to tailor it to fit your unique situation. Just like the tool itself, it looks great, is fun-to-use and it has a game-like feel. Here's a sneak peak:


Each line represents a deck of cards in the tool, and each block represents a single card. The length of each line represents the weight of each factor. You just click on a box to edit some wording (shown), or click on an end box to stretch or squash a line (to make a factor more or less important compared to the others). Other operations are similarly simple.

By the way: If you think of the Qualify tool as a level in a game, the customization tool is like the level-designer that allows an obsessed user to design new game levels for their friends to play. In this case, the customization tool allows the sales-manager to tweak (or totally revamp) the qualification process to fit local conditions, and better monitor (and mentor) the sales team.

We are about to trial the customization tool with a select group of beta-testers -- email me at dan@austhink.com if you want to give it a whirl -- and the first version should be available in the next week or so.