Sales

Sales Operations

Business Goals

Improve the quality of sales plans and forecasts
Enhance product knowledge of those who are selling to customers
Provide better access to business information and analytics

While today's sales organizations depend on email, they also depend on information that cannot be effectively managed or controlled using email alone. Sales plans, forecasts, product information and feedback on sales effectiveness must be available in a secure, easy-to-use manner.

Open Text solutions for Sales provide secure, Web-based collaboration to support sales planning and forecasting processes with routing for review and approval and access to reports and business intelligence needed to evaluate sales effectiveness. Our solutions provide a single platform for transferring knowledge to sales teams, so companies can quickly build sales expertise, deliver more effective content, and make fast adjustments to initiatives to meet changing market conditions.

Open Text solutions for Sales Operations deliver this functionality with the following components:

Supplemented by Business Content (e.g., predefined workflows) to give you a head-start in configuring workstreams and processes, Consulting Services, Training and Support tailored to meet your requirements.

Activities

Sales Operations involves Report & Output Management, Sales Planning and Sales Training.

Report Management & Distribution

Key performance indicators must be monitored and measured to understand if you are close to meeting your strategic goals and moving in the proper direction. The information that you collect must be available to those who are responsible for keeping the organization on track. Livelink ECM - Report and Output Management provides the solution you need to make sure that the information that you produce is available to the right people at the right time.

Solution Adaptations: Report & Output Management

Sales Planning

Without accurate forecasts, companies risk generating excess inventory, which can result in offering products that customers do not need or want. Sales planning requires access to information from a variety of sources such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, marketing, competitive intelligence, win-loss results, and, of course, email.

Open Text solutions for Sales supports the enterprise-wide collaboration that is required to develop sales plans and forecasts. Livelink ECM solutions integrate the structured data from your ERP and CRM systems with the unstructured documents that people produce in the planning process.

Solution Adaptations: Business Process Management, Document Management & Collaboration, Extensions for SAP Solutions

Sales Training

Today, companies depend on various communications vehicles – training events, teleconferences, email, portals and Web conferences. Content and planning for each must be arranged separately, adding to launch schedules and making it difficult to adjust programs for market changes, or to update content. In addition, there is no way to track whether sales representatives are learning and whether that learning is translating into rising sales.

Livelink for Sales Readiness, a combination of Open Text’s LIvelink ECM - Eloquent Media Server and Livelink, provides a single platform for transferring knowledge to sales teams, so companies can quickly build sales expertise, deliver more effective content and make fast adjustments to initiatives to meet changing market conditions.

Livelink for Sales Readiness provides integrated workspaces to help sales, marketing and management teams coordinate initiatives. These workspaces include:

An Information Center for sales teams to access personalized content. The center guides users through content, helps track personal progress and provides powerful search tools for finding reference content.
A Tracking Center which gives managers access to an executive dashboard of sales readiness metrics, including usage, understanding, reach and satisfaction.
A Control Center for marketing teams to quickly create, organize and manage content. Users can easily customize content to target different groups within sales.
Livelink for Sales Readiness seamlessly integrates with a wide range of corporate systems, including 7CRM and HRMS databases.