ASPEC is a sales-centric application. Salespeople feel comfortable with it, as it is designed to make sales related activities easier to accomplish. Background information for the sales is accessed easily, and when retrieved will be accurate and consistent. Sales strategies are constructed quickly because ASPEC understands the language of sales. The best news of all is that ASPEC uses real intelligence to share with the salesperson on the critical decisions on where to go next in the sales process –  selling effectiveness goes up rapidly

So, ASPEC is designed by salespeople for sales people, to address their pressing needs.  The design focus is to make the life easier for sales reps, those in the trenches, their managers, and their support staff.

Many posts on these benefits, unique to ASPEC, are detailed on our companion web site, the HUB. Keith Thompson, our founder, has a new post there with an overview of what sales-centric and its impact on the sales force. In the next few posts I’ll show how the software app has to be designed and configured keeping the vision of “Sales-Centric CRM” in mind.

To make the app comfortable for salespeople to use, the user must be able to navigate it in a way that reflects the sales environment that they experience daily. Keith’s book lists four pillars or corner stones for the management of sales: these are Territory, Accounts, Sales Opportunities, and Contacts (TASC). We also have referred to the corner stones as core competencies of the management of sales.  Let’s take a closer look at these first.

First, the structure is always in front of the sales team, right there, baked into their CRM system that they will be using every day. Navigation, data entry, work flow, filters and reports – they all support the principle of 4 management competencies.

Sales reps work within Territories, i.e. groups of Accounts determined usually by geography and/or product. Each salesperson will have a territory that is unique to themselves. Reps must know where each Account is located and how it fits in their area of responsibility. Sales managers will see an overview of all the territories that they administer. They need the data to create or refine the overall territory picture

Let’s dive into ASPEC’s navigation.

When you log into ASPEC you will see the navigation bar at the top.  The main tabs include Accounts, Contacts are groups of accounts accessible through the intelligent filter in ASPEC.

Sales reps have easy access to accurate information, including marketing and service activities. Sales managers also have access to that data and know what their teams are doing and how to help them

Being good at managing individual Sales Opportunities is only one of the core skills necessary to do the job.   Reps need to look at their sales environment not only as the list of individual opportunities, but also from the perspective of the territory, accounts, contacts.

Sales reps don’t just process the list of Sales Opportunities in a vacuum, out of context. To sell, reps interact with people – Contacts.  They make informed decisions based on the contact’s history and other contact information.

But is it not enough to review just the buying history of individual Contacts, one Contact at a time? Sales reps deal with more than one contact in each organization, especially in complex sales.

A sales rep has to know what happens in the boardroom of a potential – or existing – customer, and what happened in the past. Decision makers have different priorities, organizational structure and office politics are in full force.  Prior sales attempts shed a light on the sales environment.   Therefore, it makes sense to look at Contact groups from the Account perspective, and work on the overall Account strategy.

In summary:

• ASPEC supports the 4 sets of selling skills (core competencies) that are crucial in the management of selling, described in this post

• ASPEC makes sales related navigation and data entry easy for salespeople to find and address , so the don’t waste time or energy figuring out how to use the system.
• ASPEC has an effective sales method built in, accessible from the Sales Opportunity section, so it is in front of the reps all the time. The sales methodology increases effectiveness, the ability to better opponents in competitive deals – so important that we will need several posts to explain the ins and outs in future blog posts
• By being consciously sales centric, ASPEC spreads consistency in sales opportunity management across the whole sales team.

works in future posts – stay tuned.