Virtual Selling: Going Beyond the Automated Sales Force to Achieve Total Sales Quality First edition

From high-tech to low-tech industries, the days when a salesperson could carry the company catalogue around in his or her head have disappeared. For instance, salespeople for Hewlett-Packard represent 6000 products in thousands of permutations. According to the authors, more than 500 companies are rushing to market with information technology tools for the 9,000,000 salespeople alone in the US, and perhaps four times as many throughout the industrialized world. These new systems focus on the analysis of sales-related information, the authors argue, rather than on improving the effectiveness of the selling process. Instead, they demonstrate how Siebel Systems, spearheading the emerging generation of sales force automation applications, centres on enlarging the role of the sales rep to sales project co-ordinator. By linking all departments of the company to the customer and utilizing "market encyclopaedia systems" to access product information, the sales rep/co-ordinator creates customer-specific brochures and presentations - and even products - on demand.