ACT! - your own little Mission Control

[#1]

We recently gave our annual presentation to Gartner to try and influence ACT!’s standing in the CRM Magic Quadrant Gartner publishes and as a result I was looking through Gartner’s description of Sales Force Automation areas.  One of the areas is Sales Performance and with so much emphasis on command and control you can’t help but imagine a NASA control center with several rows of people at computers, saying something like: 

Account Security Manager: “We are a go, user has access to this Account.”

Contact Information Manager: “Phone number properly formatted for dialing”

Marketing Coordinator: “Contact has responded to DRIP marketing e-mails.”

Sales guy – playing solitaire while the countdown continues…

Sales Leads coordinator: “Altering Contact status from Cold to Warm Lead.”

Territory Manager:  “Reconfiguring geospatial alignment for contact to sales person optimization.”

Calendar Manager: “Deconflicting calendar for launc…err, call.”

Time Zone coordinator: “Determining time at target…0936 hours and 28 seconds, 29 seconds, 30 seconds…”

Mission Director:  “We are a GO for call!”

Sales Guy: “Hello is John Prospect available?... Wrong number?”

Mission Director:  ”Mission abort!” 

Though selling isn’t quite as hard as sending a man into space, it’s nice to see that the kind of coordination necessary nearly 40 years ago to accomplish one of mankind’s greatest achievements is available for your every days sales calls.  I wonder how ACT! got all those people into that little box…  

[#2]

I believe the message here is KISS. ACT! needs to refrain from the Salesforce concepts and retain the humanity. The obvious extension of the micro management of  a sales process is that the Sales Automation of the vendor's CRM could communicate with the  Purchasing Automation module of the buyer's CRM and fight it out. ..Who needs sales people..:-)

Sales are as the result of a relationship and negotiation between companies and real live people not CRM systems.