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Entellium: Less Time With CRM
Entellium announces its PRO-Activity Release 2005 CRM suite.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
Now there's a worthwhile improvement to a CRM suite -- your employees spend less time with the stuff.
Entellium is announcing the commercial availability of its "PRO-Activity Release 2005," a set of enhancements for its flagship CRM suite based on what company officials claim is "over 43,000 hours of research into CRM usage behavior."
The outcome of all that? A "significant" redesign of CRM built around "the needs of sales and service representatives to get their daily activities done faster," company officials promise, "including the complete automation of many routine and mundane tasks that other leading hosted CRM vendors still require the employee to perform."
Entellium's new offering has a single location to track all activities to minimize navigation fatigue, and activity-centric quota planning for cold-calls, appointments, sales contests and other such activities.
Users can also create custom quotes, contracts, letters, and collateral by merging customer data with company templates directly from the application and e-mailing them automatically.
Plus there's a feature called Report Automator that -- guess what? -- generates and distributes reports automatically, at predetermined times.
Talk to ten industry analysts and experts, and six will agree that user adoption is still the number one issue preventing successful CRM deployment, especially in small and midsized businesses where resources are often limited and the actual sales rep sees little to no advantage to spending time on stuff designed to make management's life easier when she could be out earning commissions.
Studies proving this are as plentiful as free pens at a trade show. Back in 2002 a study by AMR Research found that even among top CRM vendors, "47 percent of companies reported serious challenges with end-user adoption that often put projects in jeopardy."
AMR found that only 11% of respondents implemented CRM to improve performance and efficiency of individual end users, according to Frontline, and most of those were referring to customers. The most common user-related inhibitors AMR found were that end users could perform their job and still meet their goals without using the system, or that end users feel that providing knowledge into the system makes them less valuable and more easily replaced.
Things haven't changed. Corporations buy CRM to meet corporate needs, but fail "to take the needs of the end-users, employees, partners, and customers, into account." As a result it doesn't get used and there goes your investment.
It's that person Entellium's targeting with this PRO-Activity Release. "Our research confirms that businesses are still frustrated by how long it takes to encourage employees to accept new processes and systems," said Entellium CEO Paul Johnston. He says Entellium's approach is to make products which simplify the user experience to match how individuals are most likely to plan their daily activities, "while fully automating tedious tasks that they shouldn't have to worry about."
Johnston calls it the "user-centric approach," and says Entellium's market research shows it affects how much time reps spend actually using the system. He's proud of the fact that Forrester Research awarded Entellium top scores in Usability in its 2005 Forrester Wave report "Hosted Sales Force Automation."
"Frankly it's harder to make it easier," said Johnston, adding that "we put our effort into automation specifically to help sales and service reps spend less time with CRM so they have more time to work with customers directly."
Priced at $59 per month for the suite, Entellium is affordable for its target SMB market. Included in that is 24/7 real-time support for every user.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100005&nm=David%20
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