ORACLE-Customer-Concepts EN 2011-01

Issue 2011.01
Delivering
a superior cross-channel
customer experience
Sales Leadership
The key to sales success
Service That Sells
How to turn customers
into advocates
Integrated Sales
And Marketing
The business benefits of
better alignment between
sales and marketing

“Many organisations
are looking for ways
to meet service, sales
and marketing challenges
more effectively.
If yours is one of them,
this magazine is for
you.”
In This Issue
DISCOVER HOW TO
MAXIMISE AND INTEGRATE
SALES, SERVICE AND
MARKETING
Welcome
Customer concepts that
drive your success
Over the last decade, the balance of power in the purchasing process has shifted
decisively in favour of the customer. Even in the last five years, social media
channels have added a new dimension to the way in which products and services
are sold and perceived by target audiences. Reputations and sales can be significantly
boosted or seriously damaged in no time at all.
For organisations engaged in sales, managing relationships with prospects and
customers has become much more complex. Simultaneously, they are expected
to understand customer needs more deeply and react more quickly to customer
requests – whether it is a sales enquiry or a complaint. This poses a significant
challenge and many organisations are looking for ways to meet it more effectively.
If yours is one of them, this magazine is for you.
SALES, SERVICE AND INTEGRATION
In this first edition of Customer Concepts, we focus on three topics – sales leadership,
customer service and the integration of sales and marketing processes.
Making improvements in all three areas can deliver better business results. We
show you how it is done.
EXPERIENCE THE ORACLE DIFFERENCE – LIVE!
We are holding a series of Executive Forums for Sales and Marketing Directors
across the EMEA region over the next few months. Attendance will give you the
chance to discuss key customer experience topics with your peers and Oracle
experts. Of course, Oracle OpenWorld is also on the horizon and sales, marketing
and customer service are sure to be important topics. Look out for registration
announcements soon.
I hope you find the first edition of Customer Concepts valuable. If you have any
ideas, suggestions or requests regarding any aspect of the magazine, please do
not hesitate to contact me.
Best regards,
Steve Fearon
Vice President, Applications Sales Development,
Alliances & CRM On Demand, EMEA
Oracle United Kingdom
Next Issue
WE EXPLORE THE
SECRETS OF GREAT
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
MANAGEMENT
Contact Us
FOR FURTHER
INFORMATION
0870 876 8301
applications_gb@oracle.com
The way that organisations interact with customers has
changed radically over the last 5-10 years. We look at
three key aspects of sales leadership to identify some of
the ways that you can drive sales excellence.
SUCCEED IN SALES TRANSFORMATION
Sales transformation describes the kind of fundamental shift
in how a company goes to market that is required as a result
of strategically significant events. These could include acquisitions,
new products and service launches, or disruptive
change in the market. Here are three strategies to ensure
success:
1) Have an investment mindset. Many attempts at
sales transformation are unsuccessful because senior management
continues to prioritise short-term goals. Sales
transformation is a long-term process and should be seen
as an investment that helps ensure the future prosperity of
the business. Success requires a deep understanding of the
current return on sales and the setting of clear goals and
objectives that have full management support.
2) Take a systematic approach. Define the best route to
the customer. Design the sales structure in terms of role,
headcount and deployment. The next step is to apply a
comprehensive management system which covers recruitment,
hiring, on-boarding, mentoring, talent management,
performance , goal-setting and compensation.
3) Support the implementation of change with a strong sales
operations infrastructure.
Listen to the podcast here:
oracle.com/goto/sales-transformation/en
DRIVE A SUCCESSFUL SALES CULTURE
Selling is central to the health of almost any organisation,
but some sales cultures make success much more likely.
Here are three rules to follow that help you emulate them:
1) Identify the right relationships, solutions and services to
meet the needs of your customers. Next, combine leadership,
good communication, innovation (including creative
problem-solving) and teamwork to ensure you deliver.
2) Make the right investments in your sales people, from
training to mentoring and ensuring that leaders lead by
example .
Sales Leadership
The key to sales success
2. 3.
3) Get the fundamentals right by establishing a consistency
of excellence that is applied to every single transaction. This
approach will enable your organisation to increase productivity,
hit sales targets and improve customer satisfaction.
Listen to the podcast here:
oracle.com/goto/sales-culture/en
Effective
Sales Transformation
Successful
Sales Culture
Sales Leadership
Customer-
centric
Organisation
CREATE A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC ORGANISATION
Most organisations are too concentrated on their own
performance and lack focus on the success of their
customers . Here are three ways to address this imbalance:
1) Map the customer’s journey from awareness to loyalty
and include everyone with involvement in customer touch-
points to contribute to establishing excellence.
2) Quantify your current ability to drive customer satisfaction
and referrals. The well-known Net Promoter Score methodology
is a good way to approach this.
3) Create a customer council with representatives from every
customer-facing department. Ideally, this council should
be led by a Chief Customer Officer. Use the council to
stimulate ideas for driving and measuring customer-centric
change.
Listen to the podcast here:
oracle.com/goto/customer-centric/en
Sales Success Podcasts
Learn more about all of these sales
success strategies with our special
podcast series:
oracle.com/goto/sales-leadership/en

Loyal customers are essential to your organisation – they
help to ensure survival in competitive markets. Furthermore,
loyal customers that attract new customers by
advocating your products and services are even more
valuable. Customer loyalty is one of the things that
differentiates market leaders from average performers.
How do you maximise loyalty and turn customers into
brand advocates?
TURNING LOYALTY INTO ADVOCACY
The reasons for prioritising customer loyalty are well known:
• It costs significantly more to acquire a new customer than
it does to retain an existing one*
• Increasing customer loyalty by a small amount can drive
big gains in revenue and profitability**
Perhaps not so well known is just how valuable customer
advocacy can be. According to a Harvard Business Review
study published in 2007, customers that actively recommend
a product or service can generate up to 25 times the
value for the vendor that they contribute themselves***.
However, to become advocates, they need to have been
exposed to a truly exceptional customer experience.
SEGMENTATION IS KEY
For many organisations, it may be cost-prohibitive to invest in
an exceptional level of service for every customer. It makes
sense, therefore, to identify which customers are most likely
to become advocates. This requires a large volume of high
quality data about long-term customer behaviour. Nowadays,
conversations taking place via social media channels can
be valuable in adding richness to that data, or in identifying
new advocates. Once identified, it is time to focus on four
key areas of the customer experience that can help drive
advocacy - convenience, speed, relevance and relationship.
Service That Sells Integrated Sales and Marketing
Brand advocacy:
why it matters and how to drive it
Better Customer Service
Learn more about strategies for
improving customer service.
Download the white paper now:
oracle.com/goto/effective-service/en
CONVENIENCE
It sounds obvious that customers value convenience – until
you realise that inconvenience is the norm. This ranges
from websites that are hard to use, incomplete or simply
broken, to convoluted support escalation processes. Today,
making the same real-time customer experience available
via multiple communication channels, in an integrated way,
provides a great opportunity for differentiation.
SPEED
Maximising the speed of enquiry processing or problem
resolution depends on enabling sales staff through three
key capabilities:
• Quick access to all the relevant information
• Consistent sharing of information across multiple channels
(e.g. web, phone and physical store)
• Automated decision-making through business rules built
into CRM systems
These capabilities can turn a good customer experience into
a great one.
RELEVANCE
It pays to take a smart approach when using service interactions
as potential cross- and up-selling opportunities.
For example, today it is possible to combine historical and
recent buying behaviour with social media data. Doing
this produces finer-grained intelligence that helps service
personnel identify the most potentially relevant products
and services for customers.
RELATIONSHIP
Building personal bonds with real people, rather than going
overboard with automation, helps build higher quality
customer relationships. For some customers, reliable access
to someone that can help them is all they need. For others, a
proactive response to their enquiry or complaint via a social
media channel can transform their opinion about a company.
Ultimately, combining these four elements into a customer
experience that the competition simply cannot match, could
be the difference between market leadership and obscurity
for your organisation. CC
* Ohio State University, http://ohioline.osu.edu/cd-fact/1301.html
** Frederick Reichheld, The Loyalty Effect, Harvard Business School Press
*** V. Kumar, J. Andrew Petersen and Robert P. Leone, “How Valuable Is
Word of Mouth?“ Harvard Business Review, October 2007
Alignment that drives results
It is a familiar story. Sales thinks the leads generated by
Marketing are worthless. Marketing thinks Sales does
not act on the leads it delivers. Muddling through that
situation is no longer enough in today’s web-centric,
real-time economy. To maximise organisational success,
the gaps in information, insight and action have to be
bridged. The only question is: how?
SALES AND MARKETING –
DEFINING THE DISCONNECT
Theoretically, sales and marketing teams are working towards
the same goal – maximising profitable revenue. In
practice, the strategies and tactics they employ to reach
that goal can be very different, or even contradictory. Siloed
information is one of the key drivers for the lack of alignment.
Sales uses one system, Marketing use another. There
is no communication between the two. Information visibility
is poor. Strategic alignment is non-existent. And that means
lost leads, lost sales and revenues that are lower than they
could have been.
WHY ALIGN?
Thanks to the Internet, buyers of any product or service
are far more educated than they were fifteen, ten or even
five years ago. From corporate websites to review portals
and social media channels, customers and prospects are incredibly
well-informed. As a result, Marketing has to work
harder to ensure that information is engaging, accurate and
up-to-date. In turn, sales teams have to be fully aware of the
buyers ’ knowledge-levels before they speak to them.
4. 5.
In fact, an independent survey of over 1000 consumers in
the US revealed that buyers often use multiple sales and
marketing channels before making a purchase. An optimal
customer experience depends on those channels communicating
the same message consistently. That means it has
never been more important for Sales and Marketing to align.
GENERATING A HOLISTIC VIEW
The key to better sales and marketing alignment is a single
view of the truth in terms of customer histories, current
behaviour , buying cycle status and likely future needs. It
is a lack of systems-integration that usually prevents the
realisation of that unified view.
Automation within CRM systems is nothing new. Sales
people rely on automated tools for managing their accounts.
Marketing teams use them to make campaign development
and execution more efficient. However, trying to squeeze
all that functionality into a single application environment
through ad hoc integration rarely ends well. Systems
designed to combine sales, marketing and service functionalities
from the outset, are a different proposition.
Oracle’s CRM On Demand enables sales and marketing
teams to share information and manage the pipeline actively
together, helping to reduce the cost of lead generation and
increase lead conversion rates. Information sharing also
increases the accuracy of customer data and giving sales
people a complete picture of their customer’s behaviour. The
impact of various sales and marketing activities becomes
much easier to measure. The intelligence generated
improves the effectiveness of future activities, creating a
virtuous circle of information and action.
The end result? A more successful business that understands
the needs and behaviour of its prospects and
customers better than ever before. CC
Integrate And Automate CRM
Align sales and marketing for better
business results .
Download the white paper:
oracle.com/goto/automate-crm/en

Success with
Oracle CRM On Demand
Hundreds of organisations in Europe and around the
world are using Oracle CRM On Demand to help themselves
drive sales, improve customer service and integrate
their sales and marketing processes for better
business results. Here are just a few examples.
KODAK GRAPHICS COMMUNICATION GROUP,
BELGIUM
Eastman Kodak Company’s Graphic Communications Group
needed to increase the effectiveness of its entire sales
activities in order to build a stronger pipeline and ultimately
increase revenues.
The company selected Oracle CRM On Demand to help:
• Consolidate all its contact, reporting and forecasting information
into a single system for managing and growing the
sales pipeline
• Automate manual lead processing tasks through sales
force automation tools
• Eliminate the ‘hard’ intervention of IT personnel via Webbased
software services.
• Roll out the solution to 400 users in under a year
The results have been impressive:
• Streamlined sales-to-cash process and an enhanced ability
to cross-sell via after-sales service
• Increased sales team productivity
• A 15-20% increase in the number of opportunities recorded
each quarter
• Accelerated sales decision process from 2-3 days, to less
than 1 day
Ingmar Hermans, Equipment Operations Director for the
group, concludes: “With Oracle CRM on Demand, we
have an integrated overview of the lead-to-cash cycle. This
over view provides our sales organisation with a unique
dimension that has helped us to accelerate the sales cycle
and significantly improve our lead conversion rate.”
COMPASS GROUP, UK
This global leader in food and support service provision
needed to consolidate the management of all its CRM
processes across Europe and the APAC region. Jan Neggers,
Customer Voices
CRM Manager for Compass Group’s international clients
reports : “With Oracle CRM ON Demand, we have gained
a unified view of our customers across our operations in
17 European countries. As a result, we have improved the
effectiveness of sales and service initiatives and gained the
ability to produce more meaningful and actionable reports.”
DEVOTEAM, FRANCE
This leading European IT consultancy firm needed to
increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its entire
proposal process. Christophe Merckens, Chief Information
Officer, reports: “Oracle CRM On Demand enables us to
measure sales person efforts beyond just the profits they
bring in and its flexible, integrated tools have made our sales
wing more dynamic. The shared visibility of clients enables
us to make the most of sales opportunities, including within
our existing customer base.” CC
MORE ORACLE CRM ON DEMAND CUSTOMER
VOICES
Oracle CRM On Demand is exceptionally quick to deploy
– and that means faster ROI. Hear how organisations like
yours are benefiting.
Watch the video here:
oracle.com/goto/faster-roi/en
Oracle CRM On Demand also delivers the best value for
your CRM investment. Hear how your peers are using
it to accelerate productivity and improve the customer
experience .
Watch the video here:
oracle.com/goto/best-crm-value/en
Learn more now!
Learn more about how organisations like yours are
succeeding with Oracle CRM On Demand:
oracle.com/en/products/
applications/crmondemand
Customer Voices
Success with Siebel CRM
Together, Oracle’s Siebel CRM Applications form the
world’s most complete CRM solution, combining On-
Premise and On-Demand options with more than
20 industry -specific packages. Here are some examples
of how organisations like yours are benefiting.
SONY ERICSSON
Sony Ericsson, a leading mobile device manufacturer, was
looking for a CRM solution that could help it deliver a consistently
excellent customer experience to customers all
over the world. Key objectives included the alignment of
marketing operations with corporate objectives and a better
return on marketing and IT investments.
Sony Ericsson selected Siebel CRM based on:
• Easy scalability for a phased global rollout
• Proven delivery of greater value and faster ROI than
competitive products
• Integrated analytic functions enabling deeper customer
insight
• Ability to improve customer retention by integrating loyalty
programs into marketing and CRM processes
• Ability to track marketing effectiveness in real-time,
enabling improvements in customer segmentation and
product affinity
Ben Padley, VP Head of CRM and Digital Marketing at Sony
Ericsson summarises: “With Siebel CRM, Sony Ericsson
6. 7.
can take its relationship with its consumers to the next level.
It allows us to do this by enabling personalised relationships
with consumers at every level and interaction point.”
VODAFONE GROUP
The Vodafone Group operates in over 20 countries across
five continents and has more than 347 million registered
customers. Implementing Siebel CRM gave Vodafone the
capability to:
• Cope with increasing market dynamics and deliver more
complex products to market faster
• Implement and configure products more rapidly
• Improve customer service on a global level
Carl Bennet, Head of CRM Technology, explains how the
solution has transformed his business: “What we needed
to do is put in place a product that allows us to configure
products quicker and get them to market quicker, which is
good for our customers and good for us – and Siebel helps
us to do that.” CC
MORE SIEBEL CRM CUSTOMER VOICES
Vodafone Group has used Siebel CRM to improve customer
service on a global level.
Watch the video here:
oracle.com/goto/global-service/en
New South Wales Community Services has a single version
of the truth for all of its clients, improving the service
delivered to local families and children.
Watch the video here:
oracle.com/goto/improve-service/en
Learn more now!
Access more information on these and a wide range
of other Siebel CRM customer success stories:
oracle.com/uk/products/
applications/siebel

Access tools and resources that prove the value of Oracle
products and solutions to your business. Click on one of
the links below for access to a wide range of white papers ,
product documents, videos, podcasts and customer
testimonials .
Sales Leadership
Learn more about
Sales Leadership:
oracle.com/goto/
sales-leadership/en
Service That Sells
Learn more about
Service That Sells:
oracle.com/goto/
customer-service/en
Your next steps
Contact Us! Stay Informed!
Executive Directors Forums
Look out for announcements about new events coming
soon to your region!
Oracle OpenWorld is coming….
Expect a lot of exciting announcements and look out
for registration details online or in your inbox in the
next few weeks!
applications_gb@oracle.com
0870 876 8301
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Integrated Sales
And Marketing
Learn more about
Integrated Sales and Marketing:
oracle.com/goto/
sales-marketing/en