Enterprise telesales opportunity pipelines performance management

Abstract

Enterprise telesales is most different from consumer sales by having a prolonged sales cycle, in weeks or months, in order to integrate various internal supports to validate and satisfy complex client demands and needs. Managers of such telesales centers are often challenged by the elaborate tasks of tracking the subtle progress of these pipelines of sales opportunities. Thus, an on-demand dashboard for the managers as well as the telesales representatives is a critical IT tool to address this unique problem. This paper provides insights into the Business Performance Management (BPM), a technology used in business intelligence to enable users to observe, analyze, and act upon the information at the right time. To describe a sales cycle and the tracking needs, we start with a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for a staged pipeline progression model. Based on business rules and threshold conditions for these KPIs, sets of business situations and alerts are generated for presentation. Finally, a hierarchical design is explained with drilldown capabilities for a typical reporting structure of a telesales center. The productivity of an IBM telesales center under such proactive management has been found to be six to seven times more cost effective than traditional field sales. © 2006 IEEE.