The Shoebox Goes Digital

Watch and learn

Perhaps the biggest hurdle was ensuring users—the salespeople who made outbound calls each day to sell Qqest's range of software and services to small and midsize businesses—were willing to give up their paper-based systems and move to a PC-based solution.

The shoebox system was working, but Qqest knew it needed technology to improve its sales staff's productivity and boost sales—and commissions, said Plummer. "It was an organized shoebox," he said. "Larry [Karas] had a very defined system of making a lead and working a lead, and for cataloging information. It allowed him the most possible time on the phone every day. We didn't want to take away his time from the phone because of software.

"Definitely we knew we could improve," continued Plummer. "We had some salespeople very concerned that we would slow them down. We had to get them to believe in us." With that in mind, Unison "really studied the processes our salespeople were used to, to maximize how that could be built into the software."

Estes said he spent several hours watching salespeople at work, noting how they found and followed up on leads, how they organized follow-up calls and literature mailings, and how they received and used Internet leads, which were printed and hand-delivered to salespeople. This homework, he added, would help develop a system that was comfortable for the intended users.

"Their systems were efficient, but because it was on paper, it wasn't easily accountable," said Estes.

And if an individual was out of the office, it was sometimes difficult for a colleague to respond to a customer's needs, Plummer said. Besides, the shoebox system had other drawbacks, Karas said.

"Although I had a good system for calling companies, whenever they called in, I had no way of finding them," Karas said. "And I would end up calling a lot of companies that already bought from us because you throw the [sales lead] card away when they've bought."

Order out of chaos

Since many sales representatives were not computer-savvy, Unison designed each customizable screen to require minimal use of the keyboard, said Estes.

"I took Larry's system and, essentially, built a virtual shoebox. We built a stack of virtual cards, more or less, and designed the system so they didn't have to spend a lot of time typing," Estes said. "We set up each shoebox or 'Uniscreen,' as we call them, to be adaptable. User adoption is absolutely critical to making an implementation a success."

The first SalesLogix solution featured multiple windows, Karas said. "I flat [out] told them, 'If this is the way it has to be, forget it!'" he said. "I sat down with Steve, and I told him, 'We have to lay this out so it looks like a card and everything's on one screen."

After some back and forth, Unison developed an interface that included all vital information on one easy-to-read, easy-to-access screen.

The project, which began in 2003, initially addressed the needs of the company's 25 sales and marketing representatives. Today, about 130 employees use the Windows system, which makes use of Microsoft's SQL Server on the back end operating on an Intel Xeon dual processor with four drives on RAID.

Next Page: The solution evolves.