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Your customer is the ultimate modern road warrior. He lugs a laptop around the country, eating miserable airplane food and enduring interminable missed connections-anything to get the sale. He is a field sales representative, and his living depends on the customer information system or sales force automation (SFA) package installed on his machine and his main office's server.
To keep a road warrior working efficiently, you need to keep the data flowing between his laptop and the database back at headquarters. This process of data synchronization remains one of the trickiest, least discussed and most important aspects of any SFA effort. But having a solid data synchronization product should be the backbone of any SFA system you attempt to build.
The majority of SFA and contact management vendors offer synchronization packages. Your challenge will be to decide if the feature set meets your customers' needs. This can be difficult, because with data synchronization, one size does not fit all.
Sweep-Up Crew
Gartner Group Inc., a Stamford, Conn., research company, estimates that 65 percent of user-installed SFA packages fail to accomplish the goals set for them. Sounds like VAR country.
"We usually get called in after a company has tried it on their own and flopped," says Carl Herrick, president of ACMS Marketing Inc., a TeleMagic Inc. reseller in Novato, Calif. "At that stage, it is hard to get people enthusiastic about the prospect."
Data synchronization woes play a large part in leaving customers disillusioned with their SFA systems. SFA VARs regularly meet with prospects who didn't realize what they were getting into when they attempted to set up the data synchronization portion of a vendor's solution.
"Most of the customers get snowed during the sale," says Kevin Carson, vice president of sales at Phoenix-based Sales Automation Inc. "They'll talk to a manufacturer who'll say, 'Of course we do synchronization.' But at that point, the customer needs to ask about 20 more questions to find out if the vendor really does synchronization, or if it just has a way to move data around."
Carson, whose company resells Elan Software Corp.'s GoldSync, says synchronization problems can lead to bad feelings and dumped projects. If...