Straight Up on Leads Management

Lead generation is a process that uses information to create interest in an enterprise’s products or services. It’s end objective is to generate sales.

Several steps are involved in this marketing process. Before a company begins, it needs to define the market that its product or service caters too, segment that market, and then identify its most profitable areas. Once this is done, the leads generation process begins. The leads generation process involves prospecting, preapproach, approach, and close. As a prospect moves through the leads cycle, information is being created and filtered. Sensibly, a business should use this information to follow up with its customers to see if they were satisfied with the service or product, and then generate leads metrics which will be used to further refine the leads generation and sales process.

The leads generation process gathers a lot of information and involves a lot of tracking, and it should generate dialogue not only between the company and customers, but within the company between sales and marketing in particular. A leads management solution uses different methodologies and practices to govern this information and distribute it to the appropriate people within an organization.

There are a couple of factors that are spurring the need for effective leads management tools. The biggest factor is that consumers are becoming more savvy, and are not easily compelled by traditional marketing. Companies are seeking to effectively target their core market by catering to their target’s specific needs.

The following white paper by BLUEROADS (original caps), outlines a some of rules that vendors should adhere to when managing leads distribution. Some recommendations include

Inventory Reduction: Effectively Turning Excess Into Cash

In virtually all manufacturing companies, there is a direct correlation between inventory levels and overall business performance. According to Harold Geneen, the legendary financial genius and former chairman of ITT, "all the problems of business end up in inventory." Most knowledgeable executives would agree with Geneen. In fact, CEO's and CFO's believe that their companies consistently carry 25 to 40 percent or more inventory than is needed.

Assess Your Capabilities

Ask your material planning and operations team to answer the following four questions.
YES NO
1. Do you have effective, fact-based decision-support for identifying and prioritizing actions to stop unnecessary material inflow to inventory by dollar impact?
2. Does your decision-support system pinpoint undesirable inventory dollar movement by item?
3. Do you have decision-support capability that continuously assess specific items inventory reduction potential?
4. Does your decision-support system help you establish a baseline, set clear targets and provide on-going performance measurement for every item in your inventory?



What is likely to happen is that many individuals will skip over key words and, at first, answer the questions with a 'Yes'. However, when the key words are pointed out, the answers are almost always 'No' for not just some of the questions, but all four of them.

Finding out that your inventory planning and control system, even one based on modern ERP systems, does not have the depth and breadth of decision support capability needed to identify and prioritize preventative actions based upon their dollar impact can be a real eye-opener for senior management. A common misconception is that effective decision-support to reduce and prevent excess inventories from accumulating is part of the company's current system. To some extent, logic does exist in material planning systems to prevent inventory excesses. However, good prioritized separation of the vital few from the trivial many, especially by their dollar impact on inventory investment, is rarely part of the functionality in most ERP systems. The good news is that the functionality can be added quickly, at a modest cost. This can create an ROI like no other investment you can make.

Considering how much money may be unnecessarily flowing into inventory every year mandates that adding the capability to quickly answer the four assessment questions on page one is an absolute necessity.

Excess Inventory Is a Problem in Good Times, and Bad

Companies hit by a sharp decline in sales all too often experience a significant rise in inventories because of the considerable and unnecessary time that's usually needed to get incoming supply rebalanced with customer demand. When sales are declining, making the right adjustments in inventory levels becomes an exceedingly more important and difficult task. For some companies declining sales combined with a suddenly out of balance incoming supply of inventory have caused a massive cash outflow.

Coping with a rapid sales decline can easily cause companies to wait too long to make supply adjustments. The result is rapidly accumulating excess inventory. It's extremely important to have the capability to promptly take the right actions that are needed to prevent and reverse the accumulation of excess inventory. A healthy balance sheet depends on having a quick, precise inventory avoidance and reduction methodology. Most companies rely on their ERP systems for inventory accumulation avoidance and reduction only to be disappointed by the poor results.

ASP Infrastructure: The Party Has Started

On June 14th, Nortel Networks introduced an application service management and integration solution that will enable service providers to offer hosted eBusiness applications to businesses and deliver end-to-end applications management to the desktop.

Called the Nortel Networks Preside Managed Application Services Platform, the solution is designed to enable service providers to deliver a portfolio of secure, managed and integrated ASP offerings. It will include technology from BEA Systems, Inc., Tarantella, and iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions (a Sun-Netscape Alliance) and will be compatible with client-server technology from CiTRiX. The platform will enable management and interoperability with a number of eBusiness applications including Nortel Networks (through its Clarify eBusiness applications), mySAP.com solutions, i2 Technologies, Inc., and desktop productivity applications from iPlanet as well as Portal Software's Infranet billing application. Technology from EPiCON, Inc. will be integrated into the Preside Managed Application Services Platform in conjunction with Nortel Networks' acquisition of EPiCON.

The first customer release of the platform solution is expected in the next 30 to 45 days and is being tested through Innovatia. Innovatia is part of Aliant, a telecommunications and IT company.

Nortel Networks Preside Managed Application Services Platform will provide a common platform integrated with their operations support system (OSS) developed for the ASP and hosting markets. The platform will support provisioning of multiple applications, application-to-application communication to automate manual processes, and access via thin, fit and fat clients and wireless devices. This will give service providers time-to-market differentiation, the ability to streamline and scale operations with automatic and customized billing, secure provisioning of applications and performance management. Later this year, service providers will have the additional benefit of Service Level Agreement (SLA) management.

Nortel Networks has entered into strategic technology and OEM alliances with enabling software and middleware vendors including BEA Systems, Tarantella and iPlanet. Nortel Networks has integrated these technologies with its Preside directory, policy services and SLA management technology, Clarify customer relationship management software and Access Policy Manager security software.

Services which embeds iPlanet's Directory Services. BEA Systems provides a suite of products for enterprise application integration, transaction processing software and business process management capabilities. The strategic relationship with BEA Systems will enable the development of an ASP provisioning environment.