"Common Information"

by Thomas M. Siebel and Michael S. Malone

The goal of Total Sales Quality is to achieve a perfect correspondence between qualified leads and sales. This is only possible if we have a profound understanding of our customers, the state of the market, and the capabilities of our own company's products. These are the three measures_that will be used to measure the value of companies in the future.

The three metrics also hint at a rule regarding corporate information. It is as follows: Anything that helps a company improve its common information on customers, markets, and products is beneficial. Anything that hinders the accumulation of this information is destructive to the company.

What does that mean? For one thing, it means that no individual, group, or department in an organization should be rewarded for hoarding information. On the contrary, even if they are sales superstars, they should be treated in the same way as any other employee would be whose behavior threatens the company's survival. Yellow Freight, when it first installed its sales information system, ran into just such resistance from some of its best salespeople. Beginning in 1994, the shipping giant armed 800 salespeople and managers at its 510 terminals with laptop computers equipped with high-speed modems and gave the recipients extensive training in their use. The system has proven highly effective -- increasing the time Yellow Freight's salespeople are in front of customers by 30 percent -- but initially it was met with distrust. Acceptance of the equipment was not the problem; rather it was the unwillingness of some salespeople to share information with their peers.

"Some of the salespeople have had to be coached and prodded to enter in good, solid, accurate information. And there is some possessiveness," Yellow Freight's Denver rep Mike Holtzer told Sales & Marketing Management. "But the game plan is changed. They've got to share it. When they make a call, they've got to enter the information and be thorough. That's information we all can use."

This rule also demands that the communication of information within an organization be two-way. The critical phrase here is "common information." Two-way communication cannot be construed as the old-fashioned model of raw data flowing up to management and being answered by commands and orders on their way down to the field. The model is only efficient if all parties in the organization have full access to all information of common interest ...

Now, obviously, perfect information sharing amongst every office in a company is an ideal. There will always be private records, secure files, and unshared work in progress. But, like TSQ itself, the model is convergent, and the ultimate goal remains unlimited access by all players. Ideally, sales information becomes synonymous with management information, manufacturing information, and product design information.

But won't all this input produce a lot of redundancy as multiple sources -- say, a number of different sales reps -- input roughly the same data? Sure. But redundancy is only a bad thing when you have insufficient memory or inefficient cataloguing. If you've got those limitations covered, then redundancy is actually useful because it confirms facts, transforming data into information. So the answer is to have an information network powerful enough to identify complementary inputs from diverse sources, locate contradictions and commonalties, then organize them together for universal access.

From Virtual Selling by Thomas Siebel and Michael Malone. Copyright ©1996 by Thomas Siebel. Reprinted by permission of The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.