Quick Configuration Helps Amdahl Make the Sale Intranet application helps sales staff work up proposals in the field Intranet World—May 10, 1999 By Kathleen Murphy The goal was simple: Make the sales force more productive in dealing with customers. So after a significant investment, the company built a client-server application so its salespeople would have electronic capabilities for creating tailored solutions for clients. But two years later, Amdahl Corp., a subsidiary of Fujitsu that provides integrated computing solutions, faced the hard truth that its application couldn't support a remote sales force and was, to boot, frustratingly slow and cumbersome. Like many other large companies, Amdahl had to consider making a switch from a client-server system, in which it had invested $2 million, and spending about $600,000 on an intranet-based sales application. The corporate leaders at Amdahl, which employs more than 10,000 people in 33 countries and its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, were understandably leery of investing in a new solution. But the directors of Amdahl's worldwide sales group saw the potential impact that a working intranet could have on sales productivity. A sales-quote generation application with remote capabilities would speed up the handling of orders in Amdahl's product lines. It would help internal sales support personnel and external salespeople shorten sales cycles, promote cross-selling and bundling opportunities, and link to back-office operations. Later, the solution could be extended through an extranet to resellers. Buck French, CEO of OnLink Technologies, a Redwood City, Calif., provider of e-commerce applications, produced a demo to help John Dean, director of Amdahl's sales group, and Anthony Villalobos, director of worldwide field sales support, sell the idea to Amdahl's upper management and IT architecture team. "The easy sell to [management]," Villalobos said, "was 'Let's not put any more good money after bad, and let's go forward with a development that allows us to deliver something in a six-month time frame that will cover all products, and has been blessed by the IT folks to ensure that we weren't going to fall into the same pit that we did in the previous effort.'" OnLink, in five days, took public information from Amdahl's Web site and created a demo of the configuration tool. OnLink presented it to the IT managers, and "it impressed the heck out of everybody," Villalobos said. "Our application actually captured the selling knowledge associated with a company," French said, "and provides a consistent story, if you will, of that selling knowledge throughout the entire enterprise for all of their salespeople." Amdahl had considered solutions from Trilogy and Calico, as well as in-house solutions. Four months after the contract with OnLink was signed, the application, known as Rainmaker Sales, was shipped. The sales force received training on the use of the application, and it officially launched this month. The only potential red flag, Villalobos said, was that OnLink is a young company--but venture capital backing by Sierra Ventures and Stanford University helped persuade Amdahl that OnLink would be viable. The resulting solution allows the sales force, some 350 strong, to configure prices and submit quotes on each of the products they would like to have for their customers, and to modify them on the fly without having to go through a laborious order-management system to validate the configuration, Villalobos said. In the past, an account executive sometimes would not know whether a configuration was valid until it reached manufacturing. Rainmaker Sales will expedite delivery, reduce errors and manufacturing costs, and cut down the time required for the sales force to use automation tools from hours to minutes, Villalobos said. Villalobos said Rainmaker Sales also supports the sales team's up-selling and cross-selling. "The way we like to talk about it is the McDonald's model, which says, 'Would you like fries with that burger?'" Villalobos said. The intranet solution will guide salespeople and help them understand what are the complementary products that could increase revenue by including them as a package or bundle to customers, he said. "This is going to be the way selling will take place in the future," he said. "If you don't have the response you need while somebody's online configuring your product, they're going to go elsewhere." Copyright © 1999 Penton Media All Rights Reserved. www.internetworld.com Copyright © 1999 On-Link Technologies, Inc. OnLink Privacy Statement