Two years ago, reps at AMF Bowling Products had good reason to shudderat the very mention of sales-force automation (SFA). It is notoriouslyhard to get right, and the company's first attempt failedmiserably.

AMF reps sell everything from shoe spray to the back-office softwarethat runs a bowling center. They need a way to track theircustomers - owners and managers of some 6,000 U.S. bowlingcenters - and theequipment they already own. Knowing which customers have ancient ballreturn machines or out-of-date automatic scoring systems helps themzero in on the best sales targets. The company's first major SFAeffort - a series of homegrown Lotus Notes databases of customerinformation - didn't take long to earn the sales reps' ire. Reps couldn'ttake their laptop into bowling centers and enter customer data withoutlooking like spies to the alley owners with whom they were trying toestablish trusting relationships. So instead, they'd scribble notes onpaper. But after schlepping through four to six bowling centers, thelast thing reps wanted to do when they got to their hotel at night wasfire up their laptop and spend up to an hour logging their sales callsinto one database and entering data on what kind of equipment eachcenter had into another. Because it usually took another 30 to 45minutes and sometimes as much as two hours to replicate their notes,most reps gave up in frustration. "You're talking about an extra twohours at the end of the day," says Chris Keller, Long Island,N.Y.-based Northeast district sales manager and a 10-year AMF veteran."The application was just too difficult. We're salesmen. We need touse our time to make money." Keller confesses he abandoned the Notessystem after about three months. Only half of the sales force updatedNotes religiously, and as time went on, usage fell, says Jay Buhl,vice president of North American sales. By 1997 the reps had revertedto their own - often paper-based - systems for tracking customer data. As aresult, "We didn't know how to get in touch with our customers anddidn't know what equipment was out there," says Buhl. "If a districtsales manager left the company, we had no clue what was going on inthat geography."

Although the lack of a centralized customer database was tolerablewhile AMF's global business was booming, the boom ended abruptly whenthe Asian market collapsed in 1998. Suddenly, AMF could no longer relyon outfitting new bowling centers in Asia for its growth. To makematters worse, an aggressive expansion campaign increased the numberof AMF-owned bowling centers in the United States from 125 to 415 intwo years, making it the world's largest owner and operator of bowlingcenters. Because AMF sells equipment to its own centers at cost, thecompany effectively decreased its universe of profitable salesprospects. Between 1997 and 1998, worldwide sales of AMF bowlingproducts plummeted from $300 million to $150 million.

Aiming for a Perfect Game

John Walker, who became vice president of North American sales in June1998 (and is now senior vice president of global sales and service),wanted CRMCRM for three reasons. First, he was eager to improve customerservice by facilitating internal communication among reps, thetechnical support help desk and the credit department. Reps were oftengetting blindsided on sales calls to customers wrestling withtechnical problems; other times, customers targeted for big sales werebeing hassled by the credit department. Second, Walker wanted topursue targeted marketing of customers instead of blanket promotions.Third, he was convinced a CRM system could help reps better managetheir time and accounts - and facilitate smoother transitions when repsleave. But for CRM to do any good, the system had to be easyto use. Alles zu CRM auf CIO.de