I am relatively new to larger scale project management and would welcome advice. I've been tasked with oversight of client planning for a division...a rough outline of the situation:
- We have around 30 consultants servicing about 100 companies, each company might have 10-20 contacts. Current practice is that sales people hold meetings or circulate emails/documents saying who should be servicing who, but there's no standard format. Consultants are assessed based on interaction levels and customer feedback, but a lot of them are not interacting enough with the full universe of contacts that they should be servicing.
- I want to come up with a process that 1. Makes it simple for sales to input client mapping information, 2. Allows us to track activity against these "target lists" for each consultant and identify gaps. Eventually, would also aim to analyze the relationship between service levels and financial outcomes.
With my current limited skillset, my thinking is: use Excel Power Pivot to generate a table with all consultants vs. all contacts at companies. Turn this into a heatmap based on activity level - ask each sales person to identify which gaps in activity should be addressed (set up some dropdown menus in the table). Somehow consolidate all this data and analyze.
But this would be quite manual and will get tedious. Are there some solutions that I should be exploring? Someone suggested Power BI, but I would only be able to export an excel file from our system and import into Power BI Desktop (and I don't think it helps with the mapping input part of the problem). I work in a corporate environment with strict security and no ability to choose my own cloud/SaaS services.
This really falls into the domain of CRM more than just PM and solutions such as Salesforce would likely provide most of what you needed with minimal configuration or customization.
However, if that isn't doable, then either an Excel or simple database (MS Access) approach might be your only choices.
I would start by creating some standardization and structure which will undoubtedly evolve over time.
You need an overall outline of a generic process, and decompose that into specific items you need to use regularly to execute your purpose. Whether you are using a spreadsheet, database, or a more elegant tool, your collected data items will probably start to resemble an object oriented programming approach.
The objects, relationships, and attributes become the structure of the tool, even in Excel. Consultant (object) Provides Support To (relationship) Customer (object). Objects and relationships have attributes like peoples' contact info, or a due date for some deliverable. You can collect the information in various ways, but linking all the data can be tricky using a tabular format.
I would keep it simple at first. High level flows with SIPOCs can get you started identifying needed information at each process step. Once you have identified some standard items to collect and how they relate to each other, now you are better able to organize them. If the information is not well organized to start with, you will find it far more difficult to query and collect specific items needed for decision making. If you want to migrate it into some COTS tool, you are also more knowledgeable about what that tool needs to do. Saving Changes...
Thanks for the feedback. I would say that the process of collecting client input from our sales team will be the most challenging. Although the head of sales is supportve, individually they aren't incentivised and have the view that they've already done this (in their own chosen formats). I also need to work on this project offline because CRM/SaaS solutions are managed and onboarded at HQ-level and this initiative is not a priority for them. Unfortunately, setting up an excel sheet for each sales person is all I can think of (which is manual and inelegant..) Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Amir
having worked for IBM in sales and consulting since 1988, it never worked to try to find out what humans are doing with their client contacts. Yes, you can try a CRM system or otherwise try to track contacts (which one of the 100 you tracked is essential?) or even link payments to #. Clever sales people will cheat the system (and you). It only shows that you are not trusting them to do the job you hired them for.
There are many better ways to build a salesforce and consultant team that are successful (e.g. bring in profitable business, retain clients) - all of them rely on you supporting them and building trust in you.
For example, pair experienced and inexperienced people. Hold 1:1s once a month and measure their success if they come to you with problems. Be fair in boni.
Kiron, I hear what you're saying but I'm tasked with planning for the consulting division, not the sales team. The issue is that sales aren't necessarily incentivized to keep our consulting team connected/productive, and individual consultants can do well on their scorecards based on activity even if they're over-servicing lower tiered clients and neglecting important clients. Our business is more comparable to how legal services are billed, so it's important to track interactions against priority clients. We want to build this process to make both sides more accountable. Thanks! Saving Changes...
