Thought Leader Interview
Larry Ritter is senior vice president and general manager of global product management and marketing for Sage CRM Solutions, part of The Sage Group plc, a leading global supplier of business management software and services to over 6.3 million small and medium-sized business customers worldwide. Ritter leads product strategy, development, testing, and marketing for the Sage CRM Solutions product family comprised of Sage ACT!, Sage CRM and Sage SalesLogix.
Ritter has 20 years of software industry experience and, prior to Sage, lead product development efforts for Citrix Systems and Hewlett Packard. He joined Sage in 2004 and as a senior executive within the company’s Global CRM Organization has helped evolve the ACT! product line for use by corporate customers and specific industries, guided Sage CRM and Sage ERP front and back-office integration, and lead the re-architecture of the Sage SalesLogix platform. He is also a significant contributor to the Sage CRM Solutions strategy and vision, as well as product roadmaps.
He is quoted frequently on CRM technology and trends in industry and business publications including CRM Magazine, Selling Power, and Computer Reseller News among others.
Denis Pombriant: Sage has been in the sales automation business longer than just about anyone. With this perspective, how do you assess the current sales environment and the opportunities that this environment presents?
Larry Ritter: Well, you're right. We have been in the business probably longer than almost anyone Sage ACT! has been around for more than 20 years and Sage SalesLogix for more than 10. And, yes, I think we've made a lot of advances. I think the beginning days of just collecting data and integrating it into a common repository was great.
CRM gives you a good memory on the sales automation side which is really helpful I think we've made a lot of really good progress in this area. I also find that usability remains an area that needs a lot of improvement.
Though there have been improvements, nothing sells like something that's really easy for people to use. And when you talk about having so many opportunities in a repository the ability to apply analytics and really dig in, find trends and patterns within the data is a great next step.
DP: As you look at the world situation for the last couple of years, in my mind it seems like companies have been focused more on service and support than selling. I get an impression that the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. Do you get that sense? Is that what your resellers and partners are telling you? Or is it the other way around?
LR: Most definitely. I think when the economy was really in a challenging spot we were all working to hang on to the customers we had because there were not many new prospects in the market. When you're selling sales automation products to sales teams when their business is down, they don't need to buy new seats for people they are not hiring.
So focusing in on services taking care of the customers you have, and delivering the best experience made a lot of sense. But I do think that businesses are now definitely into a mode of expansion and growth. And so sales and sales automation I think is an even more relevant topic because we're all thinking about business expansion rather than cost reduction and just keep the business afloat.
DP: It's got to be a nice feeling.
LR: It is definitely a better feeling.
DP: I feel it, too. Let's talk about social technologies. We see a lot of social technologies permeating the CRM product base. What do you think? Is there anything missing in the mix today in terms of the way we use social technology or our social approaches? Is it net good?
LR: I think it's definitely a net good because we've got a rich data set in place. Our CRM system keeps track of a lot of information for us. I think what social media gives us is another place to learn, and to learn the unexpected. So where I think social CRM really kind of plays in is that, as I mentioned before, CRM helps you have a good memory to capture and replay at a drop of a hat what's going on with any particular customer or prospect.
Social media gives you some new things to learn. Things like how to interact with a person. You don't necessarily get that out of your CRM system’s history records. But social media gives you those opportunities when you reach out into the networks and identify some of those relationship intangibles.
That's kind of the exciting thing about it because it gives information more of an opportunity to find you. And now you can record and interact with this unique data in confines of your CRM system.
DP: Another technology that's not really social but is sort of bubbling up at the same time is video. Sage has been one of the earliest adopters of video as a communication tool, as a content tool to share information and ideas with your customers and with your partners. Given the fact that you've got this experience, do you have any advice that you might offer to a vendor who's thinking about a video strategy?
LR: I think you've got to understand your target audience pretty well. One of the areas that we use video in quite extensively is with our SageACT! contact management product. With ACT! of course we're dealing with small business customers who may or may not be as knowledgeable with technology as larger organizations. We want to get across the important concepts about their business and how ACT! can assist their sales, marketing and customer support efforts.
We've made some video demos with our animated character Napkin Mike. You want to make videos for the small business segment light and entertaining while informative. Have a clear message, be kind of witty and have a bit of a personality that people can look forward to because people get kind of endeared to your central character.
And then I would make sure like any good marketing campaign to integrate these with various mediums. We actually use Napkin Mike within the Sage ACT! product. We use him on our Web site. He has his own Facebook page. He blogs in our online customer community. Of course we try to make his videos viral by posting them on YouTube, et cetera.
So I think video is a great opportunity. We all probably learn faster by seeing something interesting and attractive and witty than saying, "Hey, take 10 minutes and read this three-page document."
DP: You said "viral" a second ago. My experience with Napkin Mike is that he's also short. And I would say the videos are short deliberately because that makes them more viral. Is that true?
LR: Absolutely. You want to make them tight so it's easy for people to absorb and link to. And you want people to do the "Hey, you’ve got to check this link out" thing with their friends. Fifteen seconds later you're watching it. In a minute and a half you're done. I think –with video duration less is really more.
DP: I hear you. Let's talk about your channel strategy, too, because there are so many things that Sage does that you don't see a lot of in the rest of the marketplace. And if you do see it, frankly, I don't know if there's anybody out there that does things better than you, for example, in the reseller channel. You use a channel rather than direct sales. What has operating a channel all these years told you about the need for sales automation and the ways that people use it?
LR: That's a great question. It's really interesting because if you peel it back a little there's of course the good and the bad of operating through a channel. The good is you get the great leverage and expansion, and there's a lot of specialization and reach in your vertical expertise out there. On the other hand, you're kind of one level removed as a vendor. We all want to be really close to our customers.
From a sales automation perspective one of the things that helps is a lot of our channel partners actually use the product and they look like a customer to us. We set them up, and they enter their information into our forecasting. They share a lot of information with us and we find their input on sales automation to be quite valuable.
Then of course they can use that CRM system to capture the information they get from their customers about their sales automation needs. Overall we have found that working with a channel provides us frequent opportunities to better understand how our own products are used.
DP: In addition to selling through the channel, your channel also sells an awful lot to the SMB market. A lot of large vendors have had trouble going from selling to the enterprise market to selling to the SMB market, yet you guys have been able to make it look easy. What is different about this market that might be overlooked by vendors coming from the enterprise space? Don't give me any top-secret stuff, but maybe a couple of observations would be fine.
LR: Well, I'll give you some of my personal observations because I came from the enterprise software space to the small business space. [In an enterprise space, customers have people who are knowledgeable about your technology, your product space and, believe it or not, they're really interested in your technology stack and how it fits in their environment, how it was going to help them or not help them in the long run and all those types of things.
In the small business space most people could kind of care less about that. These guys are often the business owners or office managers, managing payroll, out making sales calls, hiring new employees. And by the way, they're also buying the tools that their businesses run on. They simply do not have a lot of time or interest in hearing about a technology stack and how it fits.
They care about "How does this help my business now?" So their horizon of getting a return on business system investment is not how much money they’re going to save in two to three years. It's what kind of business impact can I have today, this month, this quarter to do something that I can't do today?
The immediate ROI is a real strong factor in small business purchasing -- not that enterprise doesn’t also want it too, but they have a much longer horizon.
When it really comes down to it, small businesses need to understand and act quickly. You really have to communicate with them at this simple level.
DP: Now, speaking of technology, it seems like every vendor out there has both front office and back office technology. It's not something that they all started out with. It's something they gradually came to. Even today salesforce.com is getting into back office products with a financial force product that they have. Microsoft has, I don't know, three or four back office products. Oracle's roots are in the back office as are SAP's.
It seems like everybody's moving in that direction. You've been there for a long time. Do you see anything changing in the market that's sort of causing organizations to want to be front-to-back automated? What's driving the demand here for that kind of integrated approach to automation?
LR: Well, I think what it is, Denis, is that we'd all love to be in our application silo and say, "I've got this application, and it does this. And you've got that application that does that." But at the end of the day, a company works because a lot of different people work together. And so whether you call it the front office or the back office or working with your partners or supply chain or whatever, there are a set of cross-application work flows or business processes that are very relevant to making your business tick.
So first of all companies need to identify and optimize the things about your business that really makes it special. For some companies it's really important that when the phone rings and you're a sales guy and a customer says, "Well, gee, I placed three different orders last week. Where are they," it's really important for that sales guy to have details at his fingertips, "Oh, okay. Well, this shipped out on a UPS truck on Tuesday. And that one is going by FedEx on Wednesday. And this one is being held up for a part that we still need to get."
And this doesn't come just directly from any one application. Some information might come from your suppliers, from your [back] office accounting systems, and your shippers. And you want to have all this information accessible. So what I think is really interesting in the technology is that we're all discovering there's a set of tasks that people want to do at that point in time when you're having an interaction with a customer or prospect that requires having the right information at your fingertips. We consider part of delivering a positive customer experience.
I don't think your average person says, "Let me go open my sales automation system and find out what I need." They want to say, "Oh, let me look up that invoice for you right now." They're not thinking about what application they're coming from. So they want to be able to do that from their mobile device or their desktop or wherever they happen to be without really concern, which is why I think there's a lot of interest in Sage because it has applications on multiple sides of the equation.
DP: You've made it possible for your customers to always be able to access their information regardless of what platform they're working with, even if it's a handheld device.
LR: Yes, it’s the “Anywhere” aspect of our business systems that allows users to have functionality whenever and wherever they need it; another part of providing them a good customer experience and in turn helping them provide the same for their customers.
DP: Okay. Last question for you. There are no wrong answers here. But as you look out over the horizon over the next few years, what technologies or approaches are we likely to need? Where do you think the growth is in, say, new technologies or new business processes? Any inklings?
LR: I think there's a couple. I think cloud technology has changed a lot of things. It's really a lot about virtualization driving flexibility such that customers can identify what they need and then satisfy that need quickly by having a set of ubiquitous services at their disposal that they can draw upon; Sage for examples refers to these as Connected Services
So existing applications connecting to cloud-based subscription services and capabilities augments and complements existing applications. Examples of our Connected Services include list-building and e-marketing services among others.
I think mobile is changing a lot of things too. A few years ago someone from IT would come into your office and say, "Well, here's your device that we support. You're going to get it, and that's what you're going to use. And that's that." I have read that more than 50 percent of corporate employees now bring their own handheld devices into the office and expect the company to support business functions on it. So mobile is a really, really ripe technology right now.
Those are pretty common ones. One I think you might not hear about from a lot of others is technologies focused on managing the customer experience; this has become an intense point of focus for Sage. Something we find interesting is interacting with users of our systems and understanding what parts of the product they're using, and what parts of the product they're not using. This is becoming know as Sage Advisor technology and it really can help us tune the usability of our products for individual customers.
It can help us prioritize where we put our efforts into further product development as help us interact with our customers to perhaps move them to the next version of software. When we know what parts of the application they're using we can have more tuned messages about what we're coming out with and have a much more targeted discussion with them about how our a release can specifically help them.
DP: Regardless of what it is, I know that your big mantra is to make it easy to use and affordable for your customer base.
LR: Always.
DP: Thanks for your time.
LR: Thank you.
