Diagnosing is the first step in Susman and Evered’s (1978) action research cycle (see Figure 6.1). This step consisted of identifying and defining the problem to be addressed in the collaboration. Diagnosing began when the Researchers coordinated a kickoff workshop (WS1) with the VoiceTech task force in February 2006. This workshop included the Researchers, the Director of Sales Operations (representing the Champions), the Director of Marketing and Sales Operations and the Marketing Analyst (representing the Innovators), and the Director of IT Planning and the IT Business Analyst (representing the Technologists). WS1 began with the three directors presenting a broad overview of the company and its sales processes. The overview incorporated VoiceTech’s service offerings, internal and external organizational relationships, sales processes, sales force activities, the current and planned SFA, future requirements, and sales reports. The Researchers provided feedback on the proposed implementation plan. WS1 lasted 6 hours 22 minutes, and the resulting transcript is 127 pages long. Detailed notes also were taken during this meeting.
The overview of the sales process revealed that VoiceTech salespersons used “POINT” (the VoiceTech SFA) to record interactions with potential clients. Sales reps arrived at the VoiceTech office each workday, logged into POINT on one of the available shared computers, and printed out their scheduled client meetings for the week. Afterwards, sales reps would meet with their sales manager for a morning meeting during which each sales rep updated the team on sales from the previous day and projections for the remainder of the week. After morning meetings, sales reps would map out their day by identifying areas in their territory to call upon. The quota for each sales rep was 50 prospects visited each day. Sales
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reps could reduce this daily quota by making a sale or having a second or third meeting with a potential client.
Figure 6.1 The Cyclical Process of Action Research at VoiceTech
Adapted from Susman and Evered (1978) p. 588
A review of the notes and transcripts from this first workshop confirms that the collaboration team diagnosed two primary areas of concern: 1) Integration of mobile technology with the SFA; and 2) salesperson turnover. Related to SFA mobile integration, the VoiceTech task force was specifically concerned with two issues: the stability of the SFA (including instability of the legacy system, unreliable SFA data quality, and potential media breaks after implementing a new SFA) and management information needs. Related to turnover, the VoiceTech task force was specifically concerned with two issues: incomplete adoption and usage of the current SFA (and, thus, incomplete adoption of the VoiceTech sales process) and system issues that were correlated with sales rep retention.
Emphasizing these concerns, the Director of Marketing and Sales Operations commented “We have a big hurdle to overcome there, kind of the mental state of where they are with the current system. I think we’re going to have a win in the fact that we’re going to come to them and say, ‘Hey, listen, you know, there have been some issues. We’re getting a whole new tool and we’re equipping it for mobile
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device.’ That will immediately get us somewhere, but if it doesn’t, it’s got to be backed up by the stability and the ease of use and then I guess … usability. Once we get the baseline out there—which is just replicating the functionality that we have for the current platform—what things do we need to do with it next to really get people to go, ‘Yeah, I’m addicted to the tool, I have to have it’?” [40:1312] 2
In 2003, VoiceTech realized it needed an SFA system. Prior to this, everything was manual and there was no computer system for tracking data. In late 2003, after several iterations of “home grown” SFA tools became unreliable and unscalable as the company expanded, the IS and sales operations teams evaluated a number of SFA vendors, including Siebel and SalesLogix (the legacy SFA at VoiceTech). Siebel was evaluated, but the price-point it offered was much too high for VoiceTech. Also, Siebel, the company, was bought by Oracle and VoiceTech was concerned about the software’s continued development. Based primarily on those price and viability concerns, VoiceTech selected SalesLogix as its first SFA. In April of 2004, sales operations and VoiceTech IT launched a pilot of the SalesLogix system in the corporate office.
Based on feedback, VoiceTech IT made system improvements and additional SalesLogix SFA training was. In August 2004, the SalesLogix SFA was implemented at each office. The system was highly unstable and many issues still existed. Because of these problems and limited available resources, VoiceTech IT had to outsource support. Also due to limited resources, there was little in-house support for continued development of the legacy SFA. The Director of Marketing and Sales Operations stated,
“We spent 2005 trying to get people to use it and to stabilize it. We were constantly looking for ways to make the system better and to improve the stability of the platform, but I guess people didn’t trust it. It would go up, it would go down. Performance was inconsistent.” [40:1141-1145]
In late 2005, the VoiceTech task force realized that SalesLogix SFA could not support the company’s growth plans. The system was unstable with system crashes and unreliable with data consistency errors. At this point, the task force revisited its evaluation of Siebel SFA. VoiceTech’s CRM offerings already used the Siebel system and using the Siebel SFA could allow for a smoother integration, the task force believed. The Director of IT Planning acknowledged these issues,
“That’s why we kind of moved to Siebel at that point. It was actually going to be cheaper for us to move to Siebel, implement the mobile solution versus [the] pain and pressure [of in-house] development to enhance SalesLogix to include mobile. That’s what drove the [decision].” [40:1157]
So, when Siebel representatives approached VoiceTech in 2005 with much lower pricing, the task force decided, strategically, it made a lot of sense to implement the Siebel SFA system. This system also provided built-in functionality for mobile integration with the SFA – functionality SalesLogix did not offer.
2 Quotations and scenarios were collected from voice recorded workshops, interviews, and meeting minutes and
notes taken on a computer during workshops and interview sessions, and from researcher reflections in post- interview and post-workshop sessions. The location of these quotes within the text [i.e. 40:1312] indicates the context, source, and approximate timeframe of the quote. The reference at the end of the quotation indicates our full transcript document in Atlas.ti [i.e. 40] and specific utterance [i.e. 1312].
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During WS1, the collaboration team agreed the Researchers should interview at least eight sales reps – including both successful and not so successful sales reps, new sales reps and experienced sales reps, four managers, two directors and two vice presidents. Also scheduled to be interviewed would be the CMO, the senior vice president of sales, four internal sales managers, and two customers. Thus, there were 24 planned interviews. These would be scheduled for several weeks following WS1. The Researchers developed a series of semi-structured interview questions for the different roles within the VoiceTech sales organization. Coordination of the interviews and selection of the interviewees was handled by the Innovators based on the previously agreed-to criteria. These interviews mostly took place face-to-face with the interviewees on site at VoiceTech’s corporate headquarters. For those interviewees located in other offices, the interviews would be conducted by phone. All interviews were to be recorded and later transcribed.
For sales managers and team leads, questions were asked from the following topics (See Appendix C for specifics on sales manager questions):
1. Daily planning of unit 2. Weekly planning of unit 3. Sales mentoring
4. Sales monitoring 5. Unit reporting
6. Periodic performance and goal reviews 7. General conditions
For sales reps, questions were asked on the following topics (See Appendix D for details on the sales rep questions):
1. Daily planning 2. Weekly planning 3. Scheduled contacts 4. Unscheduled contacts 5. Daily summary reporting 6. Weekly results feedback 7. General conditions
The Researchers also believed office and field observations would help us gather additional insights into the sales process. Ultimately, while we did spend several hours one morning observing office routines, a new sales rep training session, and morning sales team meetings, we did not conduct any observations of sales reps in the field going door-to-door. Also, based on the availability of interviewees, over the following six weeks we were able to interview seven sales reps, five managers (including two customer care managers who interacted with the SFA indirectly), two directors, two vice presidents, the senior vice president of sales, the CMO, the CTO, four customers, the IT Business Analyst and the Director of IT planning (in a joint workshop), and the Marketing Analyst. These 26 interviews lasted more than 17 hours over 4 days during the six-week period.
In addition to clearly defining the problem situation and also as consistent with CAR, theory should inform the diagnosis. Our selection of theoretical framing, which occurred shortly after WS1, was
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motivated by a need to understand the stakeholder views of how technology was being adopted, implemented, and used at VoiceTech. In fact, Orlikowski and Gash’s (1994) and Davidson’s (2002, 2004, and 2006) TFR research was instructive in helping us understand the stakeholder issues with technology at VoiceTech. Thus, during diagnosing, TFR was selected as the lens through which the problem situation would be viewed and analyzed. Figure 6.2 summarizes the process before the intervention.
Figure 6.2 SFA Processes Before Intervention
6.2
Iterative Action
The VoiceTech collaboration was a single cycle with multiple workshops, interviews, and presentations as iterative instances of action planningaction takingevaluation stages. An iteration is roughly defined as the actions planned in one workshop, the actions taken subsequently after that workshop and before the next workshop, and the evaluation of actions during the next workshop. For example, actions planned in WS1 are taken between WS1 and WS2 and then evaluated during WS2. The workshops and presentations and the participants are summarized in Table 6.1. See Figure 5.4 for a timeline of the collaboration. Following diagnosing, action planning occurred when the collaboration team specified actions to be taken by VoiceTech to improve the problem situation (Baskerville & Wood-Harper, 1998). Action planning was guided by theory and established a timeline by which changes should occur. Action taking followed action planning involving implementation of the planned actions and evaluation then followed. Outcomes were evaluated to determine whether the actions were successful. This section, similar to the presentation of an action research project by Kohli and Kettinger (2004), elaborates each iteration.
Table 6.1 Workshops and Presentations
Date Context Participants Duration
(H:M:S)
2/2/2006 Workshop 1
(WS1)
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• Marketing Analyst
• Director of Sales Operations
• Director of Marketing and Sales Operations • IT Business Analyst • Director of IT Planning 4/3/2006 Presentation 1 (P1) • The Researchers • Marketing Analyst
• Director of Sales Operations
• Director of Marketing and Sales Operations • IT Business Analyst • Director of IT Planning 2:25:29 6/1/2006 Workshop 2 (WS2) • The Researchers • Marketing Analyst
• Director of Sales Operations
• Director of Marketing and Sales Operations
3:51:41
7/18/2006 Workshop 3
(WS3)
• The Researchers
• Marketing Analyst
• Director of Sales Operations
3:22:29
11/16/2006 Workshop 4
(WS4)
• The Researchers • Marketing Analyst
• Director of Marketing and Sales Operations
• IT Business Analyst • Technical Analyst 3:57:30 2/8/2007 Presentation 2 (P2) • The Researchers • Marketing Analyst
• Director of Marketing and Sales Operations • Director of IT Planning Technical Analyst • IT Business Analyst • Data Analyst 1:35:24 4/28/2008 Workshop 5 (WS5) • The Researchers • Marketing Analyst
• Director of Sales Operations
2:12:03
6.2.1 Iteration 1 (WS1 through WS2) 6.2.1.1 Action Planning
At the end of WS1 in early February 2006 the collaboration team engaged in a session to plan actions to be taken before WS2. The most pressing action involved how to communicate the impending switchover from SalesLogix (the legacy SFA) to Siebel SFA. The first part of this switch was planned for approximately two months after WS1. The first recommendation from the Researchers to the VoiceTech task force was to carefully communicate with the stakeholders about the progress being made to stabilize “the system.” In this way, no major functionality changes would be expected by the users. Instead, the
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switchover would allow a phased rollout of planned SFA upgrades on a stable platform with later additions like mobile integration.
The interview sessions provided a wealth of insight into the problems initially identified in WS1. For example, a Midwestern manager confirmed that change communication was a problem for VoiceTech:
“There have been times when we’ve had some of our execs here drop information on us. I recall six months ago Russell Barker [coming into] town and mentioning … something that was upgrading in our Siebel. We didn’t even know it was coming. Siebel POINT, for example, was what it was. Russell Barker was here in town, it was showing up in three weeks. We didn’t even know it was in route. I don’t think that was Brook’s fault. He couldn’t believe that was the case. There’s definitely a little bit of a cog in the system coming down our way on that stuff.” [8:201]
Planning continued through Presentation 1 (P1). P1 was based on a 27-page PowerPoint presentation, lasted 2 hours 25 minutes including discussions, and the resulting transcript is 41 pages long. P1 was the Researchers’ first opportunity to present initial observations and findings gleaned from interviews over the previous two months. The Researchers generally asked four questions that should be addressed during the action taking step of Iteration 1 (I1):
1. What information is offered by the SFA?
2. How to ensure that information is captured with acceptable quality? 3. What information is needed for management purposes?
4. What information is needed for sales rep purposes?
Following these questions were a series of VoiceTech assumptions and as-practiced observations. Each observation offered opportunities that VoiceTech could act upon to address the problem situation. In summary, these actions posited that VoiceTech should
1-A. Become project-focused within the scope of the SFA implementation. 1-B. Communicate the change process continuously.
1-C. Provide focused training on the SFA as needed.
1-D. Make SFA ubiquitous by ensuring real-time data usage and data capture.
1-E. Standardize and consolidate key sales management reports from a single source (the SFA). Having a project focus within the scope of the SFA implementation would require a project manager and a project team that included IT support and some representative users and managers. The fast-paced sales culture at VoiceTech was such that the executives and managers were not afforded a real opportunity to take a broader strategic view of how IT could be used effectively if implemented correctly. The Director of Marketing and Sales Operations commented many times to the effect “I just need to get this in now. Once we do that, then we can worry about these other things …” This tactical view of IT left little time for the strategic view of the project.
As indicated in the quote from the Midwestern manager regarding change communication, the change process had not been clearly communicated to users or managers. This created frustration and confusion for users and managers when changes to the SFA were implemented with little to no user input and little IT support. Likewise, users rarely received detailed or formal training on how to use the SFA. Most often
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the only training they received was a ten-minute informal training session from their managers or other sales reps.
With a ubiquitous SFA, VoiceTech might eliminate a lot of the user pain points that the company believed led to sales rep frustration and thus sales rep turnover. With real-time data capture, there would be no need for sales reps to return from the field to headquarters every day to enter data on one of the unreliable in-house desktop computers. Real-time data usage could incorporate location-aware technologies that would identify current and potential customers and do-not-call businesses. This would create a smarter and more efficient sales force. Similarly, consolidating and standardizing sales management reports with data collected into a single source location would eliminate the many media breaks that managers experienced when preparing sales summaries and forecasts. The data would then be readily available and, more importantly, reliable.
Additionally, the Researchers offered nine proposed SFA capabilities for which VoiceTech should endeavor during the implementation. These are summarized in Table 6.2. The Researchers, based on data collected during the 26 initial interviews prior to P1, multiple observations, and discussions in WS1 believed achieving these capabilities would innovate the sales process and eliminate or minimize the problem situation during the project.
Territory management capability to the SFA would help manage conflicts that frequently occurred among sales reps in the field. This capability would include functionality like frequently updating the Dun & Bradstreet data that is imported into the SFA, mapping and organizing of sales calls, and formal identification of geographical placement of potential and current customers within the territory.
Lead generation capability would give sales reps a more advanced and comprehensive ability to manage leads. This capability would include post-sale information, installation information, and contracts. Contact capture capability would allow the sales reps to collect contact information from leads, which could later be used to generate sales. This capability would minimize usage of manual data collection systems like index cards.
Lead qualification capability would help sales reps filter cold calls. This capability would allow sales reps to identify the most likely prospects while in the field. Developing SFA planning and support capability would allow VoiceTech to move from trusting the existing “paper-pushing” system to trusting the SFA system in a reliable way that would also be useful to the sales reps.
Real-time sales rep activity would give sales reps and their managers reliable, real-time access to their daily activities and sales results. Mature forecasting capability to the SFA would replace the many ad hoc forecasting routines with a more disciplined and efficient forecasting model. Finally, making the SFA ubiquitous would improve the SFA to make it widely available across time and geographic locations. Capability gaps in the VoiceTech context are the identified gaps between IT that is currently available on the broader market and IT that is currently available within the organization. Assimilation gaps are defined as the identified gaps between what the IT currently available within the organization can