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AllBusiness.com’s Sales Advisor Keith Rosen interviews Ken Rudin, CEO of LucidEra.

Keith Rosen: Ken, break it down for me. Ultimately, how does this help salespeople improve their sales process?

Ken Rudin: What people are doing right now with Sales Solution CRM, what they bought these solutions for was predominantly two things: to increase revenue and to increase the effectiveness of their sales organization. If you look at countless studies, what they’re actually getting today is better internal communication about the status of opportunities and reduced administrative burden in managing the whole sales process which is not, that’s valuable but that’s not really what they wanted. So the reason that there’s this disconnect between what they wanted and what they got is going back to one of my earlier comments. They’re focusing on becoming more efficient. The CRM solutions help them become more efficient meaning they can do the same process faster but it is not at all helping them improve the process. You need analytics to help you figure out where are my deals getting stuck? What has changed since the last time I looked at my pipeline and why? These are the types of things that we can help you focus on as a sales rep so you could look at here’s my pipeline today and here’s what it was a week ago. What’s changed so that I can kind of detect very quickly and then go in and react and correct this situation before it’s the end of the quarter and I look at my results and I see that, “Wow, I missed my numbers, it’s too late to do anything about it now.” So it gives you immediate, instantaneous feedback on what’s changing, what you can do about it. These are the types of things that allows you to do: it will help you figure out of all the opportunities you’re working on, which ones are more likely to close this quarter to help me make my number; which ones look like they are similar to other deals that have closed in similar industries that I can focus on. So if I’ve got a bunch of deals, I’m going to focus my efforts not just on kind of a scattershot, I want to really laser focus on the ones most likely to help me make my number this quarter. So that’s what analytics can do which are the best opportunities, what’s happening in my pipeline, keeping me alert and keeping me up to date, helping me figure out what’s going well, what’s not going well and, most importantly, why and what I can do about it.