Sales White Paper: Automating Your Sales Performance - Build Or Buy?

Automating
Your Sales
Performance –
Build or Buy?
WHITE PAPER

Share this White Paper! Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved. 1
PROJECT GOALS
Your build or buy decision depends, of course, on the nature
of your sales performance automation project. You need
to assess all the needs of the sales organization against the
background of your company and what it will take to meet
those needs. You should adopt a Drivers – Initiatives – Critical
Success Factors (CSFs) approach to your analysis. First, what
are your business drivers? Where are you feeling the pain?
What are the pressures on your sales team and where do they
need help to create and win more high value opportunities?
AutomatingYour Sales Performance –
Build or Buy?
INTRODUCTION
Let’s say you have a Customer Relationship Management
system (‘CRM’); it does many things well, but serves many
masters across the business and is no longer optimized
for your business needs, especially those of your sales
professionals and sales managers. You know it should
be able to do everything you require, including the
integration of your sales performance program, and right
now you are at the point of deciding between building
your own solution or buying in a proven software solution
to sit within your CRM.That way you can make sure you
reap the benefits of investing in sales performance best
practice and get your people doing the right things
month after month. Does this sound familiar?
TheTAS Group use the term Sales Performance
Automation (‘SPA’). SPA is a salesperson-centric approach
that increases revenue, improves sales forecasts and
metrics, and continually reinforces best practices.
Increased revenue is delivered through an integrated
sales methodology that is automated and constantly
used during salespeople’s daily activities. Improved
forecasting can only be achieved when guesswork is
replaced by objective in-depth analysis of sales team’s
actual, continual performance with reference to the
detailed and specific knowledge of what it takes to close
deals. Objective forecasting is not only more accurate, but
is essential for managers to effectively coach and support
their salespeople early in the cycle, when warning signs
become evident. Integrated into a SPA approach is sales-
learning that is focused on just-in-time, or contextual,
knowledge and skill acquisition.
Building your own SPA solution is naturally an attractive
option, as you will be able to make it exactly the way you
want it – and it will be yours, forever. But what is the true
total cost of ownership? What is the opportunity cost
of doing this yourself and spending time and resources
away from your core competence, the thing you do which
makes you money? ThisWhite Paper poses the questions
you need to answer – and fully cost – before you to take
the plunge and build it yourself. The questions are then
summarized in a handy table, where we estimate the
costs based on a 50-user sales organization, and give
you a range of the likely investment depending on your
requirements.
As with any of ourWhite Papers, there will be a big
variance in the seniority and experience of the readership.
ThisWhite Paper aims to provide something for the
complete range of requirements, but if you want to dig
deeper or move wider, we urge you to get in touch with
us individually. You can do this via email to:
info@thetasgroup.com.
If you were to ask your sales leaders what were the three
greatest challenges to growth, what would they say? What
is compelling you to improve the performance of your
sales organization through automation, and what are the
consequences of not achieving this? Second, what initiative
or initiatives will you put in place to meet these drivers? This is
essentially your project, but you must make sure it addresses
the drivers you face as a business; otherwise you’ll not get the
required organizational buy-in and alignment.

Sales methodology is about how you’re doing in that
opportunity relative to the competition, and involves you
addressing and fixing a number of key issues which pertain
to the opportunity and which will determine your chances of
success. TheTAS Group distinguishes between process and
methodology, and you should consider doing this as well
as you gauge your overall sales performance automation
objectives.
In the next section, we go into some of the following factors in
more detail, but you should evaluate them carefully for your
initiative:
• What is the availability of in-house resources, including
development staff?
• What is the anticipated complexity of the project?
• What are the needs of your sales people and
managers?
• What is an acceptable time to market?
• What is your target deployment date?
• Can this date be met by developing in-house?
• Is your development staff large and skilled enough in
the technology and standards to do this?
• Is this your core competency?
Third, what are the CSFs for this initiative? What has to be in
place to achieve the results you outline? What does success
look like? Be as specific as you can, so you can measure
that success. Is it revenues? Average sales person quota
uplift? Average increase in sales person use of the CRM
system? Financial objectives for the initiative will enable you
to set targets for the return on your build or buy initiative
investment.
TheTAS Group can you help with this exercise, and we’d
be glad to guide you through the process of defining and
designing your requirements and recommending the best
approach for your organization.
Sometimes the nature of the project makes the choice for you.
Do you need a solution involving a highly specialized business
function for which no commercial software exists?Then you
should build that solution in-house. But this is unlikely if you
have invested in sales process and sales methodology licenses
or Intellectual Property from a recognized vendor. Sales
process is about your customer’s buying process and it’s a
question of where you are in the process and what you need
to do next to progress the opportunity.
Sales Process Sales Methodologyvs
• Where am I in this
opportunity?
• What are the customer’s
buying stages
• What are my aligned
sales stages?
• What qualifying
questions must I satisfy?
• How am I doing in this
opportunity compared to
my competitors?
• Is there an opportunity?
• Can we compete?
• Can we win?
• Is it worth winning?

• Is your IT team motivated to make the highest quality
product and is their reputation with the sales teams as
high as that of a professional specialist?
• Is this your IT team’s core strength and focus?
INTEGRATION COST
Integrating a performance automation solution into
your existing CRM systems can be a difficult challenge,
especially if your CRM system has undergone a fair amount
of customization. Integration projects with your corporate
systems can also be subject to a fairly rigorous and lengthy
schedule, as you should expect with mission-critical systems.
You should budget for a pilot or sandbox arrangement
prior to a rollout across the organization. Consider also the
developer or outsourcing overhead, API integration and test
system integration expenses. Integrating a solution yourself
can be a tricky process, especially if the CRM system is not
part of your core competency. If the CRM system vendor or
consultant is employed to develop an interface between the
two systems they must first understand the new application
before building the required integration points. As part of the
integration project a strategy must be put in place to maintain
and update the integration points as either tool is upgraded
or modified in the future.
TheTAS Group has many years of experience integrating its
Dealmaker solution into the world’s favorite CRM systems.
It also has a solution which operates standalone, for those
companies who have no CRM system or do not wish to
integrate. The standalone option can also be a useful
stepping stone to a fully fledged solution or a transition
vehicle between CRM systems.
Integration costs with a bought solution are clear, bound by
Terms and Conditions and generally affordable, though of
course they depend on the vendor or the 3rd party integrator
being used.
TRUETOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP COSTS
The true total cost of owning a solution can often be
underestimated by companies looking to save on licensing
fees and build their own solution. Unseen, these costs adds
up quickly and can seriously dent your net margins. First
you should cost out the likely impact on your network. To a
degree this depends on your preference for how you deploy
technology, whether it is on your premises, or hosted via your
COSTS
When you sit down to figure out the total cost, including
opportunity cost, of an initiative, there are a lot of categories
of cost to consider. We have split these into development
costs, integration costs, trueTotal Cost of Ownership (‘TCO’)
costs, maintenance costs, time to market costs, training costs
and finally sales management costs.
DEVELOPMENT COST
Development is complex and time-consuming, two factors
which have a tendency to hurt financially. In general terms
the completion or success rate of internal development
projects is poor, and you can’t afford to emerge from such
a project without a viable product. You should budget
for product management and specification, technical
specification, software development and testing, and
licensing of third-party code and tools. If you want to put
the sales process and methodology IP into your software,
the chances are your current licenses with your sales training
provider do not allow this, so you should expect to extend
your license from your sales performance provider.
When you buy a 3rd party solution, you simultaneously buy
into the historical sum of all development and customer input
into that product, and you benefit from the wisdom of the
crowds. All of the costs listed above are factored into a buy
solution, but you can run far beyond your estimates if there
are any delays during the build process or overconfidence
during its planning. A bought solution like Dealmaker from
TheTAS Group has been developed by subject matter experts
since 2005 and through hundreds of wide ranging projects
across different sectors, geographies and market conditions.
This has helped us to constantly refine and improve with the
feedback and experiences of the whole user community. This
knowledge alone is difficult to put a price tag on as this might
be the first time your IT department has built a system like
this.
Some further questions you need address, which may seem
not to carry overt cost implications, might be:
• Does your IT team have the time and ability to take on
a project of this size and complexity?
• How much time will it take for the sales team to learn
the methodology and to understand form the sales
team what they require?

TIMETO MARKET COSTS
Any business project assessment involving Net Present
Value or Internal Rate of Return will involve calculating the
‘TimeValue of Money’. The same should be true forTCO.
Time is money and every day spent waiting for a solution to
become live, whether it is bought in and or built in-house,
represents money down the drain. If you have invested in
sales performance initiatives that are not being reinforced by
automating technology, then a day wasted is a day’s loss of
increased revenues. The average sales performance initiative
that is properly reinforced results in a revenue uplift of 17%, so
add 17% to your revenues and divide by 240 working days a
year to get the opportunity cost per day of delay.
SalesVPs expect to see an immediate improvement in their
sales performance. In many cases, you’re only as good as
your last quarter, and if you have a sales initiative going you
want this quarter to be good, not wait until the next. With
a bought-in solution like Dealmaker, waiting time should
be minimal, allowing you to capitalize as soon as possible.
In-house solutions can take months to build, integrate, and
launch – culminating in months of lost revenue that could
have been won had the solution been in place earlier. As you
can see from the table that concludes thisWhite Paper, the
cost of delay to your top line revenues represents the biggest
cost, and it stays hidden if you don’t acknowledge it and
attempt to qualify it.
You should also consider the potential difference in the
solution’s efficacy. Will an in-house solution built by IT teams
used to working on a range of projects be more effective?
You need to stay focused on the objectives, which should
include the productivity and sales success of your selling
organization.
TRAINING COSTS
Take a moment and consider how many people in your
organization you will be responsible to train for an in-house
solution. There are development heads, user support staff,
product management, and salespeople and sales operations.
With respect to people in the sales teams, it should not be
a one-time event, but an on-going process of training and
reinforcement. The Dealmaker solution fromTheTAS Group
has sales methodology application and reinforcement
workshop webinars built into the license fee.
own data center. Cost headings to factor into your total price
tag for a built in solution include: hosting or on premise costs,
professional services fees, hardware purchase, storage costs,
and data security provisions.
Second, you should analyze the cost of putting your people
on end user support for your solution and technical support
for the solution itself. This is likely to be measured as a
function of fractions or multiples of FullTime Equivalent
(or‘FTE’) staff. Third, you should take a similar approach
to charging individuals to make sure your solution stays
compliant with legal and regulatory provisions around data
security in line with corporate governance and safe harbor
agreements.
Less easy to qualify are the opportunity costs associated with
doing something which is not core to your business. You
may have to postpone or cancel a project which is core to
your customer development or retention. In addition there
are hidden costs and challenges that come with managing a
complex system. It is highly likely that your costs are higher
than those of a specialist provider who can bring to bear
expertise and economies of scale. It is often better to take
the complexity out of your network and outsource this to
specialists.
MAINTENANCE COSTS
Maintaining systems and software is no easy task. Added to
this are the inevitable enhancements and new functionality
requests that have to be logged, processed prioritized,
specified, developed, tested, deployed and managed. These
costs are almost always underestimated and compounded
by business growth and the need to keep software current
year after year. How will you ensure that the software is
kept current and remains a priority among all the other
maintenance projects vying for your internal department’s
resources? Will your IT resource maintain a well engineered,
robust code base that has longevity or do quick-fix software
‘hacks’and patch as they go, sacrificing a costly medium to
long term for the short term? Furthermore, depending on
the size of your development team, the risk always exists that
a lead developer of the system might leave your business,
taking with them the key knowledge required to maintain or
update the system.

has the biggest impact on revenue growth. They are less
productive when they are chasing figures and reports.
If you decide to build your own sales performance
automation solution, you need to consider the cost of
managers being diverted from their chief role. They will
have an active interest in the home-grown solution, and will
need to contribute to the business requirements and design.
They will also want to keep an eye on progress and may
well unwittingly delay the project with additional requests,
resulting project or scope‘creep’. All this diverts them from
coaching your teams to win.
And what about monitoring adoption of the new systems
by your sales people? The Dealmaker solution is geared to
fostering adoption and provides reporting tools for managers
to monitor adoption, with no additional form-filling by
their teams. In other words, the system does all the work.
Adoption is key, and in our customers’experience, the more
the salespeople adopt sales performance best practices, the
better they sell, and the more opportunities they win.
SALES MANAGEMENT COSTS
Sales Managers are at their most productive when they are
focused on proactive coaching of their sales teams, since this
help you better frame your project, and ask the questions you
need to address and estimate to arrive at a realistic build or
buy comparison. We have attempted to this for you based on
a typical 50-user sales organization doing $50m revenues per
year, but you will want to do this as accurately as you can for
your own organization.
PROJECT BUILD OR BUY COSTS
SUMMARYTABLE
Before you begin any sales performance automation project,
it’s critical that you and your organization are clear on the
objectives, outcomes, and timing of the project. With that
information in hand, you can then more accurately plan and
assess the pros and cons of building versus buying a solution
to meet those objectives. The tables below are designed to
PROJECT GOALS:
What are your Business Drivers,
Initiatives and CSFs for the project?
What are your objectives?
What are your time-to-market
requirements?

QUESTIONSTO ASK:
Development Costs Buy Build
Product management and specification N/A $5,000 (1 month’s work)
Technical specification N/A $5,000 (1 month’s work)
Project management N/A $5,000 (1 month’s work)
Development N/A $48,000 (4 developers for 3 months)
Testing N/A $8,000 (2 testers for 1 month)
Licensing of third party code and tools N/A $0 – $10,000
Licensing of sales methodology and process IP from
sales performance vendor
Price as required $20,000 (50 users at $400 per annum)
Integration Costs Buy Build
Developer or outsourcing overhead N/A $0 – $25,000
API integration N/A $0 – $10,000
Test system integration N/A $0 – $8,000
True total cost of ownership, including: Buy Build
Hosting/on premise costs Included $20,000
Professional services Price as required $0 – $50,000
Hardware Included $9,000
Storage Included $5,000
Data security Included $12,000
End user support Included $20,000 (half an FTE support person)
Regulatory compliance Included $5,000 (1 month’s work per year)
Maintenance Costs Buy Build
Bug fixing Included $4,000 (1 developer month)
Enhancement request management Included $2,500 (1/2 product management month)
Development of new functionality Included $8,000 (2 developer months per year)
Time to Market Costs Buy Build
Implementation timeline c. 6Weeks c. 4 Months
Lost revenue due to delay of solution availability to
sales
None
(Assume the buy option
is the fastest you can
reasonably implement a sales
performance solution)
$1,600,000
(Assume opportunity cost of 10 weeks lost
performance improvement of average 17% on $50m
annual revenues. 10 weeks is the difference between
the buy‘go’date and a very ambitious build‘go’date )
Lost or gained revenue due to difference in solution
effectiveness
None
Assume solution equally effective as
bought in solution

CONCLUSION
When it comes to automating your sales performance,
the temptation to‘keep it close’and build your
own bespoke solution must be great. You must,
however, make sure that you uncover answers to all
the questions raised by a decision to build, and put
estimates against these answers to arrive at the true
cost of the DIY approach. When you do this, you will
find that the cost of waiting for the solution to be built,
coupled with the ongoing cost of running the solution
yourself, far outweighs the cost of moving to a bought
solution.
We’d be delighted to discuss your specific needs
further, and explore how Dealmaker can drive
sustained sales performance improvement in your
organization. If you wish to find out more, please
contact us at info@thetasgroup.com.
QUESTIONSTO ASK: (CONTINUED)
Training Costs Buy Build
IT development staff N/A $2,000
User support staff N/A $2,000
Product management N/A $2,000
Sales Included $2,000
Sales Management Costs Buy Build
Management time spent building and guiding
requirements
N/A $40,000 (2 managers for 2 months)
TOTALYEAR 1 COST (TCO) $50 - $100,000 $1,824,500 - $1,927,500
BUILD OR BUY DELTA N/A ($1,724,500 – 1,877,500)
* Costs are based on an organization with 50 sales users, annual revenues of $50m. All costs are‘Year 1’costs.

ABOUTTHETAS GROUP
TheTAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger
deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded
within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves
sales performance and accelerates sales results.We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from
traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a
sales opportunity.
For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com
Copyright ©TheTAS Group. All rights reserved.This briefing is for customer use only and no usage rights are conveyed. Nothing herein may be reproduced in any form without written permission ofTheTAS Group.

Sales White Paper: Automating Your Sales Performance - Build Or Buy?

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Sales White Paper: Automating Your Sales Performance - Build Or Buy?