George Gallian
One of the great things about covering this industry is that there’s always more to learn. I’ve been receiving a lot of press releases from Compass Sales Solutions of late and I realized this is a solutions provider that I need to be more familiar with. If you’re a dealer, that goes double for you.
What I do know is that Compass is a developer of sales force automation and print management software. The software and services provided by the company encompasses Contact Management, Cost Analysis Tools, Proposal Generation, Order Process Management, and Managed Print Services or Fleet Management consulting. To delve deeper into Compass, this week I interviewed CEO George Gallian about the company, its products, and the trends affecting his business.
How’s business?
Gallian: Compass is certainly having its best year ever. We’ve put a lot of energy in expanding our product line and we’ve expanded our staff. We’ve grown over 20 percent in the last six months. We’re releasing new products and staying ahead of the curve on technology so our investments are paying off.
Are dealers still discovering Compass?
Gallian: Absolutely, we’re always surprised that we still run across dealers who haven’t heard of us, or have heard of us but aren’t really sure what we do. They view us too much as just another CRM. One of our biggest challenges is getting people to understand we are a sales ERP and CRM is an element of our product.
What type of dealers are the best fit for your products?
Gallian: Our smallest customer has five sales reps and our largest has hundreds and hundreds of sales reps. The small customers want to have all the tools to compete that the big guys do. We’re scalable that way. Typically our sweet spot are larger dealers with multiple branches, a bigger scales infrastructure, and who are consistently executing different sales strategies.
Why do you think they choose you?
Gallian: We’re the largest in our space and have been around for a long time. Our commitment to product development—we spend more money in product development than anybody out there. Secondly, when you call Compass, you’ll talk to a live person who’s going to help you immediately. This is sales and sales has to be handled immediately. There’s not a sales rep out there who is going to wait to get a reply call when he’s working on a deal. We also train thousands of sales reps a month through live Webinars. We’ve put together a broad series of courses for management—specific courses on strategic selling, managed print, and all that’s provided to our customers for free.
If you can generalize, how were your dealer customers dealing with contact management, cost analysis, proposal generation, etc. before Compass?
Gallian: We’ve always felt and this has always been the case that the sales department is the least supported department in a dealership. It’s a shame they’ll invest tons of money supporting service, or admin, or contract billing, yet on the front of the business they usually have one sales assistant doing 25 jobs so the sales people on the street get little support. Regretfully, the sales people are usually left to fend for themselves by going to different Websites or using a piece of a manufacturer’s tool here or they’re copying and pasting from [data] that’s been used for the past 10 years. Typically dealers have 20 percent of their sales force writing all the business and the balance of the sales force are just following up leads to those guys and the dealer has pretty much given up on the fact that they’re ever going to be able to expand the sales force with productive reps.
The independent dealer community seems to be contracting; do you still see opportunities for growth in spite of that trend?
Gallian: Absolutely, we’re seeing it all the time. Dealers are starting to realize that knocking on doors and upgrading the lease like in the 1980’s is not going to get it done anymore. The vast majority of the dealers are still doing business the way they’ve always done it. They talk about managed print or managed network services, but the execution level is still low. Dealers are accepting that if the rep is not capable of selling a fleet to everyone of their customers and prospects it’s going to be difficult to stay in business now that everybody is in their customer base through managed print or managed network services. If they’re not engaging at a higher level today, they’re seeing their business dwindle. We’re starting to see a much higher interest, and if reps aren’t capable, we have to provide them with the tools, ability, and training to look at every deal as a fleet opportunity.
What other trends are affecting your business these days?
Gallian: On the managed network we’re working diligently because the industry hasn’t come up with standards for the assessment process on the managed network side. We’re certainly expert at assessing the current situation on the device side, but on the network side, that’s been more challenging because there’s not a consistent industry direction there. We’re working diligently with the top dealers in the country in developing the tools necessary so they can come in and assess a network environment, analyze it, and effectively determine the current situation, which is probably the biggest stumbling block of getting dealers to the next step in managed network services.
How do you see sales automation solutions like Compass evolving beyond where they are today?
Gallian: What we’re seeing now is the dealers and us being prepared for it—that data knowledge, data mining—the sales rep analyzing his own client base, not missing out on the myriad of opportunities, being able to mine their ERP data, mine their DCA data, mine their CRM data, all in one tool to create the multiple opportunities that they would never normally get on their own.
A sales rep does not have the tools necessary other than a lease up from a leasing company or the occasional lead from a service technician. But for sales to be able to mine the valuable information in DCA and CRM data, it’s huge for them to uncover opportunities in their base that have been left to chance. We’re seeing more dealers expecting their sales reps to truly manage their sales territories. Sales territories actually mean something and dealers are expecting sales reps to manage their customer and prospect base whereas in the past that was okay, that’s your customer base or prospect base, there was no analytics to it or expectations tied to real information to say this customer base is worth this amount, this is what your budget needs to be, this is what we expect, and this is why. In the past that was a dart throw. The biggest change we’re seeing today are the tools available to do that.
What can we expect to hear from Compass in the next 18 months?
Gallian: Beyond the most recent releases is expanding and simplifying the ability for sales reps to uncover opportunities within their base through intuitive data mining tools and also increased and simplified abilities for sales managers and owners to get the most out of the customer/prospect base. Our biggest challenge on the table is to tie a bow on the managed network piece.
