By Chris Bucholtz

We talk a lot about “CRM failure,” which I’ve written is not usually an IT failure or a problem with technology of any sort, but with expectations – the system is brought in with the expectation that it will do something it can’t do, and then is blamed when it can’t do it. It’s not really fair to the CRM solution, but it’s a lot easier for a company executive to blame the CRM solution than to admit an almost total lack of understanding of how his or her organization actually works. But that’s a topic for another blog.

Anyhow, I had a great call this morning with Landslide Technologies’ vice president of marketing, Saman Haqqi, and I was pleased to hear about a company whose approach short-circuits that expectation-failure loop.

To put it briefly, Landslide is aimed at one goal: increasing sales performance. Instead of trying to do all kinds of business-transforming things – which are all still valid and important – Landslide goes after its goal in a single-minded way. My suspicion is that its customers are much likelier to be happy than the average CRM customer if only because both vendor and customer have their goals aligned. (Actually, Landslide doesn’t call its field of expertise “CRM” or even “SFA” but “Sales Workstyle Management,” which may keep it off some potential customers’ radar screens - but only briefly.)

Here’s what Landslide provides in the new release: a single-screen interface that walks its users through the standard tasks that CRM fulfils – gathering data on customers and leads – and then beyond that into a set of processes that guide sales reps all the way through closing the sale. While the solution comes with a pre-set group of processes, it’s also completely customizable, so it can fit your organization’s way of working and you don’t have to impose changes on your staff to fit the software.

The interface also provides a graphical cue when users use one of these processes, which is extremely helpful for seeing how your sales force actually behaves. If there’s a step that’s become obsolete, it’ll become apparent just through the use of the system. This idea of visibility into the sales process is also reflected in the solution’s forecasting tools, which receive input from sales activities to provide a more realistic forecast.

The aspect of the solution that received the most press until now was the use of assistants to unload some of the onerous task of data entry from sales people. The new solution also includes some of this for vice presidents of sales and CEOs – a management-level service to help define and track relevant sales metrics and create reports and updates.

The neatest aspect of the new release – in a couple of ways – might be the integration of InsideView’s SalesView product into the Landslide solution. (I wrote a little about InsideView here; we’ll have a feature on the company on Inside CRM very shortly.) It’s neat for two reasons: first of all, it brings a wealth of new information to sales people using Landslide, and it indicates how InsideView’s information aggregation and evaluation technology is going to become a component of a lot of tools in areas where knowledge of the customer is critical. The fine folks at InsideView hinted at its future use in a marketing automation solution during a briefing last week.

The only aspect of the new release I’m not in love with is the inclusion of a email prospecting tool; while Landslide’s dead on that data entry should be taken off the sales reps’ plates, as should a lot of other general CRM tasks, I also think that prospectintg should shift to the marketing side so sales reps can sell. Marketing automation types are working on this, and I expect the prospecting tools to become the equivalent of Landslides’ vestigal tail.

Landslide doesn’t instantly transform your company into a customer-focused organization, but that’s not what it aims to do. Its goal is to amp up sales, and its focus on that goal suggests its users will end up more satisfied than the typical CRM user.