CIO — Two years ago, reps at AMF Bowling Products had good reason to shudder at the very mention of sales-force automation (SFA). It is notoriously hard to get right, and the company’s first attempt failed miserably.
AMF reps sell everything from shoe spray to the back-office software that runs a bowling center. They need a way to track their customers?owners and managers of some 6,000 U.S. bowling centers?and the equipment they already own. Knowing which customers have ancient ball return machines or out-of-date automatic scoring systems helps them zero in on the best sales targets. The company’s first major SFA effort?a series of homegrown Lotus Notes databases of customer information?didn’t take long to earn the sales reps’ ire. Reps couldn’t take their laptop into bowling centers and enter customer data without looking like spies to the alley owners with whom they were trying to establish trusting relationships. So instead, they’d scribble notes on paper. But after schlepping through four to six bowling centers, the last thing reps wanted to do when they got to their hotel at night was fire up their laptop and spend up to an hour logging their sales calls into one database and entering data on what kind of equipment each center had into another. Because it usually took another 30 to 45 minutes and sometimes as much as two hours to replicate their notes, most reps gave up in frustration. "You’re talking about an extra two hours at the end of the day," says Chris Keller, Long Island, N.Y.-based Northeast district sales manager and a 10-year AMF veteran. "The application was just too difficult. We’re salesmen. We need to use our time to make money." Keller confesses he abandoned the Notes system after about three months. Only half of the sales force updated Notes religiously, and as time went on, usage fell, says Jay Buhl, vice president of North American sales. By 1997 the reps had reverted to their own?often paper-based?systems for tracking customer data. As a result, "We didn’t know how to get in touch with our customers and didn’t know what equipment was out there," says Buhl. "If a district sales manager left the company, we had no clue what was going on in that geography."
Although the lack of a centralized customer database was tolerable while AMF’s global business was booming, the boom ended abruptly when the Asian market collapsed in 1998. Suddenly, AMF could no longer rely on outfitting new bowling centers in Asia for its growth. To make matters worse, an aggressive expansion campaign increased the number of AMF-owned bowling centers in the United States from 125 to 415 in two years, making it the world’s largest owner and operator of bowling centers. Because AMF sells equipment to its own centers at cost, the company effectively decreased its universe of profitable sales prospects. Between 1997 and 1998, worldwide sales of AMF bowling products plummeted from $300 million to $150 million.
