Sales Force Automation Software

Sales Force Automation software has been around for ages and preceded Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However popular it is as an application, and depending on whom you are listening to, there is still some resistance to learning Sales Force Automation systems among rank and file salespeople who associate such software with tedious, time-consuming sales management tasks. They basically want to be out selling, not entering info into their laptop.

So if Sales Force Automation software is not about helping sales people sell mroe, they aren’t interested. But the major reason sales people does not embrace Sales Force Automation software is out of ignorance of its benefits. Well over half of Sales Force Automation users 57 % reported being very positive about Sales Force Automation technology in a recent Yankee Group survey. Sales Force Automation is most successful in reducing administration time, according to respondents. However, sales and marketing professionals ranked improving effectiveness as the top challenge they faced.

Therefore, training can be an issue for budget-conscious companies. There are other issues, said respondents, such as Sales Force Automation is costly, difficult to work with, requires additional work inputting data, dehumanizes a process that should be personal, requires continuous maintenance, information updating, system upgrading, and difficult to integrate with other management information systems

What should be obvious is that Sales Force Automation is only as effective as your sales team. Customers want everything now! and your sales force bears the brunt of this pressure. It has been said that if Sales Force Automation software aspires to more than automating the life of a sales rep, it must support not only their efficiency but also their effectiveness.

Therefore, the burden is on management to arm its salespeople with the latest technology to handle anything a customer throws at them. An immediate deployment of mobile computing solutions to your troops in the field might be the difference between life and death in today’s rapidly-changing economy.

With Sales Force Automation, the sales force remains in constant communication with the home office for leads, orders, tracking and other mission-critical information. It liberates a sales staff chained to their desks and / or laptops. Sales Force Automation is all about combining mobility with effectiveness.

With a Sales Force Automation system in place, a mobile sales force is never disconnected from the miracles of software. Out in the field they can access the same information as the folks back at the office. Since salespeople devote most of their day to sales work, minus preparation and admin time, a business must deploy Sales Force Automation to overcome every hurdle in the salesperson’s way including the minutia of administrative chores that could be handed off to a temp for a more cost-effective use of everyone’s time.

Therefore, companies that have the most collaborative selling process, the Aberdeen Group found, also have the most selling success. “In particular, tools that support teamwork between marketing and sales can support a group-selling approach that substantially increases numbers.”

According to a Yankee Group report, Sales Force Automation (SFA) rates high in reducing the time spent on “paperwork,” but not as high for increasing the revenue of the sales staff. It went on to say that companies say that Sales Force Automation has not lived up to its hype and are disappointed in the rate of sales. Sales Force Automation should be understood to mean that it is designed not as a sales tool or facilitator, the report continued, but as an administrative adjunct that takes care of the “before” and “after” work of a sale. The Yankee Group concluded that the companies are at fault if they expect impossible results from an application if they don’t even understand their own “business problems.”

SFA and CRM

Contact management came first and was the catalyst to link technology to sales. Contact management, or the “electronic Rolodex,” became every sales rep’s crutch. Their PDA now has everything: contacts, calendar, and memos.

In “Sales Force Automation: Back to the Future,” Barry Trailer wrote: “Someone got the bright idea of hooking up the front of the pipe (Sales & Marketing) with the back end of the pipe (Service & Support), and CRM was born. If any one person had more to do with the growth, proliferation and mainstreaming of CRM than Siebel, I don’t know who that would be. He created a marketing machine and developed the muscle to power it.”

In “Sales-Force Automation: Beyond the Electronic Rolodex, Stewart McKie broke down Sales Force Automation into the categories of opportunity management, contact management, lead management, process management, report generation and e-mail-integration.

But too many projects are launched with a lot of hype about how good things are going to be when a CRM strategy is carried out. But have they left out process? To be successful, your CRM’s efforts must have, for the lack of a better phrase, a marketing plan, a foundation that begins by asking yourself questions about your business. Where is it? What are its goals? Because goals boil down to benefits. Do a Situational Analysis: 1) internal analysis that provides an inside look on how your business is functioning; its strengths and weaknesses; 2) external analysis that examines the economy and your place in it; also the competition.

You do this to get to the heart of marketing, and a CRM solution: a strategy. Tactics also plays a role when you there’s an immediate opportunity that must be capitalized upon. But strategy takes in marketing, sales and pr goals and markets; add or drop a department, individual or business; try something different; make news?