Sales Force Automation software increases sales revenue by leveraging sales processes in your sales lead management efforts. Are you looking for a better sales conversion system?

Looking for a way to:

Improve your sales management process?
Leverage your sales activity into increased revenue?
Accurately forecast sales closure time-frames?
Effectively manage your sales teams?

Sales Force Automation software (SFA software) – sometimes called sales automation software - helps companies manage and optimize their salesforce activities. It helps generate more accurate sales forecasts, provides better insight into sales opportunities, and automates business tasks for sales tracking. It helps individual sales representatives manage accounts, sales leads and customer interactions to more satisfactory conclusions.

SFA software generally has modules for opportunity management, sales forecasting, territory management, lead management, and other sales management functions.

Most sales force automation software allows some customization to fit specific sales processes and procedures. When used as a sales process management tool, SFA software can include a sequence of sales activities that guides sales representatives through every single step in the sales process.

This helps make sales reps follow, or at least consider, each step in the company’s sales cycle. Ensuring a unified sales process throughout the company, and ensuring that follow-up activities are performed. It may even assign and schedule activities automatically.

Sales Automation – All the same?

Organizations will use SFA systems differently depending on what type of sales department they operate. For example, an organization with a tele-sales team will need a SFA system with call center capabilities. Field sales teams will benefit from a system that offers a mobile application. A company with indirect sales partners will use the SFA system to support sales lead management activities, and to transfer leads to partners.

Another example of customization, sales managers can create custom dashboards to see details of sales pipeline activity and agent sales quotas. Or, sales staff can create dashboards that show top sales opportunities of the day and information on how they are progressing towards their sales goals.

The ability to oversee all activities within the sales process enables the sales manager to schedule activities and discrete tasks automatically for an individual or the entire sales organization. The sales processes should be tied to the overall CRM strategy developed and implemented at the company.

Will sales automation software help you?

Sales process management tools by themselves are not enough. But, if they are deployed across the country, or around the world, they serve as an effective sales process guide. They can help minimize human error, standardize the sales process, and ultimately result in greater productivity for both the individual and the entire sales team.

This streamlines team selling and ensures company-wide consistency in your sales cycle. Like most SFA functionality, sales process and activity management tools are only as good as their ability to be tailored to the company’s individual sales methods.

However, forcing adoption of unnecessary sales processes and useless activities doesn’t provide any value to the people who have had their arms twisted. In some worst-case scenarios poorly configured Sales Force Automation software actual impedes the same sales processes they’re supposed to automate.

What are my options with salesforce automation?

There are some changing trends in the sales force automation software marketplace today.

Software as a Service (SaaS) or web-based crm systems are gaining a lot of traction lately. They offer low upfront costs, little to no hardware requirements and greater accessibility as reasons for the increase in adoption of SFA software that sits “in the cloud.”

Mobile SFA applications are also becoming popular. For example, SAP and Sybase teamed up earlier this year to develop a mobile app. Now, companies that use SAP software can manage business processes from iPhones or Windows Mobile devices.

Installed on-premise systems are still available and used by the vast majority of companies. Although the trend in the sales few years has been to include sales force automation functions in many customer relationship management software packages. This type of CRM software in generally referred to as a CRM suite.

Important Considerations when selecting Sales Automation Software

Companies evaluating SFA systems should consider the following:

Does the software have capabilities that meet the unique needs of your sales force?
Do members of your sales team work remotely?
In this case, you might consider a web-based SFA system so that they can access information from an off-site location.
Do you need a stand alone or “best-of-breed” SFA software?
Or, do you require a CRM software suite with modules for marketing automation, customer service management and field service management software too?

Can SFA tools also be Contact Relationship Management Software?

Many sales force automation software systems also contain some form of contact management in them. With these contact management tools, salespeople can answer the following types of questions:

Who is our individual contact?
Who is the primary contact for each department?
What is our customers mailing address? Billing address?
What consumers are included in the most recent marketing promotion?
Which prospect has already received a brochure?
When is my next sales call?
When was the last time I called a specific customer?

The true value of contact relationship management software (CRM) is its capability to track not only where customer personnel are, but who they are in terms of their clout in decision-making. Many contact management tools interface with the sales management functions; helping you optimize your efforts in revenue generation, customer retention, and building customer loyalty by using a single database application.

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