Management Features Of Sales Force Automation
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Sales force automation, or SFA, is a term that refers at its
most basic to automating critical sales functions like lead and
account management. Sales force automation uses software to
automate sales tasks like order processing, lead generation,
information sharing, contact management, customer management,
and employee evaluation.
It also keeps track of customer preferences, buying habits,
demographics, and performance management. Sales force
automation tools improve field sales productivity and open
whole new realms of possibility for companies. With an
on-demand architecture that allows effective sales force
management and CRM, managing sales information is easy on even
the largest scales. Essentially, customers and sales employees
can manage and share any type of information.
There are a number of benefits and features that come with
sales force automation technology, and these features comprise
the backbone of the SFA system. They include:
Lead management
Lead management allows companies to keep better track of leads
by ensuring they don't get cold. This can reduce or eliminate
the need for manual routing and lead assignment duplication,
clearly defines opportunity assignments, and is able to
automatically assign leads to the correct individual based on
territory, product expertise or user-defined rules. Thus SFA
allows for automatic load leveling across sales territories,
and better relationships between team members.
For example, with automatic lead management, you can set
security controls that ensure teams or partners can access only
their own leads, increase lead conversion rates and improve
sales response times.
Opportunity management
Opportunity management allows sales teams to work better as
units by standardizing sales methods and systems, identifying
bottlenecks, and tracking deal closures. It also allows
employees to focus their resources on strengthening key
partnerships and dominating key competitors instead of
competing with each other. More organized sales teams allow
managers to delegate tasks and set up automatic reminder emails
for themselves and their team.
Most importantly, the opportunity management feature allows
companies to centrally track custom information like partner
and customer communications and milestones while simultaneously
monitoring myriad sales processes like sales channels, service
effectiveness or product lines.
Account management
An account management system ensures that your company is able
to attain full knowledge of your customer accounts. Accurate
knowledge of customer account equals better collaboration
amongst your sales teams and retains lasting customer
relationships. Additionally, account management allows a
company to defines and evaluate all those involved with the
account, from the project manager to the executive sponsor.
With account management, you can set up online access to all
customer account information, like organization charts and
current partners-across the entire company. No one is left in
the dark and everyone knows the account status and history.
Territory Management
On-demand, advanced territory management capabilities allow you
to adjust to rapid changes within your company. An easy
point-and-click interface ensures your company can
automatically route accounts and opportunities to the correct
territories.
A solid territory management system also decreases lag time in
lead assignments by ensuring a lead never gets cold; lead
assignments are easily queued and automatically sent to the
correct territory. In essence, territory management allows
companies to easily monitor, set up, gather, transfer, assign,
re-assign, and change accounts across territories.
Contract Management
Contract management is another integral feature in sales force
automation. Essentially, it allows companies to manage a
contract's lifespan by shortening approval cycles for
contracts, renewing contracts sooner, and reducing
administrative costs.
This SFA feature improves tracking and management of contract
information, such as value, conditions, terms, evaluations, and
more.
Traditionally, most companies have had to build, buy and
sustain an IT software system all on their own; however, this
leads to extremely high maintenance fees and myriad other
costs. Today, the advent of automated sales force technology
allows businesses to subscribe to already built, on-demand,
customizable services that provide everything a traditional IT
software does and more.
The architecture of sales force automation allows for a
decrease in the total cost of ownership, reduction of risk
factors, a decrease in wasted time, and a new focus on business
and management rather than technology.
About The Author: http://Salesforce.
on-demand application service and a giant in the field of CRM.
With over 24,000 customers, over 500,000 subscribers, and a 97%
customer satisfaction rate, http://Salesforce.
lead their field. To find out more about them, please visit
http://www.salesfor
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 11:22 AM,
