"Nothing happens until someone sells something"

It is often stated that ‘Nothing happens until someone sells something’; this means that without customers, the greatest business is worthless. Tools and procedures that enable companies to improve their sales processes are essential for effective organizations, and provide the catalyst to accelerate revenue growth.

These tools and procedures are known as Sales Force Automation or SFA. This capability is often used in conjunction with solutions for Customer Relationship Management or CRM. We believe that Sales Force Automation tols can be broken down into three types or stages as follows:

Stage 1 - Transaction-Centric, the basic level of SFA.

The software allows you to know who your customers and prospects are, view and manage the sales pipeline, review sales cycle activities, perform trend analysis and begin sales forecasting.

Stage 2 – Sales Connectivity

Connecting SFA with marketing, customer service, installation and service, promotions, accounting, inventory management and manufacturing can go a long way to improving the profitability of any business.

Stage 3 – Knowledge Empowerment

The most advanced step of SFA, serves the organization by institutionalizing all selling and selling-channel-related knowledge. Additionally it benefits individual salespeople by providing a supporting structure and processes. This stage requires commitment as well as the best salespeople.

What are the benefits?

The key benefits of SFA are:

• Improved customer management;
• Rapid, accurate and inexpensive communication among field reps, sales managers and the corporate office;
• Easier access to sales data and supporting information;
• Reduced errors and cycle time;
• Improved sales call planning, reporting, and scheduling; and superior growth, both at corporate level and in the sales force.

The Challenge

Emerging companies require software that is both flexible and scaleable, in order to accommodate growth. Established companies can no longer accept customized solutions that will take a long time to implement at significant cost; instead they are turning to commercial off the shelf solutions.

However, the single biggest barrier to the adoption of Sales Force Automation is cultural. Sales people need tools that are intuitive and easy to use. When a quotation or forecast entry needs to be done, it needs to happen efficiently and accurately with access to required information being available on demand. Sophisticated tools allow these basic activities to take place with little user overhead and it is these valuable metrics that many of the incumbent tools have failed to deliver effectively.