Chapter 3

Sales force Automation

 SFA: Now and Then
• SFA were originally meant to improve
sales force productivity and encourage
salespeople to document and
communicate their field activities

• They are becoming increasingly

focused on cultivating customer
relationships and improving customer
satisfaction
 What is Sales Force Automation
• Sales force automation (SFA) software is
a type of program that automates
business tasks such as:
a. inventory control
b. sales processing, and
c. tracking of customer interactions, as well
as
d. analyzing sales forecasts and
performance.
• sales force automation is a technique of
using software to automate the business
tasks of sales, including order processing,
contact management, information sharing,
inventory monitoring and control, order
tracking, customer management, sales
forecast analysis and employee
performance evaluation.
• Most Sales Force Automation software
today contains tools designed to assist
efforts for marketing to generate leads as
well as selling to existing accounts and
new customers. Some SFA software offers
limited service or support capabilities.
 Benefit of Sales Force
Automation
• 1. The first major benefit of Sales Force
Automation is having sales information
captured and available to every member of
the sales team in one real-time data
repository. This eliminates individualized
Excel spreadsheet lead lists and pipelines,
and errors of omitence.
• 2. It organizes a sales team’s efforts as
almost all SFA software on the market
today interfaces with Microsoft Office.
Almost all also have the capabilities of
designing and utilizing templates, such
as form letters for email campaigns that
can be merged with individual contacts.
• 3. Automating activities such as the
dialing of telephone calls, merging of
template letters, and automated
generation of sales quotes have two
major benefits for a salesperson. First, it
increases individual productivity and
efficiency. Second, it makes reporting
easy.
• 4. SFA can increase productivity as the
whole team can easily spot busy and
available times. For individual account
management, scheduling automatic
notifications for selling opportunities can
improve time management and ultimately
increase recurring sales.
• 5. SFA helps automated repeat selling
include the renewals, replenishment or
supplies that clients need regularly.
Internet firms, in particular, have this
fulfillment down to a fine art.
• 6. By sharing information, a salesperson
can discuss all kind of sale opportunities
with peers and managers. Defining and
automating the stages of a sale allows
calculation of closing statistics based on
previous, similar opportunities, and
results in more accurate sales close
rates within specific timeframes.
• 7. Relieved of tedious repetitive tasks, a
salesperson can focus more time on
managing the sales process and moving
it closer to a win.
• 8. One of the capabilities of a Sales Force
Automation system is the ability to
categorize the stages of a sale from
prospect to close. A salesperson can then
prioritize and focus on the most winnable
sale opportunities
• 9. By having real-time visibility to a
complete sale opportunity pipeline, the
Sales Manager can focus team members
on those deals on those deals that can
be won or those deals that can close
immediately. That executive can also
ensure there are enough leads in the
pipeline and apply resources to move the
opportunities through the process faster.
• 10. Slowed opportunities are easily
identifiable, and decisions can be made
to change strategy, qualifying them out or
assign the opportunities to a nurture
campaign, and market to them on a less
aggressive schedule until they eventually
mature or go away.
• 11. SFA software minimizes the risks
involved when best salesperson is lured
away by fiercest competitor. Most Sales
Force Automation software systems have
the functionality to re-assign existing
accounts and leads from one
salesperson to another en masse in
minutes minimizing the risks of stalling or
losing sales in the pipeline.
 Sales Force Automation:
Functionality
• There are core feature such as:
1.contact management and
2.prospect management
3.Account Management
4.Opportunity Management
5.Lead Management
6.Pipeline management
7.Sales forecasting
8.Quotations and Orders
 1. contact management
• A Contact Management System (CMS) is
an integrated office solution that allows
organizations and individuals to record
relationships and interactions with
customers and suppliers. This information
includes all emails, documents, jobs,
faxes, calendar and mor
 Contact Management
• Contact Management:
– Subset of sales force automation that deals with
organizing and managing data across and within a
company’s client and prospect organization
– Software can contain various modules for
maintaining local client databases, displaying
updated organization charts, and allowing
salespeople to maintain notes on specific clients or
prospects
• Can answer specific questions quickly
• Enable salespeople to communicate their schedules to the
organization at large
– Real value of CM is in its capability to track where
customers are and who they are in terms of their
influence with sales management functions
• Many software programs allows users to
query remote databases for
supplementary information or to
synchronize laptop local data with a
corporate customer database.
Sales people can answer questions
like
• Who is the contact individuals for a
specific client, and for each department?
• What is the client’s mailing address or
billing address?
• Which customers were included in the
most recent promotion for a specific
product?
• When is my next sales call? When was
the last time I called on that customer?
 2. Account Management
• While a sales team works to close deals
with small to large businesses it is
necessary to maintain individual accounts
and keep track of contacts under them.

• Effective organization in interacting with

your contacts, who may represent or
account for a particular company or such
other bigger concern is of high priority.
• The relationship with the concern as a
whole would become inharmonious and
cause potential deals to slip if interaction
with contacts is disorganized.

• Account management helps maintain

harmony and makes the process of sales
to businesses with multiple contacts easy
and efficient.
 What are accounts?
• An account represents a company, organization,
business or a similar concern that has many
employees and personnel working in it.

• They could all serve as contacts at various

levels. In a B2C (Business to Consumer)
scenario where the end customer is an
individual, an account is redundant since he or
she is a single contact.
 What is account management?
• In simple words, account management is the
process of managing the communications and
transactions with businesses having many
contacts and divisions.
• This makes it possible to cater to the needs of
specific divisions inside a business.

• By categorizing contacts to accounts by their

sub-divisions and functions, communication is
directed to the proper personnel in charge.
• This saves time that may be lost in
approaching the wrong contacts and
wasting effort in improper directions. The
success of a sales operation relies heavily
on account management.
• Account management module presents a
simple and straight forward interface to
manage accounts.

• Apart from basic information fields, the

history section at the bottom helps in
monitoring potentials, contacts, notes,
activities and products categorized by
account.
 Account management Benefit
• Track all accounts and related contacts, opportunities and other
details from a common repository

• Associate accounts and related subsidiaries or sub divisions by

setting parent-child identifiers

• Generate printer savvy sales quotes, invoices and sales orders for
the accounts

• Store notes pertaining to accounts and keep track of contacts,

opportunities and other details more elaborately

• Export accounts to spreadsheet software to analyze the buying

patterns of a customers and set up loyalty programs

• Track purchase history of the customers and analyze opportunities

for up-selling and cross-selling in future
 3. Lead Management
• Lead generation is the process by which a
company finds prospective customers for
its product offerings.

• Prospects can come in the form of names

and addresses, names and phone
numbers, email addresses and fax
numbers.
 Lead Management
• Tools:
– Aims to provide foolproof – can provide qualified
sales strategies so no
sales task, document, or leads through
communication falls marketing
through the cracks campaigns or lead
referrals
Sales people follow a – can also track other
defined approach to prospect attributes
turning opportunities into – These capabilities
deals can result in
answers to
questions that
previously
demanded
guesswork
• lead management not only track customer
account history but also monitor leads, generate
next steps, and refine selling efforts online.

• Enable a company’s marketing or sales

management organization to automatically
distribute client leads to a field of telemarketing
rep based on the rep’s product knowledge or
territory. Can result in faster deals and higher
close rates.
• Prospect attributes such as product interests, discretionary budget
amounts, and likely competitors, which provides a real-world view of
each lead and its likelihood of becoming a full-fledged sale.
• Can also feed sales forecasting software and result in more
accurate predications than relying on traditional spreadsheets of
past performance.
• Questions can be answered such as:
• At which step in the sales cycle do we lose most of our
perspective?
• What percentage of leads resulted in sales in a certain region?
• How long is the average sales cycle?
• Lead management is only as good as the data that feeds it, and
different products provide different levels of sophistication.
 What is Lead Management?

• Lead management encompasses:

– Lead acquisition and data capture

– Data cleansing and lead import
– Lead distribution
– Lead assignment rules
– Lead scoring and prioritization
– Lead list management
– Qualification and conversion or nurturing
– Workflow for automating lead processes
 prospect management
Prospect management enable individual sales
representatives to quickly identify their best
prospects, develop, implement and measure
their prospect’s next step strategies,
properly balance their selling and
prospecting activities, understand the need
to prospect on a continual basis, objectively
determine which prospects are most likely to
close, and better plan and manage their time.
• Prospect management help sales men:
• Understand sales ratios and how to improve them
• Understand the steps of the sale and their progression
• Understand \ sales cycle and the time/probability factor
• Introduce the "do" versus "need" sales philosophy
• Understand time and activity allocation
• Understand continual prospecting, replenishing prospect base
• Rank sales situations according to established criteria
• Justify board ranking
• Present "next step" strategy
• Apply system criteria to actual prospects
• Evaluate prospect ranking
• Strategize "next step" activity
• enable individual sales representatives to
quickly identify their best prospects,
develop, implement and measure their
prospect’s next step strategies, properly
balance their selling and prospecting
activities, understand the need to prospect
on a continual basis, objectively determine
which prospects are most likely to close,
and better plan and manage their time.
 5. Opportunity Management
• Opportunity management enables sales
teams to work together to close deals
faster by providing a single place for
updating deal information, tracking
opportunity milestones, and recording all
opportunity-related interactions.
• Opportunity Management can be
customized to fit internal sales
methodologies and processes, making it
easier for managers to monitor their sales
pipelines.
 Benefits:
• :: Standardize sales processes and
methodologies
• ::Identify bottlenecks and shorten sales cycles
• ::Proactively counter competitive threats
• ::Facilitate collaboration across your teams
• ::Effectively manage multiple deals
simultaneously
• ::Track deal progress and milestones
• ::Close more deals and increase sales
productivity
 Details:
• •Opportunity Tracking
Centrally track all opportunity-related data, including
milestones, decision makers, partners, customer
communications, and all other custom information
unique to your company.
• Sales Methodologies
Use built-in support for branded sales methodologies
such as Miller Heiman, or set up you own customized
sales methodology or sales process
• .•Multiple Sales Processes
Set up different sales processes and page displays for
different sales situations, whether it be different business
units, different product lines, or different sales channels
• .•Product Tracking
Track product-level information on each sales
opportunity, including quantity, standard price,
quoted price, and product codes. Additionally,
set up revenue and quantity schedules for each
product to mirror payment and delivery terms
• .•Opportunity Update Reminders
Ensure sales teams keep opportunity
information up-to-date with scheduled email
reminders. Managers can set up automatic,
recurring emails for themselves and their teams
• .•Competitor Tracking
Track the competition and key competitive
issues on each deal. Roll up competitive data in
win-loss reports to understand competitive
trends and emerging threats.
• •Opportunity Analysis
Easily analyze your sales pipeline so you can
quickly identify and eliminate any bottlenecks in
the sales cycle or determine the cause of
downgraded sales opportunities
 6. Pipeline Management
• Maximize the revenue potential of every lead.
With a transparent view of all sales activities,
sales team can generate instant and accurate
forecasts based on revenue and customer
demand.

• Now company can effectively communicate and

collaborate, transforming prospects into
profitable and lasting customers.
• The “sales pipeline” is a peculiar term for the
execution of the established sales process. Each
company has its criteria for what constitutes its
sales process, but opening and closing tend to
be the process bookends.

• A sales process sequence could be:

• 1.Prospecting
• 2.Potential lead
• 3.Qualification
• 4.Oppurtunity
• 5.Building vision
• 6.Short List
• 7.Negotiation
• 8.Closed:won or lost.
In other words, every company has its own sales
process. The variations may not be infinite, but
they are extensive. If you can successfully
embed your sales process into SFA application,
you can use the application as it was meant to
be used.
 7. Sales Forecasting
• A new level of control and predictability allows to
plan sales activities with confidence.

• Sales personnel provide forecasts and historical

reports to their managers as requested.

• Forecasts roll up throughout the organization

and managers have the ability to add their own
assessments to the forecasts submitted
 Customer quotation build-up
• Most good SFA packages have automated
generation of quotations and orders.

• Product catalogs-whether they cover

physical inventory or services offered-have
to be created.
• All the services, products, and
combinations of services and /or products
have to be entered into catalogue.

• Then a pricing schedule that allows for

special discounts, volume discounts, times
discounts, and such has to be created
based on some criteria.
• Customer quotation build-up helps organizations
manage even the most complex product
catalogs with ease.

• You can easily maintain and secure even large

catalogs and multiple price books centrally for
increased consistency, while giving your teams
easy access to the precise product and pricing
information they need.
 Benefits:
• ::Eliminate disparate and out-of-date
product catalogs
• ::Manage special pricing for certain
customer segments
• ::Support global teams with prices listed in
multiple currencies
• ::Increase efficiency, accuracy, and
consistency
 Order tracking
• This feature tracks the status of the
invoice and the product delivery. This is
normally tied into the back-office financial
functions.
 Sales quota management:
• This is normally for sales managers. It
allows them to see how the individual
salesperson is doing relative to their
quotas within some defined time segment.
 Commission Management
• This is a tool that calculates the
commissions for salespeople.
 Territory Management
• Easily administer, analyze and change
territories. Territories are organized based
on geography, industry, product or other
customizable criteria. Instantly and
automatically route sales activities to the
right sales personnel – anytime,
anywhere.
 Other SFA applications:
• 1.Incentive compensation system
• 2.Competitive information system
• 3.Telesales campaign management.
• 4.Sales assistant
• 5.Expense reporting
• 6.Learning management system/content
delivery tool
• 7.Marketing encyclopedia
• 8.Partner management capabilities
 Sales Force Automation: The
Technology
• What makes SFA powerful is not just the
functionality ,but also the combination of
the functionality and the flexibility of the
technology.
• The two makes SFA useful to both the
professional on the road and the manager
back at the headquarters.
 DATA SYNCHRONIZATION
• One of the most significant technologies is
data synchronization.

• Data synchronization is the process of

updating information among unconnected
computers-laptop, mobile ,or desktop .
• Each synchronized system gets data that
conforms with the data on any other
disparate system.

• Salespeople in the field can maintain a

subset of the master database and update
their local data while others are working
with the same data simultaneously.
• Synchronization also allows corporate
managers and sales teams to share
information created by field salespeople,
such as meeting notes, schedules, and
forecasts.
 Important recent sales trends related to
mobility and wireless data make
synchronization more important:
• 1.Sales people are spending more time out of the
office with customers and prospects.

• 2.sales people operate as members of sales

teams as products become more complex and
technical, so the need to share information
grows.

• 3.Entire sales and marketing organizations are

using computer based customer, sales and
project information to sell more effectively.
 Data Synchronization process
• Synchronization products specifically
designed for sales force automation
allow users to maintain a corporate
database in Oracle or Sybase and
distribute a subset of data to the
remote users running relational
database applications in stand-alone
mode.
• Most SFA products run a single batch job each night to
produce a host database extract for every user.

• A big problem with this approach is that the reps are

always receiving yesterday's information. In some cases,
the update may require two telephone sessions--one to
upload and another to download fresh data.

• Companies with hundreds of salespeople may literally

run out of time during the night batch process window,
failing to complete the database update.
• The latest sales force automation products
use single-session, bidirectional, on-
demand database synchronization.

• In a global environment where information

must be updated 24 hours a day,
bidirectional communication ensures that
data does not become "out of sync" due to
lags between uploads and downloads.
 How does it work
• Field salespeople with laptop computers need to download a pertinent
subset of data, manipulate and update the data, and reconcile their
changes with the new information from the host database.

• The typical process of synchronizing data between remote and host

systems.

• Remote databases are created for mobile salespeople and branch

offices.

• Each database is a relevant subset of the corporate database.

• For example, the information on a field salesperson’s laptop need only

pertain to his particular account.
• The synchronization system tracks changes pertinent to the
particular salesperson to both the remote databases and the host
database.

• Remote salesperson can connect to the home office using low

bandwidth modems or wide area network (WAN) connections.
Salespeople or managers who are at a desk can connect via their
local area network (LAN).

• During connection, log files are exchanged that contain new

information to be updated in the respective databases.

• After the connection is completed, new data is applied to each

database so that each database has up-to-date information.
 Flexibility and performance

• A synchronization system should be

capable of supporting large-scale field
implementations with potentially
hundreds of users, even if your
remote sales force is currently small.
 Reporting tools
• Good reporting tools as part of the technology
of SFA (and CRM) are essential.
• Lack of or poor reporting can lead to bad
strategic or tactical decisions, redundant work
efforts, and missed opportunities.
• Reporting is the creation of customized
onscreen or printed views that provide the
viewer/reader with information specifically in
the form they want and with content they
want.
• Report engine pulls information from multiple
sources, including your financial applications,
your customer data repository and your SFA
application, and can put together reports on an
adhoc basis that can be dynamically altered.

• For example, you can view the sales figures for

the year, quarter, or month, by customer, sales
person, or profitability-all by simple drag-and-
drop operations. It saves money, makes analysis
easier, and can be critical for decision making.