For many small and medium businesses, the managers are unsure whether implementation of CRM or SFA (sales force automation) system is worth the effort and costs. When going through this decision for your business, there are many different types of question that arise. Everyone knows that the customers are the cornerstone of any organization, and the sales automation is what allows you to continue to create new customers and for generating more business from your existing customers. Unlike other organizational applications which are relevant in a specific zone, the SFA software is applicable to all sizes of the business. Whether you are a small sized business or mid-sized business or an enterprise offering thousands of products, the SFA software abbreviates the sales cycle for facilitating increased sales and higher productivity. According to the research from Aberdeen Group, they have determined the best-in-class adopters of sales force automation system which saw their deals increased in size by an average of 27%.

Sales Force Automation

The SFA platform save the salesmen from excessive burden of completing a wide range of tasks associated with selling, which results in them getting some free time to focus on other important tasks like searching new clients, developing new products and working out new ways of advertising. The software gathers all the information in one place, and hence this process becomes easier for them to prioritize and make rapid business decisions. The SFA software has become one of the most prominent and significant portions of business intelligence as this software help many customers and salesmen both simultaneously, the two most essential requirements which every organization requires to flourish and succeed. This software also collects all the data in one place and hence makes it easier to prioritize and thus the decisions can be taken easily and quickly. The SFA software is commonly integrated as part of the CRM software services and can also be readily integrated with field service management software for providing a comprehensive streamlined process.

Below are some of the top reasons of why does business needs sales force automation:

• Lost opportunities

Most of the software allows you for managing not only the follow-ups for precise business interaction with the customers, but also makes sure that you do not miss any sale opportunity. The software does this by sending you reminders regarding each potential business deal. This will also help you to enable your sales personnel to focus on growing the number and quality of the communication.

• Sales team management

Majority of the times your sales managers are tied up tallying sales call sheets daily or weekly. The saleforce automation software helps to implement and puts a full stop to all such activities. It also equips the sales manager with 360 degree view of all metrics which is needed to measure sales revenue. With accurate metrics in hand, it becomes easy for the sales manager to form sales reps territories.

• Lead management

SFA facilitates automated lead conversions as most of the SFA programs extract leads from marketing campaigns, website visit or inbound calls. Consequent to which they notify sales reps about the arrival of new leads in the pipeline. The benefits of lead management sales reps can quickly view all the leads on daily basis and can schedule a time to contact them.

• Poor prioritization

Without the use of tool which can easily list all the potential deals in your business, how are the sales staffs supposed to understand which tasks are priority & on which they need to invest best of their time? For many organizations, the number of sales leads is not an issue, but the quality of the leads is an issue. You need not want your best staff working on the cheapest quality leads, the only thing that you need is to make sure that each resource is always used in most of the optimal way.

• Employee accountability

As the saying goes “what get measured, gets improved”. By the use of tracking each individual sale within the company, your sales CRM Software system can give you a detailed breakdown on the performance of the employees. You can increase the ability to run the reports and see which steps of your process or which types of the customers you success with. This sort of intelligence on employee performance can help you to focus management resources on training employees to improve their roles to better fit their skills and job.

Benefits of Sales Force Automation

For any organization, the sales function is one of the most important business functions. The sales function has a direct impact on the bottom line of the carnations. The more effective the sales team is, the more profitable the organization will be. Therefore, every IT software organization must seek for optimizing its sales function for ensuring that the adequate tools and resources for the sales team carry out its responsibilities effectively. A part of CRM Software development services, the sales force automation involves automation of the tasks and activities normally which are carried out by the sales reps by using the software custom built for this purpose. Below are given some of the most important benefits of sales force automation in detail:

• Saves Time

In any organization, the salespeople are some of the most overworked people. They have to perform a multitude of tasks for a new client closure. On an average day, a salesperson has to interact with multiple people at various consecutive level of the sales funnel like prospects, leads and qualified leads. With so much to deal, how can salespeople stay on the top all this and be more productive? This is where the sales force automation helps them by automating the tasks; it gives them more and more time for focusing on the most important thing and can sell better.

• Intelligence

The salespeople collect lots of data which helps them to be more effective in their sales call if they use it intelligently. Without the use of tools to process this data, they can make no use of it. The integrated analytics tools which come with SFA (sales force automation) help them to crunch the data and increase the actionable insights from the resultant information. It also helps them to become better for forecasting purpose, which is an activity that is a part science and part art and very easily go wrong.

• Up selling & Cross-selling

Salesforce automation helps to store the past order history of customers which can be effectively utilized for helping to improve the prospects. For instance, your sales managers can analyze the sales information to understand:

1. Customer’s demographics

2. Order pattern

3. Customer’s preferences, etc

Perceptibly, this will help them to deal better with the present leads. Furthermore, by marketing the professionals too can use the metrics for creating precise campaigns more specifically for generating the prospects.

Conclusion

In Salesforce automation, the action is the most powerful and important tool for small businesses. There are many business owners who are skeptical about purchasing the software because they are afraid of high monthly costs. However, the statistics show that the SFA software can help for optimizing the sale strategies which can make up for some of the costs.