Sales Force Automation

SFA systems include a contact management system, which tracks all contacts that have been made with a customer, the purpose of each contact, and any follow-up that might be necessary.

This system eliminates duplicated contacts and redundancy, which in turn reduces the risk of irritating customers. SFA also includes a sales lead tracking system, which lists potential customers or customers who have purchased related products.

SFA applies technology to the management of a company’s selling activities. The selling process can be decomposed into a number of stages such as

• lead generation,
• lead qualification,
• lead nurturing,
• needs identification,
• development of specifications,
• proposal generation,
• proposal presentation,
• handling objections and closing the sale.

SFA software can be configured so that it is modeled on the selling process of any industry or organization.

Automation of selling activities is often linked to efforts to improve and standardize the selling process. This involves the implementation of a sales methodology. Sales methodologies allow sales team members and management to adopt a standardized view of the sales cycle, and a common language for discussion of sales issues.

SFA software enables companies to assign leads automatically and track opportunities as they progress through the sales pipeline towards closure. Opportunity management lets users identify and progress opportunities-to-sell from lead status through to closure and beyond, into after-sales support.

Opportunity management software usually contains lead management and sales forecasting applications. Lead management software usually contains lead management and sales forecasting applications. Lead management applications enable users to qualify leads and assign them to the appropriate salesperson. Sales forecasting applications generally use transactional histories and salesperson estimates to produce estimates of future sales.

Contact management lets users manage their communications program with customers. Digital customer records contain customer contact histories. Contact management applications often have features such as automated customer dialing, the salesperson’s personal calendar and email functionality.

Quotation and proposal generation allow the salesperson to automate the production of prices and proposals for customers. The salesperson enters details such as product codes, volumes, customer name and delivery requirements, and the software automatically generates a priced quotation.

Product configuration applications enable salespeople, or customers themselves, automatically to design and price customized products, services or solutions.

Configurations are useful when the product is particularly complex, such as IT solutions. Configurations are typically based on an “if … then” rules structure. The general case of this rule is “If X is chosen, then Y is required or prohibited or legitimated or unaffected”. For example, if the customer chooses a particular feature (say, a particular hard drive for a computer), then this rules out certain other choices or related features that are technologically incompatible or too costly or complex to manufacture.