Sales Force Automation

Sales Force Automation is the entire process starting from a lead and closing a sale. The various components of a good SFA system are as follows:

• Lead Management
• Sales Process Workflow
• Account and Contact Management
• Dashboards
• Pipeline Forecasts
• Activity Management
• Documents and Attachments
• Search, Filters and Reports
  

 Lead Management

 In today’s business environment, it’s absolutely essential to separate leads from regular  customers. The business management system should  provide a conduit to link new leads from websites, trade-show lists or outsourced lists with a simple and transparent process. Leads can be qualified by either inside sales or through telesales reps and once qualified can be assigned to field or inside sales for follow through.

Sales Process Workfow

 Businesses need to focus on a well-tried sales processes where the success ratio is the highest. It is a known fact that such sales processes are unique to the individual business and varies from the type of industry they sell to.  Sales managers can design opportunity processes for multiple opportunity types. Each stage will have an associated probability of closure. Sales reps can now follow well defined sales process workflows to close deals and at the same time provide visibility to the sales management about the stages in which each opportunity exists at a point in time. Sales managers should also have the ability to track specific territorial and global opportunities by  sales stage and accurately provide sales forecasts to management.  Executive management can focus on specific accounts where large opportunities exist with a higher degree of probability.

Account and Contact Management

The ability to accurately track Accounts/Contacts based on various user defined parameters is very important in account follow-ups. The Contact management system should provide the ability to associate a variety of multi-dimensioned filters so that users can track Accounts/Contacts based on opportunity stages, probabilities of closures or even geographical, zip or tel. area codes. Custom fields can be used to capture specific information about a prospect and Accounts/Contacts can also be tracked based on these parameters.

Dashboards

Dashboards serve up key performance indicators to users depending on the roles that they play in an organization. To executive management, dashboards provide summarized data such as Opportunity forecasts, financial information (bank balances & cash flow) and key accounts and contacts. Sales Directors and reps will use dashboards to get an overview of the day’s appointments, closing opportunities, neglected accounts and other data key for optimal time utilization.

Pipeline  Forecasts  

Accurate sales forecasting is widely regarded as an art rather than a science. SFCRM provides a system that is accurate, requires very minimal data maintenance and provides visibility of forecasts from the sales rep to the sales director, VP of Sales to the CEO and CFO. Forecast reports are generated on the fly and requires no submission of reports by the sales reps except to update his opportunities and stages of workflow.

Activity  and Task  Management 

Activity management is the art of time and activity scheduling and execution of specific tasks. Sales reps become more efficient if they have a scheduled list of calls to be made on a regular basis.  

Activities should be  linked to other users, accounts, contacts and opportunities as well as specific tasks. This provides a razor sharp focus to sales reps so that they can organize themselves better—but also provide visibility to their peers and sales managers on their schedule of activities. Alerts can be provided to reps indicating that an activity is due and requires action. Recurring activities can also be scheduled for weekly meetings or regular review meetings with customers.

 Meetings and activities involving other users can also be scheduled so that users can be alerted if joint meetings are due. 

Task management is also part of Activity management and is handled exactly as Activity management.

Document Management  

Documents are a lifeline to an organization. Using simple hosted or om premise servers, a central repository for all documents such as product literature, forms, templates, contracts and other documents.  Documents can be stored based on category and other parameters.

Attachments to  Accounts,  Contacts, Cases and Opportunities are also stored in a central repository with full access to authorized users.

Seach, filters and reports
Searching for specific data such as Accounts or Contacts is easy –just type in the first few letters and the records appear instantaneously. Complex searches are also possible. 

Filters are segmented records of the database.  For ex. a user can view all Opportunities in Area code =408, type = Manufacturing, Class= dental with a deal size of $50K or more. 

Reports can be created on the fly using the same set of filters. SFCRM ships with 40+ reports and more can be added to them.