There are lots of different tools out there to automate the sales process as well as methodologies. In most companies, sales teams cobble together several different tools or collections of tools to in the quest to automate tasks and free up their time on administrative tasks. When looking at an SFA package you want to include the following features:
Most Customer Relationship Management packages out there incorporate about 60% what an enterprise will need out of the box. The conundrum becomes getting users of the software to actually use the system and weave the use of it into their daily activities. This is where I really like tactics some of the SaaS vendors are using to encourage use of the system. I won’t mention any in this article as it will be a focus of a future discussion.
Users of such systems include Sales Managers, Sales Operation Managers, Marketing Managers and the sales teams themselves. The users which benefit the most from the system are the management teams as they grok analytics like demographic / psychographic trends, identify their strong performing customers and the individual productivity of their sales teams.
Additionally, I am noticing an trend where SFA vendors are claiming to level the playing field among salespersons where an enterprise will typically find 20% of their salespersons driving 80% of their revenue. However, the central mantra of a good SFA package is to increase customer loyalty, decrease the effort needed to close deals and acquire new customers.