Chapter 3- Sales Force Automation [SFA] Introduction: SFA i.e.

Sales Force Automation is designed to help salespeople, acquire and retain customers, reduce administrative time and basically make sales peoples activities something that earns them and their company profit. SFA has the following purposes. 1. Increased Revenue: Quite obviously, gross income in the profit (i.e. improvement in the bottom line) is the main goal of implementing SFA. But it is not just the sufficient answer to SFAs success. Just as important is the increase in revenue per salesperson and in the gross profit per year. If you have an increase o 100% in sales revenues but your cost of sales has increase or it strictly came as a result of your increased sales force, your SFA implementation fails. 2. Reduction in the cost of sales: This doesnt stand for reduction in force (meaning fewer employees which obviously means to you). But in this case, we are talking about a reduction inn the amount of time that is used by the sales people in coordination of their efforts, continuous data entry and often unsuccessful attempts to extract and interpret data without the tools to do so. Studies show that salestime to fulfill administrative functions is almost half of a salespersons activities. By reducing the time engaged in these administrative or other non-sales related efforts, the cost of the sales is reduced. This is one of the most successful results of SFA. 3. Customer retention due to company: If your customers are happy, they will stay with you even if they are paying a bit more. It is not about the money but about the relationship with the company and often the relationship with particular salespeople within the company. SFAs benefit is to provide you with a view of the customer that allows an intelligent salesperson or a company to understand the value of the individual customer through customer history and communication with the company. Though it can never be a substitute for personal interactions, it can provide the intelligence and the view to better plan how to actually do good things for your clients. 4. Sales force increasing mobility: The sales force is out of the office most often. They have to do many duties like meeting customers, moving through airports etc. This is making mobility a competitive issue requiring effective mobile tools such as internet and hand sets. 5. Easily available customer information with single view: Multiple apartments may have interests in viewing the status of the customer account or opportunity. For e.g. the sales department wants to see the status of the opportunity. The accounting department wants to see the status of invoicing and billing for the same account. The marketing department wants to see reports on varying degrees of success/failures of their campaign with individual account within each department are individuals with different roles who have their own agendas. The vice president of sales wants to see all the activities of all salespeople in his department. He also wants to get a sales pipeline report to refine his sales forecast for the coming quarter. The accounts manager does not need that much information. He wants a national view of all sales activities around the accounts he owns. The sales manager wants to see the opportunity progress but not all the contact lists of each salesperson. Each salesperson wants to manage his customer accounts. Each of

them has an individual view that allows them to see all the data they need to see; but at the same time there is a universal view of all the data available to all departments at all time. Sales Force Automation functionality: At its roots, SFA has the same fundamental features regardless of the vendor. The treatment of the core features tends to oscillate only in the depth provided, the look and the feel of the interface and the transparency to the user. The list that follows is a representative feature set for SFA. 1. Contact management (CM): It is a basic tool that has entire applications devoted to it. Contact management modules take on an added degree of complexity when it is integrated to SFA package mainly because it is to be linked to all other modules incorporate. Otherwise contact management covers the basic things like name, address, phone number, company, title, personal and business information, activities related to individual, attachments related with the individual and level of that decision makers. Some applications such as Siebel sales are able to take this contact information and create organizational charts for sales people so that they can see who they have to deal with, at what level of customer hierarchy. 2. Account management (AM): This standard feature allows the salesperson to handle individual corporate account. Each account has multiple links t the other information beyond the corporate name and address, including the contacts by corporation and the proposed opportunities by corporation. Fundamentally, it is another view of the customer and the potential data that is designed to work with sales departments that have accounts manager or that what corporate information. It can include either general or highly detailed views of an enterprise. 3. Opportunity management (OM): This is often seen as the most essential of SFA modules. The aspects that OM covers include the specific opportunity, the company it belongs to, the salesperson or the team that is working on it, the assignment of revenue credits if there is a sales team, the potential for closing of this particular opportunity, the final results of this opportunity, the stage of the sales process this opportunity is in, and the potential closing date for the opportunity. Additionally competitive information is included here. E.g. who is specifically competing for the opportunity against your company and how much threat they represent. Even more interesting, in some better SFA packages, a competitive products metrics can be brought up to see how well your product stack up against the competitions product equivalent. This can give salesperson a valuable selling point. 4. Lead Management (LM): Lead management functionality can be seen as a subset of opportunity management. With SFA packages that have strong lead management features, the sales person can import leads multiple sources and using criteria established through the sales process weigh the potential of these leads to become opportunities. 5. Pipeline management (PM): the sales pipeline is a particular term for the execution of established sales process. Each company has its criteria for what constitutes its sales process. E.g. one company could set up salespersons objectives that are

weighed by the steps of the sales process. The sales process may have the following sequence: Prospecting Potential lead Opportunity Building vision Short list Negotiation Closed- won/lost Thus, the variations in the sales process may not be infinite but they are extensive, if you can successfully embed your sales process into the SFA application, then you can use the application as it was meant to be used. 6. Sales forecasting (SF): Part of PM is getting forecasts from sales and then managing sales activities to those forecasts; e.g. if the salesperson is expected to do $2.5 million business and eh does 40% of it, then the company have serious problems. If that is due to poor forecasting tools, SFA also has problem. However, most SFA programs have adequate sales forecasting tools. But most sales forecasts are still nothing more that good guesses regardless of how many algorithms people stuff in program. 7. Proposal management- When implemented, it is a way of coordinating and tracking external proposals. It normally has an overflow which is determined by who is responsible for what part of proposal. Additionally, it can control the effective completion of the proposal by guiding the stages of evaluation of cards of proposal. 8. Quota generation- A simple tool that generates quotes for customers. Normally, it uses information on pricing in the product catalogue that is available with SFA application and has been customized for individual company offerings. 9. Order tracking- This feature tracks the status of invoice and product delivery. This is normally tied into the back office financial functions. 10. Sales quota management- This is normally for sales managers. It allows them to see how the individual sales person is doing relative to their quota within some defined time segment. 11. Commission management- This is a tool that calculates commission for sales people. Though it looks very simple, it is not easy thing to implement. Sales persons can often share the opportunities, which complicate the calculation of commissions. Additionally, depending upon the company, the sales team might have some private arrangements going. These arrangements are known to the managers and have to be programmed into the application so as to cut accurate commission cheques. 12. Territory management- This is another important feature that solves a complex problem. It is not particularly complicated until there is a change in the territory. That can mean a new person takes over an existing territory or a territory can be restricted and re-divided among existing sales people geographically. Re-dividing a territory becomes a very political issue that has to be managed carefully.

Sales force automation technologyWhat makes SFA powerful is not just functionality but also the combination of functionality and flexibility of technology. It allows each of them [i.e. the managers and the sales people] to analyze the data, stay on the top of the opportunities, embed best practices for the future sales people and last of all, do all this by just clicking the mouse. Data synchronizationOne of the most important technologies is data synchronization. It is the process of updating information among unconnected computers. Each synchronization system gets data that confirms with the data on any other system far away. Sales people in the field can maintain subset of master database and update their local data while others are working with same data simultaneously. Synchronization also allows corporate managers and sales teams to share information created by field sales people such as meeting notes, schedules and forecasts. Important recent sales trends related to the mobility and wireless data make synchronization even more important. There are several points which are to be considered. Sales people operate spending more time out of the office with customers. Many sales people are telecommunicating [i.e. working out of their homes rather than in corporate branch offices]. Sales people operate as members of sales teams and as products become more complex and technical, the need to share information grows. Entire sales and marketing organizations are using computer based customer, sales and project based information more effectively. Field people can use this information to close sales faster and managers can access this information input in the filed. This means that for SFA, data synchronization becomes most essential piece of technology. The data synchronization processData synchronization takes up a fair amount of network infrastructure bandwidth. It actively involves a lot of what comprises the corporate information system, to take example of Sales Logix data synchronization system which is one of the most sophisticated CRM data synchronization systems in the market. Working of SalesLogix data synchronization system is as followsDia. Field sales people with laptop computers need to download relevant subset of data manipulate and update data and need to synchronize changes with new information from host computer database. The typical process of synchronizing data between remote and host system requires several basic steps as shown in the figure. Remote databases are created for mobile salespeople and branch offices. Each database is a subset of corporate database. It will contain information needed by only that particular salesperson; e.g. information on filed salespersons laptop is only pertaining to his particular account. The synchronization system tracks the information pertinent to particular salesperson to both remote database and host database. Remote salespersons can connect to home office using low bandwidth modem or WAN connection. Salespeople or managers who are at desk can connect via their local area network. Log files are exchanged that contain information to be updated in respective database. After connection is

completed, new data is supplied to each database and should have up-to-date information. It is estimated that using localized version of data synchronizer [where only updates are done], 50% of the communication cost can be saved. Flexibility and performanceSynchronization system should be capable of supporting large scale field implementation with potentially 100s of reasons. Besides using most efficient means to distribute and post data, flexible support to modern client-server database is critical to meet demands of data synchronization. High performance synchronization requires powerful database capabilities and performance. Other SFA applications Incentive compensation system- This is a functional feature and there are standalones devoted to it. This particular feature allows vice president of sales to design compensation plans and to track them. Competitive information system- This is often tied to multiple sources so that as a salesperson, one could do the research online and internally find what he should do. There are some external programs that are not tied to CRM. But there are some serious advantages to be able to integrate internet searching with server and desktop searches. Telesales campaign management- This feature helps inside sales managers to design telemarketing campaigns. Thus they have an organized and sophisticated way to track activities of telemarketers. Sales assistant- This feature is there for sales people without experience. Expense reporting- This feature ties expensive reporting to both account and CRM system. Learning management system/content delivery tool- This feature allows means for new employees to understand sales process and experienced employees to request and proceed appropriate sales information and tools ranging from brochures to competitive information. Marketing encyclopedia- this is a centralized depository for all marketing materials so all sales people have access to appropriate materials for their customers. Partner management capability- This really doesnt belong to SFA applications but some limited functionality is there so that indirect sales opportunities are there. Custom sales process and methodologies- This is a built in base practices and known methodology. The value is that, companies have benefits of using well established and consistently popular sales methodology. Consistent sales methodology framework- This is a framework for preceding features.

Other SFA features SFA centric flow- This is a sales specific workflow that assigns permissions and roles to either specific people or titles; e.g. sales manager might need to approve an

opportunity entered into a system by a sales person because of resource cost of opportunity. A flag as opportunity would then notify the sales manager of the need to approve it before it can be officially registered into sales pipeline. Customer need assessment- Using templates and comprehensive set of questions and interviews, the sales person is able to work with customer to determine what they are specifically looking for. This means that functionality has to include ability of sales person to understand customer business process. Custom product competition- This allows sales person to provide customer with specific set of products that meets their actual needs. Sales order creation from quotes- This generates actual order for customer based on quotes those were developed from price and product configuration designed via the needs assessment. Automated customer billing- This is an integration point. It means that the back office can generate customer invoice automatically form information that the salesperson has entered into customer records. This feature is consequence of preceding features.