Essentials of Sales Force Automation Tools

For many sales forces, knowing the latest news about your customers can make or break a sales call or an entire customer relationship. Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools came into being as companies found out that despite accumulating and organizing knowledge about their customers, hardly any of it was making its way to the sale people in the field. The result of this communication breakdown was many sales people getting blind-sided when visiting accounts where the customer recently had called support or service with problems, or needed help getting a new contract approved or asking for a new price. Customers expect the salesperson coming into their offices to visit to have a broad view of all concerns and not just the ones discussed during the last visit, on the phone recently, or via e-mail.

Sales Force Automation tools has grown into one of the core strategies in CRM because it has proven to be useful for cultivating customer relationships and improving customer satisfaction. Managing account details, tracking opportunities, establishing and monitoring the sales pipeline, and organizing contract lists are the tasks that companies use sales force automation tools for. The goal is to have an immediate, accurate and complete picture of what's going on in each account.

For Sales Force Automation tools to work, everyone who works with customers needs to keep records updated for everyone else's benefit. Tracking commitments to customers across a company is one of the most powerful uses of SFA applications as it gives the sales people knowledge of the most important information: when commitments are going to be kept.

While Sales Force Automation tools range from simple calendars to complex Web-enabled applications that capitalize on laptop computers & wireless technology to synchronize data, deciding on which approach is best for your company starts with the following questions:

1. How often does your sales force visit customers?
2. In the last six months have there been several noticeable disconnects between your company's?production, shipping or service departments and your customers?
3. Does your company often have several different departments working with the same customer at the same time with multiple versions of the truth emerging?
4. Does your company contradict itself often due to lack of coordination between departments?
5. Can your sales reps research all activities for their accounts on just one system?

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