Do you know that 64% of a salesperson’s time, more than five hours out of an eight-hour workday, is spent without selling anything for your business? Shocking!
As sales supervisors or managers, a business sales team, which regularly goes hand in hand with your marketers; may seek to automate some of their work as well. You need to automate the whole sales channel to streamline your cash flow and also increase productivity.
So the sales force automation or an SFA system may be the best choice for your business. So what is The Purpose of the Sales Force Automation (SFA) System?
Sales force automation software is meant to support the sales team in the selling process. Ultimately, the goal of sales force automation is to let companies sell more of their products.
The sales force automation system is really needed for all types of businesses that have sales, sales distribution channels, retail channels, and direct sales.
Why is Sales Force Automation Important for Your Business?
Sales Force Automation is a software system to automate your business processes such as account management, customer management, real-time employee monitoring, business process management, sales team activity evaluation, inventory management systems, sales forecast summary, sales tracking, etc.
So you can easily understand that, if you want to streamline and boost the above sectors of your business then the importance of Sales force automation is immense.
Why SFA?
The SFA (Sales Force Automation) system will help sales teams concentrate on the most important tasks and spend more time on the activities that will more likely contribute to bringing in sales.
SFA will streamline the sales manner for your business so the most efficient strategy is always used.
This system permits managers to get insight into the effectiveness of the sales process.
Sales force automation will help to track the sales pipeline, so sales pipeline managers take necessary actions to take leads through the sales pipeline toward conversion.
The Purposes of Sales Force Automation
The sales force automation system is mostly needed for all businesses that have retail distribution and/or direct sales channels. SFA systems can decrease thousands of wasted working hours and improve work efficiency.
If you require a business to fight tough competition, SFA is the key to bringing efficiency to it. So, here are some purposes and benefits of sales force automation systems.
Streamline the work process for choosing the important task first
To streamline your sales process, a sales force automation system is an excellent choice for all. The SFA system will help your business select and identify the strategy to convert leads into sales in the most effective and efficient manner.
Streamline the sales method: The most beneficial sales method is one that is streamlined and effective. By skipping unnecessary and low-value adding tasks, your sales agents spend their energy only on what is required to be done, nothing extra.
The big problem we discussed in the previous section is spending time on tasks that don’t generate any revenue and profit for your company. Now, with a sales force automation system, it’s possible to condense, reject, or reassign these tasks.
Streamline the sales process: A Sales force automation system can make the sales process more effective which can lead to more sales. Sales reps tend to get busy with a lot of activities and miss out on follow-up on client calls or emails.
The SFA system will streamline the sales process and help you to choose the task that is worthy of your business.
Helps Your Business to Increase Revenue
How much revenue can your business generate in the next 1 month? 2 months? 3 months? Rather than just dive into guesswork, your sales force automation system can provide an excellent solution here.
Improving win rate significantly: There is a clear reason to believe that a sales team that’s using less time on administrative tasks and more time on selling is going to bring in a higher revenue flow for the business.
This is unquestionably one of the biggest sales force automation advantages. No business is going to convert every single lead, of course. So, you need to maximize hitting on the most potent leads and convert them into sales. SFA helps you to identify those leads.
If a sales rep’s window to sell is small, we have to expect an equally small win rate. With the help of SFA systems, your sales reps can identify the hottest leads and pursue them.
As a result, your company’s average sales win rate may reach up to 47 percent or even higher. It will certainly help your business to increase its revenue significantly.
Activity tracking: Activity tracking permits sales managers to keep track of the team members’ time spent on specific tasks, assuring they are taking the exact next steps to bring in sales.
Additionally, some versions of sales force automation systems automatically inform sales teams of the next steps they are required to take.
That means they will constantly be taking corrective actions as and when things are happening. These actions at the right time maximize the chances of generating sales and increase company revenue.
Managing the sales pipeline: Companies can see the advantages of sales force automation when using it in their sales pipeline. The pipeline can be set up so the sales team members are informed whenever a prospect moves to the next step of the pipeline, simplifying the process and ensuring everyone knows the next moves to take as soon as they need to take them.
Additionally, when you are using dynamic sales pipeline software, metrics such as projected revenue and conversion rates are automatically updated and renewed whenever a client is moved through the pipeline.
With an SFA in hand, the managers have the luxury to dig down into data and analyze individual salesperson’s performances. The SFA system will also ensure that they will have all the tools and features they need to make a perfect plan to increase the business.
Reduce the Costs of Sales
You will automatically see a gradual reduction of your sales process-related costs when you have a sales force automation system up and running in your business.
The expenses will be reduced as the time-consuming manual assignments are completed faster without requiring continuous manual intervention from a person. Your business profit will, in turn, increase because you’ll be capable of processing more client leads at the same expense, and faster as well.
Helps to Reduce Your Response Time
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important and essential needs for a successful business. For that, you need to be active when your customers need you most. While using an SFA, you’ll be able to find enough time to concentrate on customer issues such as objections and complaints during the sales process.
Giving extra concentration to solve these matters as well as being systematic and fast with customer service can help to improve your customer experience and customer satisfaction.
Better Lead Management
We have already discussed that a sales rep can easily map a potential client’s journey across the sales pipeline. The system helps a manager to observe leads move through the pipeline and also lets salespeople reduce the time to follow up with individual leads in a faster and more systematic manner.
Helps to Build Advanced Contact Management
Your salespeople understand and so do you that your contacts are very critical for your business. The prospects turn into leads that ultimately become your clients, even repeat customers too.
However, a bad start or below-par customer communications between a lead and a sales agent could jeopardize the deal even before it ever really gets off the ground.
If your salespersons have got any lead from a previous cold client, then before approaching him or her, apart from Googling, they can also study the prior customer interactions saved in the sales force automation system, just in case.
This will help your sales representatives understand the possible preferences of the customers and know what to say while interacting with the clients. Without any doubt, this exercise might create the difference between winning or losing a particular lead to the competition.
What is the Difference Between SFA, CRM, and DMS
SFA (Sales Force Automation) concentrates on the sales process – making it as efficient and simple as possible. Usually, SFA software will be Formed of potential sales management and pipeline management tools, giving sales managers a clear idea of future possibilities, current sales, and past performance of their sales reps.
CRM (customer relationship management) on the other hand, is created with a focus on customer satisfaction including all the benefits of customer retention. It is designed to look after the customer and clients.
It maintains the relationship between customers and businesses by collecting and centralizing client data from consumer interactions (phone, email, and social media), complaints or questions, previous meetings, and buying history.
By examining this data, sales teams can customize their sales solutions based on existing client’s requirements.
CRM is software that can be used in the pre and post-sales periods to maintain and satisfy potential and current clients. As SFA is primarily a customer acquisition software, it entails the pre-sales section of the CRM of the direct sales channel.
In an attempt to be an all-in-one solution, many CRM providers have attached additional features such as SFA (i.e. pre-sales CRM), and marketing automation. To be clear, SFA can be a stand-alone system or software.
Whereas, the Distribution Management System (DMS) is a platform designed to manage your whole retail/distribution sales channel. In a distribution sales setup, your stocks move from central warehouses to regional depots to dealers to retailers; DMS automates this entire process.
DMS also automates the sales team visiting process to optimize their performance at all steps of the sales team’s visit.
Distribution management includes different activities of the supply chain process namely warehousing, distributing, and delivering along the entire logistics chain. The DMS system is created to improve your business efficiency and productivity in your distribution sales channel.
Sales force automation (SFA) helps to streamline the responsibilities of a sales professional every day and helps to create more businesses. The sales force automation system is essential for all types of businesses that are involved in sales, be it distribution sales or direct sales.
To reduce your sales channel management headaches you can easily choose a Sales Force Automation (SFA) system software that suits you most and watch your business grow significantly.
