Sales Automation System

Identifiable sales force management processes

• Setting targets and objectives based on inputs
• Assigning actors responsible for achieving objectives
• Control processes for ensuring objectives are being achieved within
  • a given time frame
  • a given constrained context (customers and/or markets)
• System management to handle uncertain environments

The process usually starts from specific sales targets. The command center analyzes the inputs and outputs established from a modeled control process and the sales force. The control process enables the sales force to establish performance standards, measuring actual performance, comparing measured performance against established standards and taking corrective action. The sales managers adjust their actions based on the overall process.

Aside from the control process, the following metrics are implemented:

• Time management— Accurately measures the tasks and the fraction of time needed for each task.
• Call management— Plan for customer interaction accounts for the fraction of command center reps that comply with the process and have successful calls.
• Opportunity management— If the process is followed correctly then a sales opportunity exists. The fraction of command center reps that use the tools, comply with the objective are all measured.
• Account management— For multiple opportunities with a customer the account is measured by the tools, process, and objectives.
• Territory management— For monitoring the account, the territory is measured by the number of account reps and prospective versus active customers.
• Sales force management— Process includes training, IT systems, control, coaching, and is shared across several people and departments.

Five major activities are involved in staffing a sales force. They must be divided into related steps. The first step is plan the recruiting and selection process. The responsibilities associated with this step are generally assigned to top sales executives, the field sales manager or the human resources manager. The company wants to determine the number and type of people needed, which involves analyzing the market and the job and preparing a written job description. The qualifications of the job must be established to fill the job. Second, the recruiting phase includes identifying sources of recruits that are consisted with the type of person desired, selecting the source to be used and contacting the recruits. You need to weigh out the options and evaluate its potential effectiveness versus its costs. Third, select the most qualified applicants. The selection phase has three steps, in the planning phase there may be qualifications specified and in the first step it is necessary to design a system for measuring the recruits against the standards from the planning phase. Then the system must be put into effect with the new applicants and then making the actual selection is the final step. Fourth activity is to hire those people who have been selected, just because one makes an offer doesn’t mean that a job is done. One must convince a recruit that the job offers everything that they need and want to get them to join a company or at least highly consider it. The fifth activity is for them to assimilate the new hires into the company. This is done by placing them under direction of an employee in the firm and possibly giving them a mentor to help them feel comfortable working in the firm and going through the training programs.

Mobile sales force automation application

A huge number of sales managers are always on the go. The growth of smartphones has reignited the creation of mobile sales force automation systems. Most companies IT departments are aware that adopting new abilities requires extensive testing. Despite the time needed to test such a new product, it will pay off in the future for the sales department. Smartphones appeal to salespeople, a part of a company’s department that is extremely resistant to new technologies. Smartphones are easy to carry and easy to use, great interface design, touchscreens and fast wireless network abilities like 4G and 3G phones. More than 55% of global 2000 organization will deploy mobile SFA project by 2011 and newer Smartphone platforms, such as Windows Mobile and Google’s Android,  point to a future of increasing diversity in device selecting and support for sales force. When implementing the mobile sales force automation application or during the first stage of systems development life cycle, project teams will need to evaluate how prospective solutions comprising mobile devices, software and support infrastructure and carrier services are packaged to deliver optimal system usability, manageability and integrative abilities, as well as high scalability, reliability and performance. It’s always good to put in mind that just like any new technology, success comes with usability.

Advantages to the marketing manager

• Understanding the economic structure of an industry
• Identifying segments within a market
• Identifying a target market
• Identifying the best customers in place
• Doing marketing research to develop profiles (demographic, psychographic, and behavioral) of core customers
• Understanding competitors and their products
• Developing new products
• Establishing environmental scanning mechanisms to detect opportunities and threats
• Understanding one’s company’s strengths and weaknesses
• Auditing customers’ experience of a brand in
• Developing marketing strategies for each of one’s products using the marketing mix variables of price, product, distribution, and promotion
• Coordinating the sales function with other parts of the promotional mix, such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and publicity
• Creating a sustainable competitive advantage
• Understanding where brands should be in the future, and providing an empirical basis to write marketing plans regularly to help get there
• Providing input into feedback systems to help monitor and adjust the process

Strategic advantages

Sales force automation systems can also create competitive advantage:

• As mentioned above, productivity can increase. Sales staff can use their time more efficiently and effectively. The sales manager can become more efficient and effective (see above). This increased productivity can create a competitive advantage in three ways: it can reduce costs, it can increase sales revenue, and it can increase market share.
• Field sales staff can send their information more often. Typically information can be sent to management after each sales call, rather than daily or weekly. This provides management with current information, which they can use while it is more valuable. Management response time can be greatly reduced. The company can become more alert and agile.
• These systems could increase customer satisfaction if they are used with wisdom. If the information obtained and analyzed with the system is used to create a product that matches or exceeds customer expectations, and the sales staff use the system to service customers more expertly and diligently, then customers should be more satisfied with the company. This can provide a competitive advantage because customer satisfaction leads to increased customer loyalty, reduced customer acquisition costs, reduced price elasticity of demand, and increased profit margins.

 

Positive Impacts

• Share sales data across individuals and teams
• Focus attention on the most profitable deals
• Bring new sales representatives up to speed
• Present effective presentations and proposals to customers
• Monitor quota progress and business performance

Opportunity Management

T3chnocraft Opportunity Management allows your team to close deals faster by sharing consistent sales information, tracking deal progress, and recording deal-related interactions. Customize T3chnocraft to fit how your opportunity management process works, including sales methodologies, account details, and opportunity handling.

Positive Impacts

• Share opportunity information across individuals and teams
• Increase sales productivity through standardized sales processes
• Ensure effective opportunity handling through collaboration and workflow
• Tailor sales methodologies to meet your business needs

Opportunity Tracking and Reports

Track and manage multiple opportunities through real-time reporting. View opportunities by team, product or geography in charts and then drill down to understand how the opportunity is progressing. Roll-up and analyze opportunities from across your organization. Understand how different units are performing and what improvements can be made.

Customized Sales Processes

Adjust T3chnocraft to fit your sales process. Customize the application to mirror how your organization tracks opportunities or download extensions from the T3chnocraftCRM community that track opportunities based on your industry and company size.

Opportunity Reminders

Ensure follow-through as opportunities progress across sales stages. Designate certain actions that need to be taken and automate reminders to ensure that teams and individuals take the necessary steps to close the sale.

Contact Management

T3chnocraft Opportunity Management allows your team to close deals faster by sharing consistent sales information, tracking deal progress, and recording deal-related interactions. Customize T3chnocraft to fit how your opportunity management process works, including sales methodologies, account details, and opportunity handling.

Contact Imports

Import contacts from a variety of data sources in a few simple steps. T3chnocraft supports data transfer formats for Salesforce.com, Act, Microsoft Outlook, Excel and CSV formats.

De-duplication

Automatically ensure good data quality through de-duplication checks which scan for similar contact records upon import.

Record Merge

Merge similar records in a few simple steps. With record merge, companies can combine information from multiple records to create a single master, reducing duplicate contacts while increasing data cleanliness.

Account Management

T3chnocraft Account Management capabilities provide a single view of customers across products, geographies, account, and status. In one single page, users see not only account information, but all associated sales opportunities, contacts, activities, history, cases and quotes. Account management gives your organization the ability to build tighter, more profitable relationships by understanding the status of each account.

Positive Impacts

• Understand account status and relationships
• Improve up-selling and cross-selling opportunities
• Ensure consistent interactions with customers
• Share account information across marketing, sales and support departments

Account Ownership

Define who in your organization owns the account relationship and who else is involved in selling or supporting the account.

Coordinated Interactions

See who in your organization is interacting with the account before engaging. Understand if there are other marketing, sales or service interactions occurring with the account.

Single Account View

View all information related to accounts, including contacts, interactions, campaigns, service request history, and other attributes.

Forecasting

T3chnocraft Forecasting gives sales representatives and managers the ability to generate accurate forecasts based on sales data in T3chnocraftCRM. Managers can create, assign and edit quotas for their team, roll-up forecasts across individuals and teams, and measure forecast accuracy relative to commit amounts.

Scenario Planning

Generate more accurate forecasts with high, medium and low commit amounts to produce a more complete view of future sales results.

Forecast Worksheets

Leverage sales opportunity and sales stage information within T3chnocraft to develop more meaningful and accurate sales forecasts.

Forecast Roll-Ups

Consolidate sales forecasts from individuals, teams or divisions to gain a macro view of how the company is performing relative to quota.

Quotes & Contracts

With T3chnocraft Quote and Contract Management functionality, sales reps can generate accurate quotes with support for multiple line items, currencies and tax codes. Quotes and contracts can be delivered to customers via email, Microsoft Word, or PDF. Strong version control functionality ensures reps can more easily manage multiple versions of quotes and contracts.

Positive Impacts

• Generate and present accurate quotes and contracts to customers
• Integrates with the T3chnocraft Products module
• Manage multiple revisions in a single location
• a clearer picture of customer agreements and products purchased

Dashboards

T3chnocraft Dashboards provide employees and managers with real-time information about leads, opportunities and accounts. Automatic consolidation of sales data from across teams reveals the information executives need to drive performance across their business. Manage access based on user profile and expose employees only to the information they need to know.

Positive Impacts

• Present user-specific information about sales opportunities and progress
• Consolidate sales information from across the business for executives
• Customize charts and reports based on key metrics
• Drill down on charts to understand account progress and individual performance

Real-Time Information

See information as it happens with real-time sales performance dashboards. Share dashboards with team members to align goals.

Chart Drill-Down

Investigate account progress and sales performance by viewing the account information contained within sales dashboards.