Sales Force Management - Disadvantages

We are talking CRM Software Functions here in this blog. We are talking Advantages of Sales Force Management system's advantages to sales people, advantages to sales manager, advantages to marketing manager, strategice advantages.

Today we are going to talk Disadvantages of Sales Force Management.

Detractors claim that sales force management systems are:

• difficult to work with


• require additional work inputting data


• dehumanize a process that should be personal


• require continuous maintenance, information updating, and system upgrading costly


• difficult to integrate with other management information systems

ref: Insurance SFA & Insurance CRM software, wikipedia

CRM Software - Strategic Advantages

CRM software we are talking here. As a part of our talk we are talking on SFA. We talked advantage of SFA to Marketing Manager and Sales Manager. Today we are going to talk about Strategic Advantages of Sales Force Automation.


Strategic advantages
Sales force automation systems can also create competitive advantage. Here are some examples:

• As mentioned above, productivity will increase. Sales staff will use their time more efficiently and more effectively. The sales manager will also become more efficient and more 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 will send their information more frequently. Typically information will be sent to management after every sales call (rather than once a week). This provides management with current information, information that they will be able to use while it is still valuable. Management response time will be greatly reduced. The company will become more alert and more 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 satisfied with the company. This will 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.

ref: Insurance SFA and Insurance CRM, wikipedia

SFA Software - Marketing Manager's Advantage

CRM Software Functions we are talking here. As a part of CRM software we are talking Sales Force Automation. In our previous post we talked sfa advantage to Sales People and sfa advantages to Sales Manager.

Today we are going to talk SFA advantage to Marketing Manager.
It is also claimed to be useful for the marketing manager. It gives the marketing manager information that is useful in :

• Understanding the economic structure of your industry
• Identifying segments within your market
• Identifying your target market
• Identifying your best customers in place
• Doing marketing research to develop profiles (demographic, psychographic, and behavioral) of your core customers
• Understanding your competitors and their products
  Developing new products
• Establishing environmental scanning mechanisms to detect opportunities and threats
  Understanding your company's strengths and weaknesses
• Auditing your customers' experience of your brand in full
  Developing marketing strategies for each of your 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 you want your brands to be in the future, and providing an empirical basis for writing marketing plans on a regular basis to help you get there
• Providing input into feedback systems to help you monitor and adjust the process.

ref: sfa and crm software, wikipedia

SFA - Sales Manager Advantages

Sales Force Automation we are talking here and Advantages to different people/department attach with it. In our last post we talk about Advantages to Sales People and Advantages to the Sales Manager.

Today we continue our talk on Advantages to the Sales manager. Advantages to the

sales manager. Sales force automation systems can also affect sales management. Here are some examples;

The sales manager can configure the system so as to automatically analyze the information using sophisticated statistical techniques, and present the results in a user-friendly way. This gives the sales manager information that is more useful in :

• Providing current and useful sales support materials to their sales staff
  
  
• Providing marketing research data: demographic, psychographic, behavioural, product acceptance, product problems, detecting trends
  
  
• Providing market research data: industry dynamics, new competitors, new products from competitors, new promotional campaigns from competitors, macro-environmental scanning, detecting trends
  
  
• Co-ordinate with other parts of the firm, particularly marketing, production, and finance
  
  
• Identifying your most profitable customers, and your problem customers
  
  
• Tracking the productivity of their sales force by combining a number of performance measures such as: revenue per sales person, revenue per territory, margin by customer segment, margin by customer, number of calls per day, time spent per contact, revenue per call, cost per call, entertainment cost per call, ratio of orders to calls, revenue as a percentage of sales quota, number of new customers per period, number of lost customers per period, cost of customer acquisition as a percentage of expected lifetime value of customer, percentage of goods returned, number of customer complaints, and number of overdue accounts.

ref: sfa & Sales Management Software, wikipedia

Sales Force Automation - Sales Manager Advantages

Sales Force Automation we are talking here and Advantages to different people/department attach with it. In our last post we talk about Advantages to Sales People. Today we are going to talk about Advantages to the Sales Manager.

Advantages to the sales manager
Sales force automation systems can also affect sales management. Here are some examples:

• The sales manager, rather than gathering all the call sheets from various sales people and tabulating the results, will have the results automatically presented in easy to understand tables, charts, or graphs. This saves time for the manager.
  
• Activity reports, information requests, orders booked, and other sales information will be sent to the sales manager more frequently, allowing him/her to respond more directly with advice, product in-stock verifications, and price discount authorizations. This gives management more hands-on control of the sales process if they wish to use it.
  
• The sales manager can configure the system so as to automatically analyze the information using sophisticated statistical techniques, and present the results in a user-friendly way.
  This gives the sales manager information that is more useful to him in different way.

We talk how these information useful to Sales Manager in our next post.

ref: Sales Force Automation & Sales Management Software, wikipedia

Sales Force Automation - Advantages to Sales People

An integral part of any SFA system is company wide integration among different departments. If SFA systems aren’t adopted and properly integrated to all departments, there might be a lack of communication which could result in different departments contacting the same customer for the same purpose. In order to mitigate this risk, SFA must be fully integrated in all departments that deal with customer service management.

We talk different advantages to different department/ person who are integrated with SFA procress.
1) Advantages to Sales People
2) Advantages to Sales Manager
3) Advantages to Marketing Manager
4) Strategic Advantages

We talk each of the above here. First we talk Advantage to Sales people.

sales force automation systems can improve the productivity of sales personnel. Here are some examples:

• Rather than write-out sales orders, reports, activity reports, and/or call sheets, sales people can fill-in prepared e-forms. This saves time.
  
• Rather than printing out reports and taking them to the sales manager, sales people can use the company intranet to transmit the information. This saves time.
  
• Rather than waiting for paper based product inventory data, sales prospect lists, and sales support information, they will have access to the information when they need it. This could be useful in the field when answering prospects’ questions and objections.
  
• The additional tools could help improve sales staff morale if they reduce the amount of record keeping and/or increase the rate of closing. This could contribute to a virtuous spiral of beneficial and cumulative effects.

ref: sales force automation - CRM Software, wikipedia

Sales Force Automation - SFA - CRM Software Functions

Sales Force Automation Systems (SFA), typically a part of a company’s customer relationship management system, is a system that automatically records all the stages in a sales process. SFA includes a contact management system which tracks all contact that has been made with a given customer, the purpose of the contact, and any follow up that might be required. This ensures that sales efforts won’t be duplicated eliminating the risk of irritating customers. SFA also includes a sales lead tracking system, which lists potential customers through paid phone lists, or customers of related products. Other elements of a SFA system can include sales forecasting, order management and product knowledge. More developed SFA systems have features where customers can actually model the product to meet their required needs through online product building systems. This is becoming more and more popular in the automobile industry, where patrons can customize various features such as color and interior features such as leather vs. upholstered seats.

We continue our talk on Sales Force Automation as part of CRM Software Function in next post.


ref: Sales Force Automation, CRM Software, wikipedia

Leadorganizer - CRM Software Functions - 4

CRM Software Functions and CRM Software Features we are talking here and as part of it’s features we talk about Lead Capture, Lead Distribution and Lead Management.
In our today’s talk we are going to talk about leadorganizer as features of CRM software functions. CRM Software consist of different features we talked before, leadorganizer is very important and crucial part of it.

Leadorganizer is consisting of CRM, SFA and Lead Distribution. CRM part of leadorganizer is focused on contact management, document management, time management, agency work-flow automation and communication tools.

With reference to CRM Functions, SFA is part of leadorganizer. Sfa includes lead management, communication tools, scheduling, performance tracking and marketing tools. Leadorganizer sfa also integrated with an enhanced instant term life quoting tool, paramed order and auto fill applications.

Lead Distribution is also important part of leadorganizer. Leadorganizer automatically route or distribute leads to the right agent in team based on a set of configurable assignment rules. This helps the sales team to get qualified leads and reduce manual assignment.

We can say that as part of crm software, Leadorganizer is having nice combination of crm, sfa and lead distribution features in it.

ref: crm software functions flow

Lead Management - CRM Software Fuctions-3

CRM Software Functions and CRM Software Features we are talking here. Till now we talk about Lead Capture and Lead Distribution as features of CRM Software.
We are going to talk about Lead Management as part of customer relationship management software features.

Lead Management is a term used to describe the methodologies and systems to manage customer prospects and inquiries, generally generated by a variety of marketing techniques. Lead management can be considered the connectivity between advertising and customer relationship management. This critical connectivity facilitates the acquisition of customers, and has also been referred to accurately as customer acquisition management.

Lead management creates an orderly architecture for managing large volumes of customer inquiries, or leads. The architecture must be able to organize numerous leads, at various stages of a sales process, across a distributed sales force.


The lead flow process can become enormously complex as customers and sales professionals begin to interact. These various interactions and subsequent actions can create a variety of scenarios, both productive and counter-productive. This exponential number of scenarios can provide for numerous opportunities to mishandle leads in such a way as to reduce their value. Managing these scenarios is the function of lead management.


ref: lead management software, wikipedia

Lead Distribution - CRM Software Functions-2

We talk about CRM Software Functions and CRM Software Features , in last talk Lead Capture - CRM Software Functions-1 we talk about Lead Capture as Features of CRM Software In this post we are going to talk about Lead Distribution as features of CRM Software.


Lead Distribution
As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors (see distribution (business)), resellers, brokers and other channel partners, those vendors often distribute leads to their respective partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed' partners with new business opportunities. Today there are two major methods for distributing sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.

PUSH The push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that those partners will follow up and work on those leads. The challenge with 'push' is the fact that often the local sales people may not be able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about their lead follow-up rate through partners after the leads where pushed out to those partners.

Pull The pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer, Axel Schultze, who was frustrated with the lead follow up results of the push method and decided to let the available and motivated sales people 'pull' leads from an online available system. Patent was granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=09514997&OS=09514997&RS=09514997 The pull method became widely accepted in the high tech industry where thousands of resellers from companies including Avaya, Nortel, Juniper and others distributed leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the PUSH method, and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from BlueRoads indicate.

ref: lead distribution crm softare, wikipedia

Lead Capture - CRM Software Functions-1

We talk about CRM Software Functions and CRM Software Features in our previous post. In this post we are going to talk about Lead Capture as Features of CRM Software.

Lead Capturing is attracting the highest quality of targeted prospect for once business. The business can be any related with internet, direct marketing.

Lead Capturing is possible with a lead capture page. A lead capture page has input field or we can say lead capturing capacity which capture basic information like name, address, email, phone, etc. along with unique or general questions designed to qualify leads for each response profile. The form should be tied directly to an auto responder. An auto responder is basically a set of prewritten messages that goes out to anyone that fills out the form on your lead capture page. Your emails should be designed to market a product, service or anything else you desire. A good lead capture page and a good set of follow up emails are the essence to any internet marketing business.

Benefits of Lead Capture page or web base Lead Capture:-

• Track and manage leads from anywhere at anytime
• Easy integration with current electronic and traditional marketing initiatives
• Set rules for lead weighting and lead distribution
• Manage qualification questions and answers using a simple to use interface
  

ref: Lead capture & Leadorganizer software

CRM Software-Function and Features

While studying and reviewing different sites for Customer Relationship Management and CRM software Functions I find following features and functions are part of any Customer Relationship Management-CRM Software.

1) Lead capturing
2) Lead Distribution
3) Lead Management
4) Leadorganizer
5) Automated Sales force activities
6) Customer Relations
7) 360 Client Historical View
8) Document Management
9) Calendar and Scheduling
10) Tasks Management
11) Advance Search and Filter
12) Custom Reporting

CRM Software Functions-1

CRM can provide companies of all types and sizes with significant benefits, but only if sales team adopt it. We are talking about 3 modules. Marketing, Sales and Service. In Marketing, we are talking today Marketing Automation Module features:

Marketing Automation Module including following major features.

• Contact customers with targeted promotions and email communications

• Run sales campaigns

• Run campaigns in conjunction with the sales team

• Send e-mail and track responses

• Sales force automation

we talk each of the above one by one.

CRM Software Functions

Last time we talked about what is CRM and Why CRM? We left off with 3 different modules in any CRM Software. Today we will continue and talk about these 3 modules and functions of these modules.

1.Marketing

2.Sales

3.Service

Depending on your business process automation needs, you may want a higher focus on one or the other module. These modules can be integrated with one other. Marketing, Sales and Service Modules share the same database about customers, contacts and activities. This allows easy consolidated access to all customer information, and avoids the need to store common data in more than one system.


1) Marketing:-
Make your marketing team more effective by providing CRM. Best CRM should include tools to help identify, execute and replicate effective marketing initiatives across multiple sales channels.
The Marketing Module helps your marketing team to assign, schedule and track marketing campaign activities and measure campaign performance. The combined sales, marketing and customer service tools allow your business to work with one up-to-date set of customer data, therefore appearing professional, organized and informed when speaking to your customers.

Marketing Automation Module features:

• Contact customers with targeted promotions and email communications

• Run sales campaigns

• Run campaigns in conjunction with the sales team

• Send e-mail and track responses

• Sales force automation

CRM gives marketing team access to your customer data quickly, easily and in a way that makes it easier to market the right products to the right customers.

Talk on Sales and Service modules of CRM Software Functions will be available in next notes with title CRM Functions