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