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