Sales and marketing teams have more crucial roles to play in a pandemic-era market. Even after we have control over the virus, market conditions will never be the same as the Before Time. So, you need to boost the capabilities of your sales team to stay ahead in the competition. And that’s where sales force automation comes into play.
You must already have heard about sales force automation (SFA) a lot — even before the pandemic. Sales force automation involves automating various tasks and processes associated with sales. These may include everything from lead generation and conversion to customer relationship management.
By using automation tools and techniques, you can liberate the sales team from the burden of repetitive tasks. It enables the salespeople to focus on more creative stuff that demands human intelligence. More importantly, SFA helps you dramatically cut operating costs associated with sales and marketing.
Business Benefits of Sales Force Automation
Applications and advantages of SFA go beyond sales and marketing. From converting more leads to managing the post-sales relationship, SFA has wide-ranging benefits. Below are the most striking ones.
Sales territory management
Efficient tracking of different sales territories and redirecting the leads are critical early steps of the sales process. A traditional spreadsheet-based approach makes these tasks tedious and inefficient. With the right automation solution, you can easily manage these tasks incredibly efficiently. For instance, CRM solutions with SFA capabilities can do it for your sales team. Such a software application is useful for small, mid-sized, and large businesses alike.
You can automate lead processing with better sales territory management capabilities. Besides, the sales team can assign leads to a specific department or individual based on a set of predefined rules. It enables the sales team to send automated email notifications to leads and prospects.
Activity tracking & monitoring
The sales team can track multiple prospects and leads using software dashboards with impeccable data visualization. They can analyze the status of important leads and customers. With real-time data in hands, the team can execute the right next step to ensure conversion, upselling, or cross-selling. Your sales force can use the CRM system to email clients and sync customer information with other tools related to SFA. The automated system also alerts salespeople about their activities and calls with customers. These measures ensure that the sales team never misses and any crucial action or a client call.
Orders & service delivery management
With well-developed CRM software, you can also streamline the order fulfillment process. SFA lets you cut down the unnecessary paperwork. It, in return, provides the team with more spare time to focus on critical activities associated with order management or service delivery. Besides, by ensuring timely order fulfillment and delivery, you significantly improve customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Build a CRM with efficient key capabilities like dashboards, data analytics, and BI.
Sales pipeline management
The sales pipeline is a sophisticated and often long journey for a sales rep. It starts when your first interact with a prospect and goes all the way up to the point where the lead becomes a paying customer. When you have a sales force automation solution in place, the team gets notified every time the prospect moves to the next step. SFA simplifies the sales pipeline process and keeps every stakeholder updated about the status of a lead. Additionally, the solution also automates the process of creating key metrics such as projected total sales and quarterly turnover. In other words, SFA ensures that sales managers don’t have to manually track leads and generate reports, among other things.
Upselling & cross-selling enhancement
As the coronavirus-induced market conditions create an unprecedented scarcity of new leads, up-selling and cross-selling has become more pivotal than ever. You need to pitch your existing clients and customers more often to maintain the cashflow level above the threshold. The sales force automation system empowers your sales team with crucial data and tools. For example, the sales team can view the detailed purchase and transaction history of existing clients. SFA capabilities integrated into your CRM ecosystem provides important customer data. The pieces of information help you to create a personalized upselling and cross-selling approach.
Automated performance reports & insights
The SFA system not just automates an array of crucial tasks, but also boosts your insights into consumer behavior. SFA solutions enable sales managers to save a significant amount of time and effort by automatically analyzing the sales team’s performance. Dedicated dashboards for managers let them visualize data in real-time. Managers can seamlessly share these pieces of info with their superior or other required stakeholders. The reports and insights are based on the most evolved data analytics and machine learning capabilities. Besides, the visualization provided by dashboards makes it easier to understand the metrics more effortlessly.
Wrapping up
You can build a sales force automation solution with or without a CRM. Most businesses prefer to integrate SFA capabilities onto a CRM. It makes a comprehensive software ecosystem for end-to-end sales and marketing management. However, you can also develop a feature-rich SFA solution that doesn’t rely on a CRM platform.
Use a development approach that perfectly suits the requirements of your sales team. The solution should, more than anything else, enable the team to focus on the most critical tasks requiring human ingenuity. By streamlining the sales process with SFA, you can enhance the effectiveness of your business strategy. At OrangeMantra, we have helped numerous clients to level up their lead management, upselling and cross-selling processes. Our expertise in enterprise software development lets us build impeccable SFA solutions for your business.
FAQs
Q. What do you mean by sales force automation?
Sales force automation involves automating various tasks and processes associated with sales. SFA may include everything from lead generation, conversion, and customer relationship management. The automation usually focuses on repetitive, administrative tasks that, while important, can be time-consuming for sales teams to perform.
Q. What is the difference between CRM and SFA?
Sales force automation solutions focus on the sales process of products or services, to increase sales and optimizing conversion. While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system focuses on managing customer relations by ensuring effective communication. SFA capabilities are often built into a CRM software ecosystem.
Q. How much does it cost to build an SFA solution?
There’s no predefined average cost of developing an SFA solution. It all depends on your specific requirements. If you want to build a feature-rich SFA solution based on a CRM platform, the costs will be higher than a simple SFA software. We build flawless SFA software at a competitive price.
