Sales Force Automation: Managing CRM and ERP Solutions

Sales Force Automation

Sales force automation (SFA) is used loosely throughout the industry and means different things to different people. Basically, SFA includes all of the technologies, techniques, and strategies on which successful sales are built. It's an activity that brings you together with your customers and improves communications and productivity. Customer resource management (CRM) falls under this umbrella.

The goal of SFA is to streamline the entire sales process in order to make businesses more efficient, to improve customer interactions, to increase overall customer satisfaction, to and save time and money.

Customer Relationship Management

Managing sales data and processes can be simplified using today's software solutions. These products automate nearly all of the tasks that salespeople and their support staffs once performed manually. As a category, these products are generally referred to as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

CRM applications started as simple contact-management software that salespeople ran on their PCs. Then vendors began to develop products that automated a larger number of processes and tied together all of the sales data across the organization into one comprehensive source.

Though the features of a CRM solution can vary from product to product, there are a few industry-standard functions:

• Contact manager. A CRM solution must have a powerful yet easy-to-use contact manager to track sales leads; it should give you instant access to relevant information about your clients.
• Marketing encyclopedia. This feature includes base of information about different vertical industries, competitors, and products. It's a valuable tool that diminishess research time and informs you of your clients' needs.
• Forecasting module. The forcasting module lets you analyze where and when leads are generated. This information helps you to determine how to spend advertising and marketing budgets in the future.