Sales Force Automation: Are you Buying Technology or a Solution?
Author : Rommel Rozario,
Vice-president (Sales)
Advanz101 Systems P. Ltd.
“It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.” - Mark Hunter
Ever since the concept of sales has started in modern world, salespeople have always been the ones, who always have to deal with more negativity than almost any other professional. For every deal that has been signed, there’s bound to be countless unanswered calls, emails that fell into an unaddressed space and prospects that sharply demand to know, “What exactly I am going to buy and why ? “.
But you know who else dealt with rejection? the people who faced the failures and got approved further. And they didn’t just stopped in the hard times — failure is what made them succeed.
Sales is the life blood of business and sales force automation systems provide the management, automation and reporting to systemically improve sales performance and achieve corporate growth objectives. However, selecting, implementing and refining SFA systems to sharpen processes such as account management, opportunity management and the order cycle is a continuous challenge.
Sales force automation software is a powerful tool that increases sales success rates, reduces the sales turnaround time, enhances your sales field force’s productivity, streamline the data input and improves the revenue part.
Whether it’s a small business or an enterprise offering hundreds of products, Sales force Automation is designed to take care of the sales process regardless the scale.
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Time Saving
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Planned Sales process / Field Working
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Monitored Primary & Secondary Sales
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Stocks & Inventory Control
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Merchandising Activities Monitoring
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Opportunity Management
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Improvised Customer Service
First of all before implementing or planning to buy this (In fact any automation system) , people who are likely to be users shall be educated, after all if people don’t see SFA as strategically important and valuable, they will be rigid to use the solution, harming the goals and ROI estimations.
You can go for the options available in the market i.e.
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On Premise
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SaaS
Further you can :
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Review the catalogue of features and compare with the options available.
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Hold In-Depth conversations and assess the providers for their Technical Knowledge.
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Review the Service Level Agreement and its accuracy.
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Review the Past track record of the Vendors.
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Assess the vendor for their Domain Expertise on your Industry type.
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Discuss their Solution’s Strength, weaknesses and their after sale support.
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In case you are still not able to decide, go in for Proof of Concept with best ranked vendor on your criteria.
“HOWEVER YOUR ARE NOT BUYING TECHNOLOGY, YOU ARE BUYING A SOLUTION”