Benefits of Sales Force Automation – Part Two

In the last post, we saw a few benefits of Sales Force Automation (SFA). We’ll continue that in this post ant take a look at some more.

Informed and Organized sales reps:  Salespeople are most effective when they do their research and be prepared. They need to convince, nay impress, the prospect or lead with their preparation. They also need to be sharp in their communication and be on top of every request. In the previous post, we already mentioned how busy salespeople are and how versatile they need to be. With so much going on, how can they be organized and stay on top of new developments? The answer is SFA. Sales reps can organize all their customer-related information using this software in a way that they have it handy whenever they need it.

One-stop shop: This benefit is an extension of the previous one. To perform different activities, salespeople use different tools and resources. To communicate with their leads, they use email or phone; to organize their data, they use spreadsheets; and for information regarding pricing, they depend on finance/accounting. Moreover, pricing is often volatile; there are significant changes in pricing often. Using multiple systems is highly inefficient as there is no communication among these systems and information from one system has to be manually re-keyed into others.

Instead of putting sales reps through all this hassle, SFA provides them with a single system with which they can manage all their activities. From the same SFA application, they can store and organize their data, communicate with their prospects (through an integrated email module), and have access to up-to-date pricing information at all times.

On the move: Salespeople are on the move a lot. They have to travel to different cities and even countries in some cases to close a deal. They need access to information from every location. Instead of carrying this information (at the risk of it becoming outdated) around in documents, they can use a SaaS SFA application to access the same information online from any device they may have. All they have to do is to simply log in from anywhere and get the information.