The Benefits You Can Enjoy from Sales Force Automation

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With the advent of technology such as the Internet, lead generation has never been more active. Internet marketing is a very effective tool to use for advertising. Because of this, marketers practically deal with a large amount of leads every day. That can be very difficult for the salesperson and the marketer and may even result in their inefficiency and disorganization. 

That is where sales force automation (SFA) comes in. SFA is simply introducing an automated system that your sales force, comprising of sales managers, sales agents, and marketers--can use. 

Areas that SFA Covers

Sales force automation covers three important areas in your sales department. These areas are the following:

Lead management. Without an automated solution, lead management can be very inefficient and cluttered. However, with sales force automation, you can enjoy several benefits like efficiency and accuracy. For example, an automated lead management system can make sure that no two marketers or salespersons are handling the same leads. You can also make sure that the action being taken on a certain lead is appropriate for the level of interest that he or she holds for the product or service offered to him or her. 

Opportunity management. An SFA’s opportunity management feature improves greatly the productivity of your sales teams. For example, it allows them to come up with a very efficient process of handling sales leads. They are also able to pool together their skills to identify potential weak spots as well as exploit strong points in the sales process. 

An SFA also allows sales managers to streamline the operations of their salespeople, as well as accurately measure their progress by real-time tracking. 

Account management. In order to keep track of the movement of your current customers as well as organize their information, a sales department needs to maintain an account management system. While legacy account management systems have done a good job in the past, the amount of information generated by the Internet is simply too much for these systems to handle. 

By introducing sales force automation, you can accurately track and manage your customer’s accounts. You can easily access information that will allow you to team up with the salespeople based on how they can take very good care of your customers. These include pieces of information like interest in a product and previous purchases, for example. These are also data that can help you gauge whether or not this particular customer will want to buy a similar or related product in the future. 

Territory management. Territory management is simply defining who gets which lead to handle. With the territory management features of an automated sales force program, the flow of information can easily be manipulated in order to cope with any changes that may occur in your company. For example, department A was previously in charge of handling leads with very high lead scores. 

At some point, the company has decided to reorganize departments, and department A is now in charge of new and raw, unprocessed leads. With an automated system, the change can easily be adapted to with a few clicks of the mouse to facilitate reassignment. 

Contract management. Another important part in sales management is contract management. With a contract management solution in place, you can easily manipulate contracts. For example, it is easy to find which contracts are about to expire and would need renewal. This way, you can right away inform the contract holder. Contract management features of an automated sales force will also let you quickly access important information on an account through electronic databases.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Some More Ideas on How to Do Lead Routing

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Lead routing or lead assignment is a lead management process that should not be taken for granted. Without it, your leads can be worked on by salespeople who don’t have the capacity to transform them into customers. You may also end up giving too much leads to work on to a few number of people while the rest have nothing better to do. 

But lead assignment is very complex. There are so many ways on how you do it. To give you an idea where to start, you can take a look at the list below:

Using Geographical Location Proximity

Are you a business with several branches found all over the state, country, or even the world? One of the most effective means to assign your leads is through the most ideal geographical location. For example, if you have an office located in San Francisco, California, and you have leads who came from that area, you can assign these to your salespeople in the satellite office. 

There are several advantages of doing this one. Sometimes geography can affected the purchasing decision of your prospects. You can attribute it to their location or to the culture that they are familiar with. Your sales people there would have a very good idea of the buying habits of these leads, so they basically know the best things to offer to them and how they will be able to do it. Second, they have more options on how to track leads. They can call them—since they don’t have to pay for long-distance calls—e-mail or even personally visit these prospects at their homes or offices, just in case no other communication method is available. Moreover, when they want to set up trade shows or launches, they can conveniently invite these leads as both the prospects and the company don’t have to pay for exorbitant fares. 

Using At-risk Criteria

What are considered as at-risk leads? These are actually the prospects who need your services right away. They can no longer wait for few more days or even hours before they can get the offers that they need. The problem with this in relation to lead routing is that it becomes very hard for you to determine which among your prospects are already at the at-risk state. Usually, by the time that you can recognize their presence, they are no longer interested or may have shifted their attention to another company. 

Thus, it’s very important for your salespeople to update the lead distribution software as often as possible. After all, they will be highly dependent on real-time data. Information such as pending deals should be very obvious, so they will instantly be worked on by the salesperson who is responsible for such lead. 

Coming Up with Your Own Lead Routing Rules

You may have noticed that I have already given you the different ways on how you can distribute your leads. You can follow them, or you can set up your own. What is important is that you have very clear rules on how you can route your leads to the right salespeople. An example could be this: 

New salespersons should not work on fresh leads. New leads offer higher conversion rate for you since they have the most recent need of your product or service. They do not only have the interest but also the sense of urgency. You cannot allow new salespeople to handle them since they are still not accustomed to closing important deals. Rather, you can let them work on historical leads, or those that have not been worked on for 30 days or more. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com