Companies are increasingly focusing on raising productivity of their sales force, enhanced customer responsiveness and better sales planning and forecasting. To build a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with customers, they need to regularly keep in touch with the sales team and know their needs.

Sales Force Automation is relationship selling, enhanced and partly automated with the help of digital and wireless technologies. Enterprises that unsuccessfully attempted using WAP on mobile phones, are now turning to SMS and other wireless technologies. It seems Sales Force Automation can benefit the most from wireless technologies. Here is a guideline for implementing SFA in your organization.

Simply put, Sales Force Automation is a software that supports sales staff in their leads, customers, contacts, prospects management in addition to providing them tools for scheduling and performance tracking.

Business Benefits: The benefits that organizations want from an SFA implementation are in actual, byproducts of the objectives they want to meet from the implementation. That said, SFA implementations generally should result in the following:

1. Bring in Increased transparency in sales processes

2. Provide access to sales centric information in real time

3. Provide increased visibility into the sales funnel

4. Facilitate automated reporting

5. Provide systematic tracking of all opportunities/prospects through to their close

6. Provide the sales professionals (end users) with productivity enhancement tools such as

a) Proposal generators

b) Activity planners

c) Automated reminders

In essence, successful SFA implementations should result in efficiency enhancement in the sales operations of organizations.

Deployable Options: Broadly speaking, most SFA applications available in the market would provide one or many of the following deployment options.

1. Off the shelf, pure plug-n-play applications.

2. Customizable applications: These SFA application vendors provide customers with the flexibility to custom build the application to suit their precise business needs. The vendors would be willing to spend considerable time with the customers in understanding their SFA objectives and help them with a customized offering.

3. Hosted applications: These are services offered by vendors on a pay-per-use model. Customers need not worry about upfront investments in the SFA application and the supporting infrastructure.

SFA Success Recipe: Starting with the basics … No technology initiative can ever substitute core processes, it can only act as an enabler/catalyst. The following lines briefly provide a recipe for a successful SFA implementation.

Core Team– Put in place a core SFA Team headed by one individual. The ideal mix of the team would comprise persons heading the organization (CEO), the Information Systems team (CIO), the Marketing Team and the Sales Team with the head of the organization initiating the system and the CIO championing the initiative.

The roles of each of the core team members can be described as follows

Marketing Head – Seldom do sales processes start in the sales function (marketing to be precise) and end with the sales function. Need for continuous co-ordination is often felt between the marketing, sales teams and hence the presence of a marketing person in the Core SFA team could add significant value to this co-ordination getting addressed in the SFA initiative.

Sales Head – Sales heads possess knowledge of the areas where productivity of sales personnel can be enhanced. Their in depth knowledge of the sales cycle can also act as a catalyst when it comes to mapping the offerings of the SFA application to the core sales processes of their organization. Being end users of the application, involving them in the core SFA team gives the required buy-in to the initiative.

Information Systems Head (CIO) – As a key person in any major technology investment initiative in an organization, the CIO can bring in significant value while evaluating SFA applications from the technology perspective and also in terms of integrating the SFA application with existing applications in the organization.

Head of the organization (CEO) – The CEO should be the driving force behind the SFA Implementation in any organization. If the CEO does not have SFA implementation as part of his core strategy and does not believe in the initiative, it would be difficult for the initiative to succeed.

Define and Understand your objectives: As basic as it may sound, but many organizations fail in the “The problem and objectives definition” phase. Organizations need to realize that “SFA implementation is a journey and not a destination.” Setting small achievable goals, working towards achieving them and continuing to march towards achieving the larger objectives should put you on the path of SFA success.

Internal Readiness – Internal Readiness is one more significant factor that will define the success of your SFA Implementation.

Bottom-up Approach – Have your sales members ever requested for a system that will help them manage the sales function better. If yes, you have already shielded 50% from the risk of failing in your SFA initiative. If no, it would be interesting to gauge the response from the audience on suggesting an SFA initiative. Remember to Never Thrust A Change.

IT Infrastructure – Often overlooked, it is another critical factor that determines the success of your SFA initiative. A check on the current IT infrastructure and the future technology adoption roadmap of the organization would help plan better for the implementation, for the choice of SFA application and also provide an insight into including these items into the SFA budget.

Choice of SFA Vendor – SFA being a relatively lesser mission critical application, many applications available in the market would (broadly, not deeply) readily fit 60%-80% of most customers’ requirements. However, the following tips can help in your vendor evaluation exercise.

Domain expertise – First and foremost, does the SFA vendor possess knowledge of the domain that you operate your business in?

Underlying architecture – Always remember to look under the hood. The technology used and the product architecture is very important while considering a solution, for it needs to fit the future technology adoption roadmap of your organization, and it should integrate with other enterprise applications already implemented at your organization.

Scope for customization – As much as it is important to choose a vendor that has the domain expertise, it is equally important to remember that you know your business better. As we understand that that an SFA implementation is a journey and not a destination, it is vital to learn the extent of support the vendor is willing to provide in this journey.

Training – The emphasis on training should be high on the agenda from the time the application is chosen. The entire user community should be trained before signing off and the training should be complemented by detailed user and training manuals.

(L Santhosh heads HEW Software, a Bangalore based company specializing in the area of Sales Force Automation. HEWSales is their SFA product initiative. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

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