Generally, the sales force automation solutions means automating the sales leads within the company. It has many applications and features comprising calendars, generation and information sharing, ‘to-do’ lists, contact management, proposal and presentation, product configurations to name the few.
Likewise, today’s sales force management solutions and sales force automation solutions also comprise numerous advanced tools like product knowledge, sales forecasting and leads tracking systems. Here’s the guide for beginners about the pros and cons of this automating solutions.
Pros
With the help of this system, the sales managers can develop several tables, graphs and report automatically rather than manually collecting call sheets and several information’s from various sales masses and putting in them into traditional spreadsheet systems.
They could more often and easily access the order books, activity reports, stock positions, and some other sales info on which they could use active control over different leads of the total sales.
With the assist from advanced statistical techniques and analytic tools, the managers could examine several information and data automatically comprising marketing research information, new product, new competitor and marketing trends, and identify most problematic and most paying clients.
With the more complex and advanced automating models, the managers could easily cover the productivity of their sales faculty. They could as well calculate key functioning indicants like incomes per sales district, incomes per sales person and amount of phone calls per day, price per phone calls, allowances per client, number of due accounts and number of client disputes to name the few.
The marketing person could well find out the target marketplaces and the sections inside the marketplaces by using this automating applications and tools.
This solution can make it really simple for marketing person to implement marketing research and build up demographic and behavioral visibilities of extremely potential consumers.
This management solution allows the marketing person to know corporate weakness and strength. It counterpart the competitor’s strengths and products and take the suitable steps.
This automating system make the marketing person to build up the correct marketing schemes applying the ‘marketing fuse’ variables of product, cost, promotion and statistical distribution.
With help of this software, the marketing person could coordinate with some other sales activities and functions like sales publicities, ad campaigns, media promotion and public relations.
Cons
If this automating solution is not integrated properly with some other sections of the organization, it may lead in communication lack, which could advance result in various sections by getting in touch with same consumers for one and the same purpose.
Several automation systems are of course difficult, which makes it very hard to work at this solution without active proper training and experience.
Almost of sales force automation solutions need day-and-night information and data updating, regular upgrading and system maintenance.
Few of the automating software, peculiarly the complex and comprehensive ones is very expensive and therefore discourage the little and average business organizations.
