For businesses reliant on sales volumes, a decline in sales can have a disastrous result on the health of the company. Some early indicators of a decline could be leads falling through cracks, customers leaving positions, and territory disputes that arise within the sales team.
Depending on your business model, a good SFA solution can help you identify these issues at an early stage and nip them in the bud. This will deliver a customized view of the customer that can be shared with marketing and sales in real time. It allows you to analyze and track data that will ultimately help close the deal.
Here are some features to look out for:
Lead and contact management: Leads are one of the most important angles in sales and managing and optimizing leads is generally the route to sales success. A good SFA solution will help you track and manage leads and organize your data within your territory, and should allow you to accept and share leads with others.
Customized forecasting: Your forecasting depends on a number of criteria, including geographical location, price point, and territory. An SFA solution can help you determine, track, and analyze your pre-determined criteria. Timely forecasts of revenue and demand will help you close more sales and drive a higher profit.
Territory management: We’ve seen time and time again how important it is to manage your own territory in the sales arena. Your SFA solution should help define and maintain your territory, without the fear of encroaching on someone else’s.
Document management: Look for an SFA solution that will help you create and share documents with your sales and marketing teams, including sales brochures, price sheets etc.
Contract management: You can capture your customer’s data effortlessly from start of the contract to completion of the project and share this data with all the departments concerned.
If you’re not sure when or why to invest in an SFA solution, here are some signs that you might need one:
- Your sales are growing faster than you can handle them: Contact and database management will help you capture, organize, store, and assess the data on hand, which makes for a more efficient sales cycle.
- Your leads are falling through the cracks: This is another indication of perhaps being disorganized, where you misplace or fail to identify viable leads shared by other departments. A good SFA system can help you deliver leads to where it counts – the salesperson’s desk.
- Your organization indulges in team selling: Team selling works well in a lot of organizations and yours might be one of them. Unfortunately, team selling can result in confusion over territory and role of the individual within the team. An SFA solution can deliver a comprehensive picture of the project at hand, allowing each individual member to find out where he or she fits in.
- Your work in an industry with a high turnover rate: High turnover rates within the sales department can spell disaster, but when there is a high turnover rate in the client sector, you risk losing valuable data. An SFA solution can help keep track of employee changes and allows sales people to reestablish contacts with former employees in new companies.
- Your time is wasted in meeting rooms: A salesperson should be out building and working on contacts, yet often, valuable time is spent in meeting rooms determining the next move. An SFA solution can take the burden of planning off the salespersons shoulder and give him more freedom and time to work on his sales.
- Your customer service is not up to speed: Customer service starts with gaining enough data so that the department staff can do their job. Using an SFA solution, your customer service agents can keep track of customer relationships, establish a personalized connection, and help to grow the business through efficient customer service.
