Sales force automation (SFA) allows companies to manage
business along with data and relationships associated with them. In SFA
companies can store prospect, contact, account, lead and opportunity among
other sales related information. The information is centralized and accessible
to the sales, marketing and other teams within the company. As SFA is build
around people and relationships it is very valuable for any fast growing
business.
When a company starts to sell its products or services it
connects with people who need its product or service. As the company grows
these relationship also grows, then you have not only buyer seller relationship
but multiple new relationships - there are multiple people in your company who will
have relationship with multiple people in the buying company. Over time this
becomes complex and you as a company would definitely like to share the
relationship and interactions with others within your organization who are
connecting to customers. This is where SFA can help maintain and share
information with the people in your organization easily.
To reap the benefits
of SFA, companies need good data in terms of potential, existing customers and
relationships. Before companies start to use SFA concerted effort should be put
to get the data in SFA. Couple of ways to get this information :
Existing Data: Most
companies should already have data which can be ported into SFA. This data may
be in different systems - database, excel, note sheets or employees
phone/memory. This data can be scattered within the organization from various
units / departments like sales, marketing, product groups to human resource or
finance. Data load templates can be used to collect data from various sources
so that this important information is not lost. Data entry is possible on
templates and then loaded into SFA or directly on SFA so that data is ready for
users whenever they get on it.
Third Party Data:
With the rise of social networking and internet lot of data is available at
company's disposal which can be fed into SFA. Linkedin, facebook, twitter
already have wealth of information which can be funneled into SFA as prospects
and contacts. Then there are posts, blogs, discussions, articles and posts from
companies, government filing information, job postings and updates on websites
etc. All this data is available on the web and anyone can use this. Companies
need to figure out how to extract useful information and leave junk data
behind. One way to do this is by monitoring on a regular basis and feed into
SFA so that it creates prospects and opportunities. Monitoring can be done
automatically by web crawlers (or manually if company has time and resources)
intelligently so that only relevant information is brought back into SFA.
Starting from a clean
slate and building data in SFA can be frustrating for the users - no one likes
to see blank in prospect list. If companies can work to get existing data and
relevant third party data within SFA it can potentially jump start sales
efforts.
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