What is Salesforce Automation?
Sales Force Automation (SFA) contains multiple aspects of sales functionality, including sales activities, opportunity & pipeline management and forecast capabilities. Sales Force Automation is frequently combined with Marketing tools to help facilitate the lead to opportunity (sales) flow. SFA enables you to analyze the entire sales cycle and successfully manage your sales pipeline—from first contact to final sale.
SFA functionality can also help forecast your sales pipeline. Forecasting sales opportunities enables companies to forecast products or services that will be sold within a specified timeline, the monetary / unit amount of products or services sold, and the likelihood of selling those products or services. Forecast management may also be based by employees or territories, they may compare the adjustments over time so sales managers can see the changes, and the forecast could be compared to a sales users’ quota.
Highlights of sales force automation:
· Effectively processes and quotes orders
· Manages opportunity and pipeline for products and services to be sold
· Improves lead distribution and tracking
· Sales methodology support including guided sales activities and achievements
· Productivity tools to reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks, and increase that spent on deals most likely to close
· Forecast Management capabilities
· Provides remote sales staff with instant access to corporate information
Sales Force Automation Questionnaire
Have you provided the sales team with tools to help them manage leads & opportunities, create forecasts, and improve revenue? Find out by answering the questions below and award your answers points as follows:
- Yes=5 points
- Partially=3 points
- No= 0 points
- Are new leads passed from marketing to sales efficiently?
- Do you use sales activity lists to keep the team on task?
- Is a lead to opportunity workflow established to interact with other team members and keep track of sales promises made?
- Do you have an established sales methodology?
- Do you leverage a forecast tool for real-time sales / revenue updates?
- Can your sales agents see customer service incidents?
Total Points: A ___ + B___ + C ___ + D ___ + E ___ + F ___ = Total ________
How does your company score? Interpreting your results:
0 –5: You need to look into using CRM sales force automation tools to improve revenue results, improve sales user efficiencies and forecast your business better.
6 –10: Looks like a slow start to SFA, look into using more SFA features for better CRM results. You may not be managing the sales process to the best of your ability.
11 –15: Not bad, consider other tools that sales force automation provides.
16 –20: Very good. You may wish to leverage more complex sales force automation concepts (like lead to opportunity workflows, or sales methodologies) to really gain the most value of your CRM sales force automation implementation and improve sales.
21 –25: Almost complete, consider improving the sales force automation question you scored lowest on.
26 –30: World Class CRM, no changes needed!
Need some help understanding what resources you may need to implement CRM? Download our CRM Resource Requirements to find out what you need to successfully deploy a CRM system.