Most business owners dealing with field force sales staff are on the lookout for newer technologies to gain insights into their sales team’s productivity. This gives rise to technology solutions such as sales force automation (SFA) solutions to simplify sales processes.
Several technology companies have claimed to receive a massive improvement in their sales-related activities using SFA solutions. In fact, 61 percent of businesses leveraging sales force automation have accounted for more instances of exceeding revenue targets in 2020.
Identifying the activity insights with the help of Sales Force Automation can benefit sales managers with enhanced performance and productivity. Rightly so, companies are putting their money and efforts behind this objective.
To tap this opportunity, there are multiple solution providers existing in the market who claim their SFA solution to be the best.
However, to avoid the possibilities of failure, companies should not just rely on the solution provider to bring them results overnight! It’s even dependent on a sales team’s grit and determination that will impact the firm’s productivity, performance, and other aspects. The SFA solution, can at max, allow the sales reps to perform their duties in an elevated manner.
Here is a list of the top 8 things that successful companies have followed to ensure automation technology intervention among sales team success.
1. A Clear Understanding of the Needs of Your Company:
The implementation of a Sales Force Automation solution points out specific internal reluctance that company owners must overcome. This approach provokes some requirements of certain training and adapting techniques. Hence, it’s imperative that you must make the right decision.
To ensure this, the first thing to be executed is the analysis of the needs of your company. Alongside this, you must include various profiles and departments in a prior study to simplify the decision-making stage for businesses. This approach will make it convenient not only for the company owners but also for the team members who are going to use it every day.
2. Customization:
This is one of the most crucial aspects in the determination of the apt SFA solution for your company. It is imperative that the Sales Force Automation technology that you incorporate into your ecosystem must achieve what your company requires or demands. It’s not just about the capabilities of the solution but also the flexibility to design custom features as per the company requirements.
The SFA software that you are shortlisting must fit the needs of your company. The customization options on offer should be eligible to be implemented quickly and must function as per your needs. You can involve some tech experts to ensure its compatibility opportunities.
Many SFA solutions often advertise their offerings with a complete customization offering. However, the reality of this scenario boils down to an instance where certain features are simply disabled for the tweaks that you haven’t asked for. This results in slow performances of the solution owing to several inactive elements.
3. Cloud Solutions:
In instances, where your SFA solutions come only and exclusively with the features and options that you need for your company, the response speed of the system is enhanced multi-folds. The fact that an SFA solution is stored in a cloud setup, companies can immensely benefit from its superfast functionality. Firms can accordingly take advantage of its process both for their offline and online requirements.
4. Access:
It is crucial that your members of the sales team can access information from their database, as and when required. They may require data while preparing a visit right from their homes, en route while heading on towards the next destination, or even while interacting with a client.
To make this a reality, you must ensure a smooth setup of data access functionality both for online and offline instances, Need may arise for accessing real-time data or also in locations having limited or no connectivity.
5. Compatibility:
Multi-device compatibility is a strong aspect these days for determining the success ratio of products and services. Hence, when it comes to Sales Force Automation technology, it must be responsive enough to be usable across multiple platforms and devices: Android, iOS, Windows, as well as other smartphone and tablet brands.
6. Integration:
Along with the compatibility of devices and operating systems, you must ensure easy integration of the system with relevant software that is in use in your organization. It should have a smooth experience with the most important ones like ERP solutions and other similar domains.
7. Advanced Analytics:
A sound and capable Sales Force Automation software should be strong enough to make full use of all the data sets that you have available in your database. This will leverage the allowance of providing key information for sales processes, starting from relevant statistics, customer reports, KPIs, and other metrics.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is making massive advancements in its domain and the SFA solution must allow you to be in a position to maximize its full potential.
8. Option for Multiple Languages and Currencies:
Your business should not fall short with limitations like restricted languages or limited currency options. Your customer may hail from the global market and providing them with restrictions will only incur a bad user experience. In some cases, you may lose out on clients due to unwanted restrictions.
This feature is a massive contributor in helping you calculate and optimize your sales routes. Benefit from the analytical capacity of your Sales Force Automation solution to assess your leads and make modifications in your routes to the criteria that work best for you.
Summing Up:
Unless organizations are given a teaser of the opportunities of a sales tool solution, there will be resistance in the deciding factor of the right solution for a business. For any sales tool technology to be successfully implemented, organizations must provide customer and product-level insights that can be both believable and valuable to the sales team.
Finally, these sales automation solutions must have an objective to not micromanage the salespeople. On the contrary, they must assist members working on the field to outperform their own duties. Sales managers, on the other hand, must be benefitted from key insights to ease their decision-making process and get the best out of their sales team members.