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SFA: virtual salesman
Companies are turning to sales force automation to improve
pre-sales efficiency says, Abhinav Singh
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SMEs would like to closely monitor daily interactions
with their sales members and customers, says Rajesh Ghosh |
Ganesh is a medical representative of a pharmaceutical company and is based
out of a small town. He has completed his daily rounds of meetings with doctors
in his region. At the end of the day he goes to a cyber café and logs
onto the Sales Force Automation (SFA) portal deployed by his company. Logging
in, he enters the sales details for the day, (including collections and any
new customer acquisitions). Once entered, this information can be accessed by
other sales folk, and is readily available to the company management. This is
one of the major advantages of an SFA portal. Now picture this—-a medical
representative who doesn’t have an SFA portal will have to make a manual
entry and courier the report to his regional office, which in turn transfers
it to the head office. This cumbersome and time consuming process is bound to
deprive the management team of timely information thereby resulting in lowering
the sales team’s productivity. Lower productivity in turn leads to lower
profits and market share.
Competition spurring SFA adoption
With competition increasing manifold in the recent past companies are looking
to improve the productivity and effectiveness of their sales teams by converting
customer leads generated by the marketing team into actual sales or customers.
Sales team members have a wealth of information about the market, competitors
and industry trends. This information needs to be readily available to the management
so that it is able to take more informed business decision and plan its marketing
and sales strategies accordingly. The management is also able to better handle
the productivity of their sales team members as well as analyse the effectiveness
of sales processes in operation and plan production accordingly.
Though analysts are yet to put a number to the SFA market in India, Pranav Kumar,
research director- Enterprise Application Software, Gartner Asia/Pacific says,
“The drivers of the SFA market in India are three-fold—increased productivity
of the sales force, enhanced customer responsiveness and better sales planning
and forecasting. With increasing competition and commoditisation of many products,
you often find concerted sales and marketing efforts becoming competitive differentiators.
SFA tends to be used where the direct field force tends to be high and account
management is important.”
BFSI and pharma to drive SFA growth
In India, organisations in verticals such as BFSI (retail and consumer banking),
pharmaceuticals, asset management and telecom have a direct field sales force
and a large number of customers. These verticals are expected to drive SFA growth.
Vikram G Shah, managing director Talisma Corporation Ltd explains, “Organisations
coming under the BFSI segment extensively cross and up sell products. For instance
a bank will try to up sell many of its products to existing customers. SFA helps
a bank target the right customers leveraging the information available from
the SFA tool.” Almost all insurance companies have multiple sales channels.
They have direct employees, agents and even shopkeepers selling their policies.
It is essential that they integrate sales information coming from different
channels for forecasting and bringing transparency to their sales force. As
a result many of them are expected to go in for SFA tools.
SMEs aren’t lagging
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SFA helps a bank target the right customers
leveraging the information available from the SFA tool, says Vikram G Shah |
Some Indian SMEs also have fairly large sales teams spread across the country
and they are feeling the need to adopt SFA tools. ACCPAC is primarily targeting
Indian SMEs with its SFA tools. Rajesh Ghosh, chief executive officer, ACCPAC
India, says, “As small organisations run on a tight cash flow, they are
heavily dependant on daily collections which their sales team members make.
They would like to closely monitor daily interactions with their sales members
and customers. Large organisations on the other hand are not much affected by
the cash flow, as they have reserve funds. Moreover SMEs want to utilise their
sales workforce to the optimum level.”
Integrating handhelds and SMS with SFA
Web based portal access will become popular in India, and product companies
are demanding tighter integration of SFA tools with SMS for managing interactions
with their field force and handheld integration is expected to increase. Product
companies feel that as wireless technology is becoming popular, it would be
necessary to integrate SFA tools with wireless systems in the future. The BFSI
segment will continue to drive this market in the near future, telecom is expected
to catch up and big deployments are expected from manufacturing, pharmaceuticals
and Fast Moving Consumer Good (FMCG) companies.
An SFA project is a major undertaking that needs
to be handled and planned carefully. Ideally a special pre-implementation
team should pilot the tool before deploying the solution. Team members should
include representatives from sales, marketing, customer support, customer
service, management, finance and other customer facing departments along
with members from the SFA vendor’s team. It needs to be ensured that
the entire organisation is aware about the project and post implementation
benefits expected from the deployment.
The RoI (Return on Investment) from the project should be properly defined
and understood. It also important to ensure that an SFA solution is implemented
step by step, so that the sales team gradually gets accustomed to the solution.
Training is critical for the success of a SFA project. It should be ensured
that all sales staff are given training as to how they can go about using
SFA effectively. |
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User resistance: Due to the complexity of some SFA solutions it becomes
difficult for sales staff to use them and hence these implementations
do not yield the expected output.
Longer implementation cycles: Some SFA projects take too long to implement
and by the time the implementation is completed the market scenario has
changed and it requires an upgraded version. Longer implementation cycles
can be due to the result of a product technology — the product chosen
requires customisations to the core product, thereby taking a lot of time
and money to tailor it to the customer’s needs.
Stress on optimum utilisation of the SFA solution: The top management
in some organisations try to pressurise sales force members to use all
the features of the system. It has been observed that users can initially
absorb only 20 percent of an SFA application’s feature, but management
expects them to use almost all the features right from day one. Due to
this instead of learning about the solution gradually a little bit at
a time they end up using nothing. Another cause of failure is lack of
support from management. Without management fully supporting a project
of this magnitude, there’s little chance of it succeeding. Management
support includes funding and commitment for adequate equipment, training
time, planning, and acceptance of lost productivity while the sales force
is getting up to speed with the new system and processes.
Source: SFA vendors
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akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com
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