Sales Force Automation

Management Features of Sales Force Automation
By Diane Newsome

Sales force automation, or SFA, is a term that refers at its most basic to automating critical sales functions like lead and account management. Sales force automation uses software to automate sales tasks like order processing, lead generation, information sharing, contact management, customer management, and employee evaluation.

It also keeps track of customer preferences, buying habits, demographics, and performance management. Sales force automation tools improve field sales productivity and open whole new realms of possibility for companies. With an on-demand architecture that allows effective sales force management and CRM, managing sales information is easy on even the largest scales. Essentially, customers and sales employees can manage and share any type of information.

There are a number of benefits and features that come with sales force automation technology, and these features comprise the backbone of the SFA system. They include:

Lead management

Lead management allows companies to keep better track of leads by ensuring they don't get cold. This can reduce or eliminate the need for manual routing and lead assignment duplication, clearly defines opportunity assignments, and is able to automatically assign leads to the correct individual based on territory, product expertise or user-defined rules. Thus SFA allows for automatic load leveling across sales territories, and better relationships between team members.

For example, with automatic lead management, you can set security controls that ensure teams or partners can access only their own leads, increase lead conversion rates and improve sales response times.