The Digital Divide

The fast paced market place is requiring that business meet the demand of buyers in real-time. Buyers seek vendors that provide high quality products, timely service and on-time delivery. The demands of consumers cannot be met without accurate and easily accessible information made available to sales professionals.

Customer Relationship Management programs known as CRMs impact a sales professional and sales organization in a variety of ways. For managers CRMs help the reporting process, territory management, and managing productivity. For sale reps, CRMs assist in time management, productivity, tracking clients’ critical information, scheduling, and so much more. For both, employee and company, the bottom line means more money.

Beyond the availability of information is how well the information is assimilated into viable opportunities. CRMs or SFAs (Sales Force Automation) systems like Goldmine, Siebel, ACT!, Oracle and others are being installed daily in corporations throughout American. They are even being designed so intricately to encompass much more than sales running the entire back office for many of America’s top corporations. CRMs and SFAs can be integrated to interface with high-tech web sites and offer client-user interaction. They gather information and deliver it promptly to the right personnel. Salespeople and other employees across many departments can quickly scan notes, information, and mission critical data entered by any team member.

What does this all mean?

This means we live in a world today where we can share ideas in real time, receive information in the blink of an eye and perform tasks in seconds which use to take days to accomplish. However, with all this information and process modeling corporations can create information overload for their team members, which in turn causes productivity breakdowns.

Sales Professionals

Let’s isolate for sales professionals, CRMs and their benefits. The sales portion of CRMs is often referred to as SFA or Sales Force Automation packages.

What do SFAs offer the sales professional?

· Single point of data storage

· Schedule tracking

· Timely client and prospect follow-up

· Auto-dialers

· Task tracking

· Literature request fulfiller

· Sales funneling

· Document creation

· Report generators

· Faxing services

· Emailing

· Territory management

· Pipeline management

· Contact sharing

· Project management

· Time management tool

The values of SFAs are in helping salespeople to become significantly more organized. Yet I have seen significant problems arise with the use of SFAs.

Serious Productivity Issues Arise When a Salesperson Is Left Untrained

Automation is intended to create more productive sales people, but ambiguous procedures and difficult input methods cause frustration. Frustrations lead to wasted time. I strongly recommend that any person utilizing an SFA or CRM get proper training on functionality of the product.

Managers

In addition to the tools listed above, managers are able to use CRMs or SFAs for:

· Managing your sales team

· Ubiquitous literature fulfillment

· Creating various reports including grafts, charts and projections

This only works if you keep your staff trained in how to utilize the software. Many SFA companies offer training classes, which can be presented off-site or on-site. A salesperson must hone their skills on functionality so they won’t waste time wondering how to enter information or more commonly missing altogether features which would have helped had they even know the features existed.

Another problem that can occur is related to time management. Sales automation programs work well for managing time; however, an SFA won’t magically make an unorganized person instantaneously organized. If you fall in the “unorganized” category, invest in time management courses to ensure you properly understand how to manage your activities and make the mental commitment necessary to change!

The SFA itself is, in its pure form, a glorified filing system. It allows you to maintain a sophisticated Rolodex, tickler system, note pad, word processor, and overall day planner. The main set back to SFAs is when information is not kept current or is incomplete. Utilize your SFA as a sales vehicle.

Important Information to Track

Information is a salesperson’s most valuable commodity. When you’re on the phone or in person gather as much information as possible to put in your SFA. You will keep track of the obvious things like name, address, phone number, titles, etc., but keep more detailed information like:

Administrative assistant’s name

Cell phone numbers

Additional contact names and numbers

Qualifying information

Intricate notes from conversations

Keep a list of fresh unanswered questions

Track action items

Future meetings and calls

Personal information (i.e., scheduled vacation, birthdates, spouse & kids names)

Things your client enjoys (i.e., golf)

Keep your information as detailed as possible. It is not only helpful to know what you have accomplished in your process with clients but it is quite impressive to a client your ability to remember details. I have never known a great leader, salesperson, or anyone for that matter who became great without learning how to pay attention to details.

Keeping high quality information in your SFA also helps when you are unavailable and someone else needs to help with a client. The more information you provide the easier it becomes to address issues.

If you are not going to keep your SFA current and utilize in all cases your better off not implementing an SFA at all.

Palm and CE Devices

I strongly recommend if your salespeople are out of the office at all to get them a PalmPilot, CE, or other handheld device, which will synchronize with your SFA. The main difference between all the different handheld devices is there are two operating systems. The device will either be based in the Palm OS (operating system) or CE OS. It is like the difference between Mac and Windows for personal computers. The Palm technology is utilized by a majority of the brands, which means you’ll find more choices, many accessories, and is usually cheaper than CE based systems. You can think of the CE technology as a mini Windows system that offers the ability to create Word documents, link with Outlook, and even ACT! has a CE version.

Get Rid of Your Day Planner Book

One of the main principles in time and information management is to minimize the amount of places you track data. It is helpful to get rid of your day planner and keep all of your appointments in your SFA and just sync them with your handheld. Once again handhelds like any other technology are worthless if they are not used. You must make it a point to be religious with your information entry into your handheld.

A study by the CRM community showed salespeople who effectively utilize and enter information into an SFA and use it for sales tracking experience 30% increases in their sales performance. Remember, an SFA is only as good as the person who enters the information. You must learn the functionality of the SFA, understand its limitations, and make sure you use it religiously.

Before you begin to research which CRM or SFA is right for you, make a list of your company’s needs and the functions that would help your team’s productivity. Dissect how your sales process works in detail.

SFAs are the wave and mainstay of the future of sales. You must not avoid the use of this technology but embrace it and welcome its arrival. In the new economy your success depends on how quickly and efficiently you provide information to people. An SFA can help you to do that task more efficiently. There has to be a personal commitment to diligently enter information into your SFA on every occasion. They are a simply awesome tools which I can guarantee will make any salesperson, or corporation more successful and an SFA’s ROI (return on investment) is at least 10-15% annually.