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Two Ways Managers Can Benefit From Salesforce Automation

Who benefits most from sales force automation (SFA)? Sales reps? Sales managers? The company? Customers? The answer, of course, is "all of the above." While most SFA products are designed with the sales reps in mind, and that's is where most of the payback will be seen, here are Two Ways Managers Can Benefit From Salesforce Automation. 

We often think of salesforce automation (SFA) as primarily designed to benefit the sales team. And it can have an enormous impact on their success.

It can also impact your success as a sales manager. Here are two ways you, as a manager, can benefit from the information in your salesforce automation system:

1. Tracking The Effectiveness Of Your Sales Process

A major challenge in any sales organization is determining what is working and what is not. You certainly receive plenty of feedback from the sales reps ("The leads aren't qualified," "The demo needs to be updated,"), but you need more than anecdotal information to tell you where the greatest areas for improvement lie; you need data.

Here is an approach for developing an accurate data picture of the effectiveness of your sales process. Let's take a hypothetical sales cycle that involves four steps:

1. A prospect calls for information.
2. A face-to-face appointment is set up with qualified prospects.
3. The prospect attends a personalized demonstration of the product.
4. The prospect receives a proposal.

For most sales cycles, these steps are iterative; that is, all prospects go through them in sequence, and a prospect who falls out at any step does not go on to the next step.

Now let's attach some numbers to each step. Let's assume that 30% of all prospects who enter each step graduate to the next step in the sales process. What happens if we start with 100 prospects?

In this example, for every 100 prospects who enter the company's sales cycle, an average of less than one person becomes a customer. The overall success of the sales process is 0.81%.

In a real sales cycle, of course, the numbers are not this simple. Some steps are more successful than others, and some reps are more successful than others at moving prospects from one step to the next. But even small improvements in some of the steps can result in a big improvement in total results, as in this example:

Modest improvements in the effectiveness of just steps one and three of the process have resulted in more than doubling the closing rate.

Of course, the more successful your company is at each step in your sales process, the more difficult it becomes to make improvements in those steps. So your best strategy is to identify those steps where you have a high failure rate, and work on those first.

Here is what you need to do:

• Define the most common sales steps for your company. (You may need separate sets of steps for different product lines or sales groups.)
  
  
• Set up fields in your SFA system so reps can note when prospects complete each step in the cycle.
  
  
• After sufficient time for many prospects to pass all the way through the cycle, run reports to show the numbers of prospects who complete each step, segmenting the report by:

• Product line
• Sales channel
• Sales representative or team

Your summary reports will help you determine overall weak spots in your selling process. For example, if your success rate at the demo step is low, you may need to redesign your standard demo. Or perhaps the reps are not sufficiently qualifying prospects before the demo.

Your reports by channel, salesperson or sales team will likely point to performance or training issues you need to correct.

2. Reduced Literature And Mailing Costs

In the traditional sales model, prior to SFA, most organizations follow this pattern:

• A prospect calls and expresses interest in one of the company's products.
  
  
• A salesperson qualifies the prospect and agrees to send literature.
  
  
• The full, standard literature kit is mailed to the prospect, along with a standard cover letter that is personalized only with the prospect's name and address.

That standard kit usually includes information on the company's full product line. The total cost of the literature and postage can easily run $10 or more per package -- far more for air or international delivery.

This common approach to literature distribution is not only costly; it is also bad selling. Receiving too much information can actually slow, rather than facilitate, the prospect's decision.

This model changes drastically after SFA implementation and sales staff training:

• A prospect calls and expresses interest in one of the company's products.
  
  
• A salesperson qualifies the prospect and agrees to send literature on one or two specific products that most interest the prospect.
  
  
• The salesperson completes a special area in the SFA program specifying only those literature components that fit the prospect's current information needs. (There may also be a small overview brochure that briefly describes the company's entire product line.) With less literature, it is often practical to skip the expensive literature folder, which also reduces postage cost.
  
  
• The salesperson also writes a customized cover letter for the literature kit, using one of several standard letter templates. The customization includes:

• A brief recap of issues raised by the prospect during the call
• A description of the literature components included in the kit
• A call to action for the next sales step.

As a further variation on this model, some companies set up a prospect priority code in their SFA systems: Highest-priority prospects -- those having strategic value to the company or greatest dollar potential -- might receive a fully customized cover letter, an extensive literature kit and air delivery. Lowest-priority leads might receive a generic package that fits into a standard business envelope.

The key with any literature approach is to make it easy for the sales team to specify the right kit and method of mailing while they are recording the prospect's other information.

And as you revise your literature approach, be sure to measure the impact it has on your sales process, continually seeking ways to maximize conversion of prospects into customers while minimizing sales expense.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Art Siegel

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