Rick Volz
Do you want to increase revenue, capturing customer and market share? Don’t bet on your Sales Force Automation implementation being the investment to achieve it!
Most SFA tools are designed to record what activities a salesperson has accomplished … assuming of course, that they consistently input the data. The tools themselves add very little value to the salesperson. In fact, most salespeople view data entry as an arduous task and a waste of valuable selling time.
To a sales manager, the SFA tool provides a view to activities and opportunities that are in the pipeline. But is that all the sales manager would really like to know? Wouldn’t they like to know the potential opportunities that SHOULD BE in the pipeline but are not?
What SFA applications don’t do and what is MOST important to ANY successful sales process is to direct a salesperson and sales manager on where to focus their efforts to increase revenue the most. Since what SFA systems do best is track history, they don’t identify the most probable opportunities for customer expansion and new customer acquisition!
The SFA application needs to be fed intelligence about the best specific opportunities for each salesperson by product/service, for every potential customer and prospect account in the target market’s universe.
What if a sales strategy and specific sales tactics could be outlined for each individual opportunity and each individual prospect? Would such valuable information in the hands of the sales organization shorten the sales cycle? Would that be a value-add for the salesperson? Would that add value to the SFA tool?
This is real Sales Enablement and a strong competitive advantage. Companies that have borrowed plays from the B2C marketers’ playbooks have moved to a proactive, analytics-driven program to supplement their SFA tools, and rapidly filled their pipelines in the process. Would your company consider investing in THAT capability to increase revenue?
About the Author:
Rick Volz is a Business-to-Business Practice Leader for SIGMA Marketing Group, responsible for thought-leadership and business solutions in the B2B market. Follow Rick on or connect with him on .
