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Sales Process Management
Sales process management includes all the tasks associated with finding sales opportunities and closing deals. This includes:
F 0B 7 Prospecting and qualifying leads. F 0B 7 Managing contacts, opportunities, and accounts.
F 0B 7 Tracing the stages of deal closure and its related probabilities, including the variable compensations directly or indirectly related to closing deals. F 0B 7 Managing and tracking communications between salespeople and customers, such as conducting direct e-mail campaigns. F 0B 7 Maintaining a database of product information in a format that‘s easy for the
sales force to access, either online in the office or offline at a customer site.
Forms of Sale Activity
The term sales is includes many activities some of the various modes of selling
include:
F 0B 7 Direct Sales - involving face-to-face contact
- Retail or consumer
- Door-to-door or travelling salesman
- Party plan
F 0B 7 Industrial/Professional Sales - selling from one business to another
- Business-to-business
F 0B 7 Indirect - human-mediated but with indirect contact
- Telemarketing or telesales
- Mail-order F 0B 7 Electronic
- web B2B, B2C
- EDI F 0B 7 Agency-based
- consignment
- multi-level marketing
- sales agents (real estate, manufacturing)
Types of sales include:
F 0B 7 Transaction sales F 0B 7 Consultative sales F 0B 7 Complex sales
ACTIVITY :
1. What do you mean by a Sales process? What are the forms of a
information systems and sales processes in order to increase their external competitiveness.
The origin of SFA can be traced back to the original personal computers adopted by salespeople in the early 1980‘s to perform basic transaction processes. Towards the end of the decade, microcomputer applications were introduced and were touted as increasing the ‗learning curve‘ of salespeople in helping them correctly identify customers and execute sales methods. Soon after these applications were introduced salespeople saw the introduction of mobile communication devices such as mobile phones and pagers. It was not until the early 1990s that the sales force caught up with the rest of the organization and finally started to embed IT into its operations at the organizational, individual and team level.
SFA Definition
There is a wide spectrum of sales and IT related activities that are considered part of
SFA. Although there is no universal definition, is the most commonly used, ―sales force automation involves converting manual sales activities to electronic processes through the use of various combinations of hardware and software applications.‖ This paper will use this definition as the framework to review previous research and to orientate the proposed methodology.
Organisational level:
The underpinning question that organizational level analysis aims to answer is whether there are any organizational benefits from SFA, and if there are what are they and how are they achieved and maintained?. First, it empirically found a positive relationship between the functional breadths of the SFA buying committee and overall organizational
system benefits. Additionally, firms that had the combined intent to improve both operational efficiency and to establish a strategic competitive edge proved to have greater pay-off than simply those who aimed to automate manual selling tasks. These findings further contributed to SFA research and presented the question of economically quantifying SFA facilitated improvements. Improving an organization‘s efficiencies‘ was the overriding factor behind initiating SFA projects. Paradoxically, the majority of respondents could not expand on ‗improved efficiencies‘ when asked to do so. Suggestions for future work shifted towards investigating post-implementation situations and field sales representatives‘ experience relative to their performance. Considering these two important studies, we can see that the SFA research focus quickly encompassed a wide array of topics. The most recent organizational study evaluated the distance between management and the sales force in terms of their respective perceptions of SFA planning, communication and evaluation. The study highlights the difference in opinion of these two groups in regard to SFA trade-offs and benefits. Although both had the same goal of increased efficiency, both projected different effects from the system. Management sought increased sales with less sales people versus the sales person‘s view to increase individual sales through activity automation. This dichotomy of intended benefits can often be attributed to a multitude of individual level analysis factors which influence SFA adoption and utilization.
Individual Level
SFA research at the individual level has become a multi-dimensional research area. There are many variables which can affect the maximization of the system and sales performance. The highest sales producers were those that rated ‗high‘ on acceptance positive attitude towards new technology and also in number of years of experience. Overall, a strong connection between the salesperson‘s attitude type towards using new technology in the day-day activities and years of experience in relation to sales success existed. A study investigated attitude factors that impacted levels of SFA ‗infusion.‘ ‗Infusion‘ was defined as ―the extent to which the salesperson fully
implementation, is to understand why others fail. A recent study offered valuable insights into how not to manage SFA. The authors investigated SFA adoption through the ‗identity theory‘ framework. Logically, sales-people are often more autonomous than other members of the enterprise. As such, they react differently to organizational changes such as SFA. Suitably, the focus on specific elements that make up the salesperson‘s ‗identity‘ which contribute to and are impacted by their level of adoption. The authors investigated the relationships between individual perceptions of technology (comprised of individual traits, disposition toward technology, role perception and organization characteristics) and their professional state on the person- technology fit and measured to the extent to which these relationships influenced both subjective (such as job satisfaction) and the objective (for example salesperson retention) Alarmingly, the results indicated that initial enthusiasm and adoption of the system quickly decreased following the initial training and implementation and ultimately resulted in increased rejection of the system by the sale force. Their analysis highlighted the fact that if SFA is not supported in an ongoing manner, it can lead to low levels of ‗person-technology fit.‘ This in turn can lead to wider organizational problems such as poor job satisfaction and ultimately salesperson turnover. This critical business problem is one that requires analysis at the organizational, individual and team level. The discussion above suggests that SFA does not sustain any benefits for field sales representatives and also poses managerial headaches in terms of cost employee productivity and morale. However, some suggest otherwise. Increased sales person productivity is an inherently assumed benefit of SFA, however, there are few empirical studies to either prove or disprove this assertion. Furthermore, which areas of sales activities are enhanced by SFA and to what degree? the wide array of SFA technologies is categorized into categories that primarily reflected their impact on sales activities: organizing, presenting, reporting, informing, supporting and processing
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transactions and communicating. Their robust analysis revealed valuable insights into which technologies where being used in the field. The organizing category, more specifically, contact management, was the overriding category area with the greatest improvement in efficiency. The second important finding was that an enhancement in communication with both clients and the home office greatly increased with some form of SFA. The interaction and SFA usage with team members at the home office is a related issue which should be researched in the future to address team dynamics.
T he changing nature of sales roles
Several recent studies have provided a deeper drill-down on the complexities on
SFA
adoption and effectiveness on experienced users of SFA. Their research examined the technology stressors related to SFA and the level of infusion of SFA into sales representatives‘ daily work. In sum, the research quantified that as the complexity of the sales person‘s task to integrate the new technology into the work increased, the related effort and time they dedicated to this activity decreased. Put simply, sales people felt overwhelmed with the level of impact SFA changed their routines and even the nature of their roles. This issue cannot be overlooked or underestimated in regards to the impact it can have on SFA success. Likewise, the integration of SFA within broader organization initiatives can have both negative and positive effects on sales performance.
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