Technology plays a major role today in supporting all aspects of the selling function. Benefits include improved relationships with customers and improved processes of finding qualified prospects and turning them into customers. Technology improves the sales communications process and supports effective presentation of products and services. Understand some of the available technologies used in selling functions to make your sales organization more effective.
Customer Relationship Management System
A customer relationship management system is software used to manage interactions between customers, prospects and suppliers. It encompasses many functions often handled by independent systems. Some of the primary objectives of a CRM system is to sell more customers, sell existing customers more products and services, reactivate old customers and continually improve the level of customer service provided.
Sales Force Automation (SFA)
To support the selling function, a SFA system makes the sales process more efficient. For a distributed sales force, remote salespeople are often setup to dial into a headquarters system daily and provide updated activity so that sales management can get immediate reports from the field. A sales force automation system keeps information for each prospect including such information as contact name, title, address, phone number and email address. Sales activities are recorded and scheduled in the system as well as opportunities and what stage they are at in the sales process.
Marketing Automation
A marketing department often uses a marketing automation system for the purpose of measuring the results of marketing campaigns and automating the marketing process. One example of an automated marketing process is the automatic delivery of a series of emails to a prospect followed by a scheduled phone call.
Predictive Dialer
If a company has an outbound sales department of telemarketers, a predictive dialer is