CUSTOMER

RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT
 REVISION LECTURE
UNIT V
SALES FORCE AUTOMATION

SALE PROCESS: A sales process is a systematic methodology for

performing product or service sales. The reasons for having a sales
process include seller and buyer risk management, achieving
standardized customer interaction in sales and scalable revenue
generation.
Forms of Sale Activity
The term sales is includes many activities some of the various
modes of selling include:
➢➢ Direct Sales - involving face-to-face contact
1. Retail or consumer
2. Door-to-door or travelling salesman
3. Party plan
➢➢ Industrial/Professional Sales - selling from one business
to another
1. Business-to-business
➢➢ Indirect - human-mediated but with indirect contact
1. Telemarketing or telesales
2. Mail-order
➢➢ Electronic
1. Web B2B, B2C
2. EDI
➢➢ Agency-based
1. Consignment
2. Multi-level marketing
3. Sales agents (real estate, manufacturing)
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.”

Lead Management:
Lead Management is designed to optimize the initial pre-sales process, freeing up
your sales department to focus on the most valuable prospects and opportunities.
For a given marketing campaign, you may wish to generate leads for certain
business partners within a target group. You use leads to qualify the level of
interest presented by these business partners, with a view to transforming them
into opportunities. Both customers and prospects can be considered as leads. For
example, an existing customer may be a lead for a new project you are working
on.
Knowledge management is a continuing cyclical process with
no end, not a linear one with a single goal. A knowledge
management system will therefore be continually evolving, or
learning, and any technology used to implement it must
support evolution and learning. This point is worth repeating:
knowledge management is a continuous ongoing process, not
something to be done only once.
The three Pillars of Knowledge Management are Technology,
Process and People.
The objectives of Knowledge Management can be briefed as
creating knowledge repositories, improving knowledge
access, enhancing the knowledge environment and managing
knowledge as an asset.
Field Force Automation (FFA), a comprehensive software application
combining proven, optimal resource management and superior street
routing. In addition, FFA software’s powerful integration capabilities
and use of standard protocols can improve field services by enhancing
and automating business processes across a variety of work
management and corporate systems. FFA delivers significant
efficiencies and cost savings to technical field service teams within large
and small organizations.
CRM links in e-Business: E-Commerce and Customer Relationships on
the Internet
ECRM
With eCRM, manufacturers have the opportunity to take customer interaction to new
levels of effectiveness by integrating customer information otherwise hoarded by
customer service, marketing, and sales departments and making it available across the
organisation to improve the overall customer experience.Some large companies are
gaining significant competitive advantage by using
Information Technology (IT) and business to analyze and manage their relationship with
each customer. This trend is relevant to many larger companies. While smaller
companies tend to rely on people, rather than computers, to track and manage their
customer relationships, this trend is still relevant to them because: -
Most IT driven changes in large companies sooner or later are adapted by progressive
smaller companies, as relevant software packages suited to the needs and budgets of
SMEs are developed. Any SME planning an overall medium term eBusiness/IT strategy
thus needs to consider whether aspects of CRM are likely to be relevant to that strategy