What is Sales Force Automation?

Sales Force Automation (SFA) is the process of automating repetitive tasks in a sales process with the help of any kind of CRM system or an automation tool. Before we talk more about this, let's briefly introduce the sales cycle:

Sales cycle:

 

Why SFA?

Scope for automation:

"A recent study on Time Management by Insidesales.com says that only 37% of a sales rep's time is spent on actual spending. More importantly, the study found the declining role of CRM in the lives of sales reps as they spend only 18% of their time in CRM and worse than that 10% of their time is used in spreadsheets to perform the tasks that the CRM can perform for them."

This data has almost remained the same since 2017. Despite evolving technologies to help solve most of the problems businesses face, the data remains similar. Some pressing reasons for this might be a struggle to choose the right CRM, understanding which CRM would be best for a particular business, the CRM must be easy for them to understand and use and in many cases, they just want to stay put with the existing system because the change will take time and an adjustment period. To help sales reps focus more of their time on selling, the job they do best, and less on taking on the backend work to help them easily accomplish such tasks, automating all the repetitive tasks in the sales cycle is ideally the best and recommended practice. This is exactly what Sales force Automation is set out to do. We don't have to say twice, lost time is lost revenue.

Different processes that can be automated with Sales Force Automation.

The sales cycle has a series of processes that has the potential to be automated. Let's discuss them one by one.

• Lead generation: 

Lead generation is the process where a company brings in new leads with various marketing efforts like email campaigns, social media campaigns, advertisements, and shows among other efforts. In this stage, SFA will help sales reps stay on top of prospects with the help of email automation, scheduled follow-up calls etc. The bar raises when SFA is in the picture.

• Lead scoring:

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a score to the leads and customers based on the criteria that are accepted by a particular business. It varies for different businesses. With SFA, lead scoring is automated and sales reps and managers can prioritise leads that need attention and ones that are most likely to close a deal with the company.

• Emails:

McKinsey Global Institute's study suggests that an average sales rep spends around 28 per cent of their work week managing e-mail. Email is an integral part of a sales rep's life. There's no denying that. But just using emails is different from how far it helps in improving your business. With SFA, the amount of time sales reps spend on emails will be considerably reduced since you can have templates for emails that are sent often. You can also automate the time and schedule follow-up emails to leads and customers thereby reducing. Once SFA is implemented, sales reps will only spend meaningful time with email interactions that will contribute directly to closing a deal and not on repetitive email tasks.

• Lead Assignment: 

Whenever a lead enters the sales pipeline, it has to be assigned to a particular sales rep for further nurturing. With SFA, whenever a lead comes in, the system will automatically look at the incoming lead, analyse the available users and assign it to the user that can handle it best. This simple assignment task saves a huge chunk of time for both sales managers and sales reps.

• Activity tracking:

Activity tracking is ensured with SFA where all the customer interactions between sales reps and the leads/customers are stored in the automation tool used. This ensures that we understand where each lead stands, the number of calls and meetings scheduled with them, and the best course of action to take next. By having all of this information in one place, we can also understand what can be done next to ensure deal closure.

• Customer management:

Without SFA, individual sales reps will keep track of their customers and all customer-related information. With any SFA tool, customer management is made simple by having all customer-related data in one centralised place. This enables any user within the SFA tool to access the information and also combats the loss of data if any of the sales reps happen to leave the organisation.

• Sales forecasting: 

With sales forecasting in any SFA tool, you can understand the sales trends and predict revenue based on the patterns. In many automation tools, you can also create and assign targets for sales reps easily. With this understanding, so many important marketing and managerial decisions can be made that will aid in the overall company growth.

• Reporting:

Without SFA, sales managers and sales reps have to manually analyse data to arrive at any kind of report or pattern which is time-consuming. With an efficient SFA tool, reports are readily available for most of the data that would take days for a sales manager to understand. In several SFA tools, it's also possible to create custom reports required based on the data available in the system.

These are some of the possibilities with SFA. When implemented, it will only take your process one step higher and help you scale up and grow your business to the next level. When all your sales reps and sales managers are free to do the work that matters, SFA will aid and help them do just that thereby contributing to increased productivity, improved team collaboration and increased revenue among other things. 

Benefits of SFA:

in the business:

• How SFA influences and benefits a Sales representative?

• How SFA influences and benefits a Sales Manager?

• How businesses having an SFA is beneficial to the customers? 

How SFA influences and benefits a Sales representative?

The major players who are involved in selling and bringing customers to your business are the incomparable sales representatives in your organisation. SFA benefits them in numerous ways that allow them to prioritise leads, focus more on selling, understand where they stand in the sales process, maintain efficient and timely relationships with customers and so on. Let's talk about SFA benefits the sales reps in your business.

• Keep track of where a lead is in the sales pipeline always: By having a proper Sales force automation system in place, a sales rep can always understand where the lead is in a particular sales cycle and take action according to that.

• Scoring leads based on their previous interaction to understand how close they are to buying: By analysing and understanding previous interactions, with the help of SFA, you can score leads and customers. Based on this score, sales reps can figure out how close they're to buying from the business and invest time and effort to make it sooner rather than later.

• Focus on leads and deals that need attention on time: Having a proper SFA in place will help sales reps have a clear picture of which leads to focus on and when. Instead of them manually going through the leads and deciding who needs their attention, SFA will. This will put in place an effective communication system for the sales reps and the company.

• All your data in one place: Instead of using different tools to manage the sales process, all the data will have to be in a single place to perform SFA. This in itself will be an incredible value add to sales reps. They can quickly get the required information and send emails from within the tool itself thus again freeing up a lot of back and forth tab switching to look at your data.

• Automating repetitive tasks will free up time for the sales reps to focus on selling: Implementing SFA will help sales reps to avoid a lot of manual tasks that they perform on a day-to-day basis and free up a chunk of their time that they can utilise on strategising and selling.

• Schedule calls, and meetings and send emails with the click of a button: With SFA and all your data in one place, you can easily schedule calls, and meetings and also send emails with the click of a button. Say you have a CRM system with SFA implementation, it will have a separate entity where a sales rep can manage all the calls, emails and meetings from within the system itself.

• Have templates in place for kinds of email: Sending emails is an incessant part of a sales rep's life. He/She drafts and sends the same email to different leads and customers. With SFA implementation done, you can create different templates of the kind of emails sales reps usually send and voila. With a click of a button, emails are sent. This may sound so simple, yet the importance of this is infinite. This is a game changer for sales reps.

• Having SFA increases productivity: Having an efficient SFA system in place will increase the overall productivity of the sales reps because now that all of their mundane day-to-day tasks and activities are automated, they can focus on selling and do more than what they were doing without an SFA.

• SFA means the lesser scope for error: When a system is not in place and the entire process is left to be managed by sales reps, human error is bound to occur. When SFA is implemented, tested and in place, there is lesser scope for human error. Like dialling the wrong number or sending the email to the wrong person. All their details are available within the CRM system and they can call and send emails from within the CRM itself.

• Availability towards customers: Implementing SFA helps in understanding where a customer stands in the sales cycle. With this understanding, a sales rep will know how much and when they will have to be readily available to the leads and customers. They're on guard all the time and thereby making sure the customers get the help and support they need in the buying process.

• Increases overall competence of the sales reps: When sales reps get out of manually performing the repetitive tasks and adapt to the SFA system, then that contributes to them learning about the tool that is being used to implement SFA. It also shows how sales reps will push their boundaries, learn more and thereby end up increasing their overall competence by looking for new ways to improve the sales process. 

How SFA influences and benefits a Sales manager?

A sales manager who is monitoring the sales reps that are using a spreadsheet to run a business or any kind of tool without any automation in place is going to suffer as much as a sales rep is, probably more. Each sales rep will work a different way and have their data organised differently and the sales manager has to go through all of that unorganised, chaotic data to understand which are the leads in the pipeline, how business is performing and not just that, also monitor how a sales rep is performing in the organisation. It's as difficult as it sounds but unfortunately many businesses still run this way. If there is a proper SFA in place, then his/her job becomes much easier. They will have a common format of how data which in itself makes such a huge difference. Let's take a look at how SFA will benefit a Sales manager:

• Organised data, all in one place: It's the same benefit from a manager's point of view. Keeping track of multiple sales reps and their way of tracking leads and customers is a tedious task. This can be avoided when you implement SFA for your business with any kind of automation tool or CRM. All the data is in one place in a single format and it's easier for a sales manager to navigate and make sense of the data.

• Stay on top of the activities of sales reps: Having implemented SFA with any automation tool or with CRM will help you get the bigger picture of where leads are in the sales cycle and also stay on top of the activities of sales reps. You can understand what leads a particular sales rep is talking to, the number of calls he had, emails he had sent etc. With this, it's easier for sales managers to redirect sales reps wherever their attention is required.

• Assign targets to sales reps, monitor and alter them periodically with Sales forecasting: With sales forecasting available in CRM systems, sales managers can assign monthly or weekly or daily targets to sales reps, and monitor them periodically. Based on the performance of the sales reps, sales managers can also change the targets by increasing or decreasing them. This is another excellent scope of implementing SFA for your business in an efficient CRM system.

• Analyse the performance of sales reps with reports: Almost all of the CRMs will have inbuilt reports to understand the performance of the sales reps. If 1000 leads have entered the system through lead prospecting, you can see the number of leads and in which stage they are, how close they're to buying and expected revenue generation. All of these reports are readily available for sales managers based on which they can strategise a sales process to close more deals.

• Avoid decision fatigue and efficiently perform managerial actions with SFA: Decision fatigue is real among managers who aren't even aware of what their sales reps are up to and how many deals are closed. With SFA, managers can have all the required information neatly laid out before them which will help them beat that fatigue and efficiently perform their duties.

• Redirect sales reps to prioritise leads that require attention based on which stage they are in the sales pipeline: With an understanding of where leads stand in the pipeline, sales managers can redirect sales reps to focus and prioritize the leads identified as those that require immediate attention.

• Arrest stagnation of leads: SFA implementation will make sure leads or deals are not stagnant and that they keep moving. When implementing SFA, managers can also set reminders/alerts to alert him/her when a lead or deal is at a particular stage for longer than the desired duration.

• Automatic lead assignment to sales reps frees up managers to focus on more important tasks: With SFA implementation in certain CRM systems, sales managers will have the option to automatically assign leads that enter the system to sales reps based on specific criteria. Sales managers can set it up once and leads will be automatically assigned. This will again free up managers' time which can be used for selling.

• An overall increase in productivity and decrease in the overhead: It boosts the overall productivity of sales managers and sales reps. Repetitive tasks are automated and this results in the reduction of overhead.

• Increases the overall quality of customer relationships: It increases the overall quality of customer interactions within the system. Now there is a time and a step-by-step process configured in the tool as part of SFA and this means, no wondering what to do next. Sales reps and managers can know when to contact them and when to leave them alone. Believe it or not, knowing when to leave them alone is key is closing their deal. This in itself will improve empathy and the quality of customer relationships. 

How businesses having an SFA is beneficial to the customers?

Leaving aside how SFA is beneficial for businesses and their sales reps, the goal of any business is to serve its customers. No business owner will deny that. Without customers, there is no business. In such a case, how is having an inefficient system going to serve them in any way? When businesses haven't implemented SFA, their interactions with customers are completely different from how they maintain customer relationships with a proper SFA in place. Any customer will want their requirements to be remembered, wants a timely response and simply put, effective communication. All this will only help the customer build a strong bond with the business which in turn will contribute to upselling and cross-selling. It's all tied together. Let's see how customers will benefit from an SFA in place.

• Availability of Sales reps: Most of the customers might get tired of waiting around for a call that the sales rep probably forgot. They will move on to the competitor. With an SFA, customers feel remembered and cared for by having sales reps readily available for their requirements.

• Effective understanding of their requirements: With an efficient SFA and not a spreadsheet, sales reps tend to analyse their buying behaviour and know their requirements accurately. SFA in automation tools enables sales reps to take notes and thereby customers will appreciate sales reps remembering what they were talking about in the previous call. This is a game changer instead of customers wasting time explaining it all over again.

• Timely response by sales reps and sales managers: Customers will appreciate the timely help and response they get from sales reps and sales managers in case of escalations. This will ensure they stay with the brand or not.

• Effective communication: Effective communication is established between a customer and a business that uses SFA. Respecting the privacy of the customers, ensuring availability before calling them randomly and having a brief history of what the customer wants with the businesses. All of these qualities are inherent with an SFA system in place that triggers efficient and clean communication.

• Brand loyalty: All of the qualities above combined will contribute to brand loyalty. A satisfied customer will remain loyal to the brand and we want more of them. It's easier to convince loyal customers to buy more than generate new leads because they're already familiar about your business.

  Difference between SFA and CRM?

CRM and Sales Force Automation are often misunderstood to be the same but it's not.

A CRM is a tool which is built to maintain customer relationships and save all the information about a lead or a customer in it. Sales force automation might also be built into a CRM. Many CRMs now offer SFA as part of the CRM features.

There are also separate SFA automation tools that are not part of a CRM that will specifically focus on Sales force automation processes like scheduling email replies.

A combination of SFA and CRM can be an unstoppable force to run a business.

Checklist for an efficient SFA:

There is an unpopular opinion that implementation of Sales force automation can be tricky and if done wrong, it can cause cost customers and businesses. To avoid that you can have a checklist to implement Sales Force automation efficiently in place. Having this will help you be cautious in areas where you might go wrong and avoid damage. Use the following points to note to implement SFA efficiently for your business:

• Know and thoroughly understand your business and the sales process involved including every step of the sales cycle.

• It's important to identify what you're trying to accomplish by having SFA in place. Some businesses might want to go all in and automate the entire process. Some businesses start small and scale up. It's important to document the accomplishments you expect from setting up SFA.

• From your sales process, identify areas of automation. By doing this, you can easily automate simple tasks first and take them forward from there.

• It's also equally important to start the automation effort by understanding the tool you have in mind, and the constraints in it and then plan implementation according to the limitations or look for a different tool.

• Once you identify and implement SFA, you must perform a test run with some of your partners or customers, get input and make the necessary changes.

• Personalize the communication with customers in every way possible even via automation. It might be a small thing as including their name in the email or even a big deal where the sales rep remembers the previous conversation with the customer because they had taken notes after the call. All of this will help in personalising the automation efforts thereby making the customer feel like they're cared for.

• Frequently monitor your SFA and identify areas of improvement. This is a game-changer. The tool you have in place will probably be possible more and as and when your business scales up, keep identifying areas other areas where automation is possible and implement them.

 Why choose Zoho CRM?

Now that you have an overall understanding of Sales Force Automation as a process and a necessity, the next step is identifying the proper tool that will help you achieve that and more. This is a crucial phase where you evaluate different automation tools and CRM in the market and choose the one that suits your organisation in the best possible way. The CRM you choose should be able to fit your business like a glove. Let's talk about Zoho CRM and why you should choose that for your business.

• Ease of use: When evaluating a CRM, this is one of the major make-or-break factors in deciding which CRM to choose. Imagine a CRM which has all the features you want but requires you to undergo special training before you're able to use it. That's you investing a lot of money in a CRM system and some more time in learning how to use it. Zoho CRM is designed in such a way that it's simple, straightforward and easy to use. With its friendly user interface and direct and visible features, it's one of the best CRMs out there for your business.

• Inbuilt SFA: Zoho CRM has the inbuilt Sales Force automation modules and most of the processes that we discussed. It has a Leads, Contacts, and Deals module to maintain leads and customers and their purchases. It has Activity modules to maintain the customer interaction data. Apart from that, there are infinite other possibilities that help you manage emails, calls, chat and everything better.

• Scalability and affordability: With the countless CRM tools available for users, why should you choose Zoho CRM? One of the main reasons is the flexibility of this tool to suit any kind of business. It can be immensely useful to a company that's just starting. As and when they scale up, they'll need additional features, they'll add more users and more data. A CRM system should withstand the n number of requirements that users throw at it while not burning a hole in your pocket. Zoho CRM is just that and much more. It's flexible, scalable and affordable for every kind of business out there.

• Ease of migration: If this box isn't checked then that CRM isn't for you. Especially when a business is looking for a change from one CRM system to another or if they're moving their data from a spreadsheet, migration should be stable and smooth. With Zoho CRM, you can migrate from any CRM or SFA system effortlessly with just a series of clicks and voila, you're set to manage your business.

• Infinite Automation possibilities: Apart from SFA, there are infinite automation possibilities which Zoho CRM has to offer your business. You can create and execute workflow rules for different parts of your sales cycle where you can automate a bunch of repetitive tasks like sending emails, updating a record,  scheduling a call etc. You can also classify customers based on their buying behaviour, and perform lead assignments automatically among other automation.

• Zoho CRM's customisation possibilities: This comes under scalability. What's there in the CRM at the face value doesn't necessarily have to be what works for your business. Zoho CRM can be customised end to end and tailor-made for any kind of business with its infinite customisation possibilities. If the features available aren't enough for you, you can always build more by using Zoho CRM's developer space.

• Data Privacy and Security: Another major factor in the decision-making that goes into choosing a CRM system is 'How safe is it?' which is an important question.  At Zoho, we value users' privacy and give it our all to make sure data is secure. Zoho has multiple data centres in different parts of the world that aids in this noble goal. Wherever GDPR is applicable, GDPR compliance can be enabled in your CRM account. With Zoho CRM, your data is safe and your business is easy to run.

• Integration with other Zoho applications and third-party applications: Zoho CRM can be integrated quickly with other Zoho applications and we also host a variety of third-party applications to be integrated with Zoho CRM. Not just that, even if a third-party application you're looking for isn't available, which is mostly never the case, you can always integrate them with the help of custom functions and API.

• Efficient business process management: From a lead entering your system to deal closure and even support beyond that, Zoho CRM can implement your entire business process online as it is offline. Not just that, it can also monitor every step taken in the sales process to make sure everyone is on the right track.

• Omni channel communication: Customer interaction plays a major role in any business. Zoho CRM allows you to communicate effectively with your leads and customers through various channels like social media, calls, messages, emails, chat with website visitors etc and having all the relevant information in a single CRM system enables efficient omni channel communication.

• You get Zia, Zoho's inbuilt Artificial intelligent assistant: On top of all of this, we present to you, Zia, Zoho's inbuilt artificial intelligent assistant that will aid and assist you in every possible way. You can just pick up your phone and start asking questions and Zia will answer them for you. With Zia, you can automatically get the information you need, assign leads, understand and analyse trends, take notes, and automate tasks among other things.

• Mobile support: With everything on the go, we need a CRM system that's also on the go. Zoho CRM offers all the features in its mobile application thereby ensuring connectivity and conducting business wherever you go.