Sales force automation - Unitedworld School of Business

2. Marketing Project

3. Sales Force Automation
• Sales force automation(SFA) is a technique of using
software to automate the business tasks of sales.
• SFA perform diverse task like……
• Order processing
• Contact management
• Information sharing
• Order tracking
• Customer management
• Sales forecast and analysis
• Inventory monitoring and control.

4. Purpose of SFA
• Increase Revenue: Improve day to day operation
and give competitive advantages.
• Reduce cost: Reduce the amount of time sales
force spends on administrative and other non-
sales related task , hence reduce the cost of sales.
• Increases availability of customer information:
SFA allows different departments and individual
in a organization to access specific information
about their customer.

5. Cont….
• Sales forecasting: AS SFA are equip with more
sophisticated tools, it help to do sales
forecasting. SFA help managers to successfully
predict sales and make intelligent business
decisions.
• Improve tracking by management: SFA allows
managers to better monitor the activities of the
sales force by reporting on the activities of the
sales force. SFA also allows managers to compare
the sales force progress with all other territories
or teams.

6. Case study: Hewlet Packard(Dyche , 2002)
• Hewlett Packard (HP) is one of the world largest and
most successful information technology organizations that
operates in nearly every country. HP markets its products to
households, small to medium size businesses and enterprises,
both directly, via online distribution, and indirectly through
consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers, software
partners and major technology vendors. HP was always
thought of as an innovative organization focused on
delivering an industry-leading customer experience. For this
reason, in the nineties HPs. CRM program director Mike
Overly was in charge of rolling out a worldwide CRM program
that included a complex SFA system. The following sections
will discuss what HP did, their main challenges in
implementation, and the results and learning from the
experience

7. What HP did
• Mike Overly and his CRM team knew that in order to deploy a
global CRM solution they would need to influence the entire
organization. HP chose an FSA system from their business
partner, Oracle. With the introduction of the new system HP
had to phase out numerous data, business processes and
technology systems. HP goal was to provide the company’s
global sales force with an automated and standard way to
perform contact management and account planning.
Everyone had their own rules and guidelines about managing
their customer activities, Overly said. But what makes a
customer happy is pretty universal (Dyche, 2002, p. 99). With
customer activity data in an Oracle “customer database”.

8. • HP could provide a remote salesperson with
the ability to track a customers activities
across organizations. For instance, the SFA
system allowed a salesperson to find out
which of his/her customers contacted a
company help desk, or could check up on how
particular customers were doing in terms of a
recent marketing campaign.

9. The Challenges
• Implementing a worldwide SFA system obviously results
in many challenges and HP was no exception. Overly
explained that the most challenging aspect of the SFA
implementation was creating a uniform system for the
diverse sales force. Overly and his team found that no
matter where in the world they went, the sales
representatives shared a common goal of being as
successful and productive as possible; however, every sales
person had a preferred way of getting the job done. During
the SFA system implementation Overly and his team had to
overcome habits and assumptions that were often not only
organizationally ingrained but also culturally embedded.
However, Overly was committed to creating an HP
solution, and he worked with Oracle to design a

10. Cont..
• system that allowed the sales force to customize their interfaces to
include client information and contact activities as well as data from
external news sources and the global financial markets. HP also developed
a training program in order to help the sales force apply the technology to
their specific job.
• Results and Learning
• Overly measured the overall success of the system based on three
primary measures” increased revenue, decreased costs and industry-
leading total customer experience. The overall results from the SFA
implementation were positive and Overly was confident that the system
would continue to pay off in the future. Overly was reluctant about
estimating the revenue generated by the SFA system, however his
optimism made it clear HP expects additional revenue to be generated by
the improvements resulting from the system.

11. Cont…
• Based on his experience with HP, Overly advised
other organizations that might be deploying CRM to
be mindful of three success metrics. First, organizations
should obtain sustained executive presence, meaning
that executive leadership must be engaged throughout
the CRM lifecycle. Second, organizations should always
keep one eye on the problems of today, and the other
on tomorrow’s problem. Third, organizations need to
ensure change leadership, with emphasis on the world
leader. Finally, Overly stressed that Every day there a
new challenge you need someone who has a good
understanding of the problem and the authority to fix
it.

12. Campus Overview
907/A Uvarshad,
Gandhinagar
Highway, Ahmedabad –
382422.
Ahmedabad Kolkata
Infinity Benchmark, 10th
Floor, Plot G1,
Block EP & GP,
Sector V, Salt-Lake,
Kolkata – 700091.
Mumbai
Goldline Business Centre
Linkway Estate,
Next to Chincholi Fire
Brigade, Malad (West),
Mumbai – 400 064.

13. Thank You