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Customer Relationship Management

Notes SFA functionality can also help forecast your sales pipeline. Forecasting sales opportunities
enables companies to forecast products or services that will be sold within a specified timeline,
the monetary/unit amount of products or services sold, and the likelihood of selling those
products or services. Forecast management may also be based by employees or territories, they
may compare the adjustments over time so sales managers can see the changes, and the forecast
could be compared to a sales users’ quota.

14.1 Overview of Sales Force Automation

Sales force automation refers to automating all the actions related to sales of an organization or
business. This is a coordination of applications that chiefly center on scheduling and contact
management. Sales force automation actions are usually incorporated with other systems that
supply the status of orders, inventory and products and other related information and can be a
part of a bigger program of customer relationship management. Abbreviated SFA, a technique
of using software to automate the business tasks of sales, including order processing, contact
management, information sharing, inventory monitoring and control, order tracking, customer
management, sales forecast analysis and employee performance evaluation.
Sales force automation helps by making all business actions pertaining to sales, automatic.
These actions include:
 Keeping a track of orders.
 Meting out of orders.

 Contact management.
 Sharing sales information and statistics.
 Screening and control of inventory.
 Analyzing future sales patterns and behavior.

 Evaluating performance of employees in sales.
In short, sales force automation can help you to control your entire sales process from head to
toe.

Sales Force Automation (SFA) software is a type of program that automates business tasks such
as inventory control, sales processing, and tracking of customer interactions, as well as analyzing
sales forecasts and performance. Businesses may have a custom version developed specifically
for their needs, or choose from among the increasing number of sales automation software
products, such as Interact Commerce’s ACT! and GoldMine Software’s GoldMine. Sales
automation software is sometimes called sales automation software, and sometimes called
Customer Relations Management (CRM) software.

14.1.1 Sales Force Automation Solution

Nowadays there is a variety of software and solutions available for sales force automation that
can help small, mid size, and large enterprises to meet and surpass their sales targets and
initiatives. All the information provided by such solutions can help businesses to analyze their
sales and pinpoint future trends and courses.
SFA packages typically include a Web-ready database, an e-mail package, and customizable
template s. A three-tiered architecture is typically used to separate the database, server, and
application to reduce programming demands on clients.

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