Page 357 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Customer Relationship Management

Notes
Examples:
1. Rather than write-out sales orders, reports, activity reports, and/or call sheets, sales people
can fill-in prepared e-forms. This saves time.
2. Rather than printing out reports and taking them to the sales manager, sales people can
use the company intranet to transmit the information. This saves time.
3. Rather than waiting for paper-based product-inventory data, sales-prospect lists, and sales-
support information, they will have access to the information when they need it. This
could be useful in the field when answering prospects’ questions and objections.
The additional tools could help improve sales staff morale if they reduce the amount of record
keeping and/or increase the rate of closing. This could contribute to a virtuous spiral of beneficial
and cumulative effects.
These sales force systems can be used as an effective and efficient training device. They provide
sales staff with product information and sales technique training without them having to waste
time at seminars.

 Better communication and co-operation between sales personnel facilitates successful
team selling.

 More and better qualified sales leads could be automatically generated by the software.
 This technology increases the sales person’s ratio of selling time to non-selling time. Non-
selling time includes activities like report writing, travel time, internal meetings, training,
and seminars.

Advantages to the Sales Manager

Sales force automation systems can also affect sales management. Here are some examples:
 The sales manager, rather than gathering all the call sheets from various sales people and
tabulating the results, will have the results automatically presented in easy to understand
tables, charts, or graphs. This saves time for the manager.
 Activity reports, information requests, orders booked, and other sales information will
be sent to the sales manager more frequently, allowing him/her to respond more directly
with advice, product in-stock verifications, and price discount authorizations. This gives
management more hands-on control of the sales process if they wish to use it.
 The sales manager can configure the system so as to automatically analyze the information
using sophisticated statistical techniques, and present the results in a user-friendly way.
This gives the sales manager information that is more useful in:
(a) Providing current and useful sales support materials to their sales staff.
(b) Providing marketing research data: Demographic, psychographic, behavioural,
product acceptance, product problems, detecting trends.
(c) Providing market research data: Industry dynamics, new competitors, new products
from competitors, new promotional campaigns from competitors, macro-
environmental scanning, detecting trends.
(d) Co-ordinate with other parts of the firm, particularly marketing, production, and
finance.
(e) Identifying your most profitable customers, and your problem customers.

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