Sales Automation

Sales automation is a technique used by companies of today to automate the business tasks of sales department which includes contact management, information sharing, inventory monitoring, customer management, sales forecasting, order tracking , employee performance analysis etc.

Sales automation software is generally the CRM software which holds the information pertaining to the customers regarding their preferences, personal information, payment history, purchase history etc.

CRM is the central repository of data which holds all the important information required by the enterprise to achieve to their marketing and support objectives apart from achieving sales objectives.

Sales automation software automatically takes note of all stages in the sales process. It includes the contact management system with tracks all the contacts made with a specific customer, the purpose of this contact and any follow-up which might be required in the near future to ascertain that all the needs of the customer pertaining to the product or service are being taken care off. This ensures high degree of customer satisfaction while eliminating the risk of repeating the sales effort which might irritate the customer.

It also has sales lead tracking system which contains list of potential customers and information about them which helps the sales person to target them with offer that is most suitable for them .This central management system ensures that no two persons cater to the same lead and also they have the complete picture of the potential customer before pitch him with their offer.

Another important component of sales automation software is order management system while helps both customer and company to track their purchase order. Company uses it to track their order from vendors and suppliers while customer use it to track their product order from the company itself. It also helps the company to issue a purchase request automatically to the vendor when the once the inventory reaches below the threshold level configured by the company making the whole process more efficient.

Sales forecasting though sales automation software can be done by analyzing the past trends and data available to the enterprise which is displayed to the person operating it in terms of graphs and other relevant visualizations through which he can effectively forecast the future demand of particular product with respect to different regions where the company operates. This helps the firm in effective financial, inventory, and manufacturing planning.

It also helps the enterprise in managing the credit made available by it to its customers. Based on the past track record companies can fix certain credit limit for each and every customer, which if breached would be informed by the sales automation software to the enterprise about it and then the enterprise can either limit credit to the customer or can ask for immediate payment from the customer. They can also feed credit cycle or bill cycle for the customer, which notifies the company of payment collection once the cycle comes to an end. Same process can implemented for vendors which will inform the company to pay the amount to them once the bill cycle completes its course. Contract renewal notification is another important feature of this software which notifies the enterprise of the date when the existing contract terminates and need to renew it with their existing vendors and customers.

Hence, sales automation adds a great sense of proficiency and efficiency to the operations of an enterprise while significantly cutting down on costs and errors which an enterprise might endure during the normal course of operation. It also helps the firm to increase its revenue through customer acquisition and by increased customer loyalty. It also presents the firm with hot selling and cold selling opportunities which further augments their revenues.

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