The 7 ways automating your sales team takes cost out of your processes and increases sales volume

Sales force automation is about getting the right information into the right people’s hands at the right time. When that happens your sales force can sell more products, more easily. Here are my favourite reasons why:

1. Putting the right online tools into the hands of your sales teams saves calls to the office, written orders, faxed orders and return to base trips. If your team completes 8 calls a day that’s approximately an hour a call. If we save them 10 minutes a call, that’s 80 minutes a day. With a spare 80 minutes can they squeeze in one more sales call per day? That’s a one call a day, five a week, twenty a month – you work the numbers for the team.
2. An informed salesforce is a productive salesforce. You shouldn’t need to be paying support staff to be sending pricing, stock outs, credit holds and stock information to your road warriors.
3. Always be selling. Giving your sales staff the information they need to answer any customer query means they can increase their order to visit ratio. Same number of calls but more orders has to be good.
4. Up-selling and cross-selling. Most of you carry either higher value versions of the same product, complementary products, or both. Carrying all of those connections and opportunities in your head can be a real nightmare. By making them available automatically you’ll ensure you don’t miss any.
5. Avoid re-keying and double handling. A properly implemented sales force automation package delivers the orders into your financial systems instantaneously. This means each order can be handled just once, with the data going from sale to dispatch to recording.
6. Improved closure rate. We’ve all seen the young keen guy who is racing from sales call to sales call. He is wearing the shoe leather thin, but is he closing? Automating your team gives you the visibility you need, and him the tools to take orders on the spot.
7. Lastly, wouldn’t you love to know in real time how many calls your people are doing, how long the calls are taking, and whether they get an order? No more poring over week or month old sales reports, that’s what Sales Automation can do for your business.