Understanding Technology's Role in Sales: Sales Process Management & Automation, Study notes of Business Administration

Download Understanding Technology's Role in Sales: Sales Process Management & Automation and more Study notes Business Administration in PDF only on Docsity! Sales Process Management Sales process management includes all the tasks associated with finding sales opportunities and closing deals. This includes: F 0 B 7 Prospecting and qualifying leads. F 0 B 7 Managing contacts, opportunities, and accounts. F 0 B 7 Tracing the stages of deal closure and its related probabilities, including the variable compensations directly or indirectly related to closing deals. F 0 B 7 Managing and tracking communications between salespeople and customers, such as conducting direct e-mail campaigns. F 0 B 7 Maintaining a database of product information in a format that‘s easy for the sales force to access, either online in the office or offline at a customer site. Forms of Sale Activity The term sales is includes many activities some of the various modes of selling include: F 0 B 7 Direct Sales - involving face-to-face contact 1. Retail or consumer 2. Door-to-door or travelling salesman 3. Party plan F 0 B 7 Industrial/Professional Sales - selling from one business to another 1. Business-to-business F 0 B 7 Indirect - human-mediated but with indirect contact 1. Telemarketing or telesales 2. Mail-order F 0 B 7 Electronic 1. web B2B, B2C 2. EDI F 0 B 7 Agency-based 1. consignment 2. multi-level marketing 3. sales agents (real estate, manufacturing) Types of sales include: F 0 B 7 Transaction sales F 0 B 7 Consultative sales F 0 B 7 Complex sales ACTIVITY : 1. What do you mean by a Sales process? What are the forms of a system benefits. Additionally, firms that had the combined intent to improve both operational efficiency and to establish a strategic competitive edge proved to have greater pay-off than simply those who aimed to automate manual selling tasks. These findings further contributed to SFA research and presented the question of economically quantifying SFA facilitated improvements. Improving an organization‘s efficiencies‘ was the overriding factor behind initiating SFA projects. Paradoxically, the majority of respondents could not expand on ‗improved efficiencies‘ when asked to do so. Suggestions for future work shifted towards investigating post-implementation situations and field sales representatives‘ experience relative to their performance. Considering these two important studies, we can see that the SFA research focus quickly encompassed a wide array of topics. The most recent organizational study evaluated the distance between management and the sales force in terms of their respective perceptions of SFA planning, communication and evaluation. The study highlights the difference in opinion of these two groups in regard to SFA trade-offs and benefits. Although both had the same goal of increased efficiency, both projected different effects from the system. Management sought increased sales with less sales people versus the sales person‘s view to increase individual sales through activity automation. This dichotomy of intended benefits can often be attributed to a multitude of individual level analysis factors which influence SFA adoption and utilization. Individual Level SFA research at the individual level has become a multi-dimensional research area. There are many variables which can affect the maximization of the system and sales performance. The highest sales producers were those that rated ‗high‘ on acceptance positive attitude towards new technology and also in number of years of experience. Overall, a strong connection between the salesperson‘s attitude type towards using new technology in the day-day activities and years of experience in relation to sales success existed. A study investigated attitude factors that impacted levels of SFA ‗infusion.‘ ‗Infusion‘ was defined as ―the extent to which the salesperson fully utilizes SFA to enhance her productivity‖. The factors reviewed included: personal innovativeness, perceived usefulness, attitude toward new system, compatibility with current system, facilitating conditions, subjective norms and ease of use. The relationship of these factors was mapped to dependent outcomes of levels of ‗intention to use‘ and ‗infusion of use‘ of the new SFA system. The two key results of this work were important managerial considerations. The findings indicated that salesperson attitude concerning the new systems usefulness in their role and compatibility with current system had a large bearing on the adoption rate. It was found that the level of infusion positively correlated with the level of ‗facilitating conditions‘ such as training and support provided by the organization. Although the idea of ‗infusion‘, thus, establishing a new desired benchmark for SFA utilization, they failed to qualify or discuss the timing of their post-implementation data sample. The data was collected just six months after implementation. The author of this paper suggests that their findings could have offered greater insights by comparing the responses after a twelve or twentyfour month interval, therefore, adding to the limited longitudinal analysis in this area. Only after such time would sales people have been able to benefit from training and ‗infused‘ SFA into their daily work translating to higher levels of efficiency and performance. Implementation Success vs. Failure – what makes the difference? Successful SFA implementation and adoption can depend on several core activities. Recent research has further cemented the importance of training and salesperson involvement in the decision-implementation planning. Another important variable is genuine projections from management on the system‘s impact on the salesperson‘s day day operations. This is directly related to the first step of adoption model: managerial communication. Equally as important as understanding why some firms succeed in SFA implementation, is to understand why others fail. A recent study offered valuable insights into how not to manage SFA. The authors investigated SFA adoption through the ‗identity theory‘ framework. Logically, sales-people are often more autonomous than other members of the enterprise. As such, they react differently to organizational changes such as SFA. Suitably, the focus on specific elements that make up the salesperson‘s ‗identity‘ which contribute to and are impacted by their level of adoption. The authors investigated the relationships between individual perceptions of technology (comprised of individual traits, disposition toward technology, role perception and organization characteristics) and their professional state on the person- technology fit and measured to the extent to which these relationships influenced both subjective (such as job satisfaction) and the objective (for example salesperson retention) Alarmingly, the results indicated that initial enthusiasm and adoption of the system quickly decreased following the initial training and implementation and ultimately resulted in increased rejection of the system by the sale force. Their analysis highlighted the fact that if SFA is not supported in an ongoing manner, it can lead to low levels of ‗person-technology fit.‘ This in turn can lead to wider organizational problems such as poor job satisfaction and ultimately salesperson turnover. This critical business problem is one that requires analysis at the organizational, individual and team level. The discussion above suggests that SFA does not sustain any benefits for field sales representatives and also poses managerial headaches in terms of cost employee productivity and morale. However, some suggest otherwise. Increased sales person productivity is an inherently assumed benefit of SFA, however, there are few empirical studies to either prove or disprove this assertion. Furthermore, which areas of sales activities are enhanced by SFA and to what degree? the wide array of SFA technologies is categorized into categories that primarily reflected their impact on sales activities: organizing, presenting, reporting, informing, supporting and processing 123