SALES FORCE AUTOMATION NEEDS NEW VERSION

Effective sales force automation, as one of its objectives, is to support sales campaign management.  Until sales force automation fully supports the concept of event-driven sales campaign management, for all practical purposes, what a sales organization is left with is: early version sales force automation.  A big piece of the concept of sales force automation is customer relationship management (CRM) best practices.  That is a good thing.  But the sales process paradigm has shifted.  Today, with bigger but fewer sales opportunities for direct sales forces, we now know that specific, predictable events drive the bigger and more complex sales campaigns.  Imagine the benefit of having an automated system that tracks the events executed thus far in a complex sales campaign with an automated presentation of the next potentially best events to be planned and executed!  Sales forces around the world await the next release of sales force automation that fully supports advanced sales campaign management.

The concepts of sales force automation, controlling the sales force and staying connected with customers, appeals to management for lots of good reasons.  But an added element of sales force control and in customer relationship management (CRM) is having the ability to predict the next six likely events or so of a sales campaign, providing a tremendous competitive advantage for the team that has the new version of sales force automation.  This added feature to new age sales force automation will provide the ability to anticipate ten, twenty and even thirty or more likely events of a long, complex sales campaign.

My book, Closing the Whales, details thirty events that can and often occur one way or another in a big opportunity campaign that stretches across many months of patient sales campaign management.  Recently, I presented the concepts in this book to a CEO of high tech company along with the sales plan template that mirrors the concepts of the book.  His immediate reaction was that the entire concept fit perfectly with sales force automation.

Sales force automation, beyond sales force control and customer relationship management, is supposed to help sales teams win!  Only a current version of a sales force automation system, one that fully embraces what we now know about advanced sales campaign management, is useful.

Learn to maximize the use of sales force automation. Get your copy of Closing the Whales today!