High performance sales organizations have adopted practices and deployed sales force automation systems to help increase sales effectiveness, increase win rates and drive more revenue. The success of SSM deployment ultimately depends on how effectively the sales team is utilizing the system. While sales leadership clearly benefits from greater visibility into sales performance, the real value is in driving the knowledge contained in the system down to front-line managers and sales reps, who are in the best position to take action on the information and drive changes.

Benefits to sales reps

frontline SSM™ can improve the productivity of sales personnel. Here are some examples:

• Instead of writing various sales reports and/or call sheets, your sales people can fill-in their action taken and next plan of action on a user friendly web form. This saves time.
  
  
• Rather than printing voluminous reports and taking/ sending them to the sales manager, sales reps can use the internet to transmit the information. This saves time.
  
  
• Instead of waiting for paper-based 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' queries.
  
  
• The additional tools could help improve sales team morale/ motivation level by reducing the amount of record keeping and/or increase the closing rate. This could contribute to a virtuous spiral of beneficial and cumulative effects.
  
  
• It can be used as an effective and efficient training device. They provide sales team with product information, make available standard sales document without having them to waste time in looking for the same.
  
  
• Better and transparent communication and co-operation between sales personnel enhances successful team selling.
  
  
• This platform increases the sales rep's ratio of selling time to non-selling time. Non-selling time includes activities like report writing, travel time, internal meetings, training, seminars and the time spent in gathering account information.

Benefits to business/sales manager

frontline SSM™ 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.
  
  
• Daily activity reports, information requests, orders booked, and other sales information are sent to the managers instantly, allowing him/her to respond immediately with desired advice/ feedback. This gives management more hands-on control of the sales process if they wish to use it.
  
  
• The sales manager can use the system so to analyze the various information using, data using multiple combinations, and can present the results in a better way. This gives the sales manager information that is more useful in :
  
  

  	•	Making available current and useful sales support materials to their sales team
  	•	Facilitating marketing data: location wise, product wise, industry/ segment wise, regional / branch wise as well as for specific individual
  	•	Identifying your VIP prospects, and your problem customers
  	•	Tracking the productivity of their sales force by combining a number of performance measures such as: order per sales person, order per region/ branch, order by customer segment, order by various sources, product order, number of follow-ups per day, lead generated per day, revenue per call, cost per call, ratio of orders to calls, number of new customers per period, number of lost customers per period, target vs. achievement, sales projections , number of customer complaints, and number of overdue accounts.

Benefits to the marketing manager

frontline SSM™ is useful for the marketing manager. It gives the marketing manager information that is useful in :

• Identifying segments within your market
  
  
• Identifying your target market (location wise)
  
  
• Identifying your best prospects in place
  
  
• Understanding your sales team/ product strengths and weaknesses
  
  
• Supporting the sales function with other parts of the promotional mix (such as email campaigns and SMS campaigns)
  
  
• Facilitating interface to capture customers feedback and tracking of customer satisfaction index enabling you having useful and valuable inputs

Strategic Benefits

frontline SSM™ can also create competitive advantage. Here are some examples:

• As mentioned above, productivity will increase. Sales team will use their time more efficiently and more effectively. The managers will also become more efficient and more effective. This increased productivity can create a competitive advantage in many ways, some are listed below:
  
  

  • Effective Complaint/Service call Allocation: Increase in revenue up to 20% • Resource Optimization : 30% efficiency increase • Increase in new sales : 22% by increasing ratio of selling time to non-selling time. • Increased Customer Satisfaction Index: Increase in total revenue up to 20% • AMC / Warranty Contract Management: Increase in renewal up to 50%

• Field sales staff will send their information more frequently. Typically information will be sent to management after every sales call (rather than once a week). This provides management with current information, information that they will be able to use while it is still valuable. Management response time will be greatly reduced. The organization will become more proactive and more agile.

It could increase customer satisfaction if used with wisdom. If the information obtained and analyzed well with the system is used to create a product that matches or exceeds customer expectations, and the sales team use the system to service customers more expertly and diligently, then customers should be satisfied with the organization. This will provide a competitive advantage because customer satisfaction leads to increased customer loyalty, reduced customer acquisition costs, reduced price elasticity of demand, and increased profit margins.


Affordability & Pay Back Period

frontline SSM™ is available on demand and requires no hardware or software to buy, install or maintain which helps minimizing the Total Cost of Ownership and the Training, thereby saving as much as 90% compared to the other client-server solutions.

frontline SSM™ features make it possible for a high success rate in deployment and dispense away with the unacceptable risks and protracted deployment.