7 Things That Salespeople Look For In A Robust SFA Solution

Rashmi Kapse
Rashmi Kapse

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sfa solution

7 Things That Salespeople Look For In A Robust SFA Solution

Rashmi Kapse
Rashmi Kapse

Share Our Post :

sfa solution

Every Salesperson looks for SFA Solution, as Salespeople are an amazing tribe, instinctively driven by a sharp desire to compete and win. They are naturally aggressive and intrinsically motivated to hustle, chasing business targets and finding new ways to close a deal. A natural ally of aggression is impatience, and there’s no better example than a sales executive. Their impatience to smash their targets coupled with the hyper-competitive industry have together been the catalyst for several product innovations that have enabled them to be better and faster at what they do.

One of the most successful innovations in that field is Sales force Automation. An SFA solution tailored to a specific industry can make the lives of salespeople so much easier, both on and off the field by maximizing selling and improving productivity.

SFA solutions have emerged as one of the key sales force optimizing strategies that brands use to gain both strategic as well as a competitive edge.  However, salespeople are action-led people who like to take center stage with customers and close sales deals. While reporting is important, spending hours filling in sales reports is not something they enjoy doing. If they can capture the essence of a report in less than a minute through an application that can record these activities and share them in the desired format, it makes a salesperson’s job so much easier! 

At the same time, such solutions for sales managers also help to keep a check on their field executives and stay on top of their activities. Therefore, an application that provides increased visibility of sales activities on-ground can significantly eliminate tracking challenges faced by managers.

Organizations use SFA solutions to guide their sales team through an idealized sales process. In fact, an effective SFA application actually reduces the Sales Cycle and enhances revenues. 

Benefits of SFA Solution

However, ideal economics is always disjointed from real economics. Increased competition and a longer sales cycle make it imperative for sales organizations to consider a specially tailored industry-specific solution that can offer the following benefits to their field force:

1. Smart Beats and PJPs

Just imagine having a structured outlet coverage system where each day the beat and outlets are defined and all your salesman has to do is choose the beat and begin his day! If the SFA has additional features, like FieldAssist’s Beat-o-meter, it can give your team razor-sharp visibility on their entire outlet universe! e.g. which new outlets are to be covered,  % of outlets buying from you and which aren’t active, dead or dormant outlets, so your team knows exactly what to sell, which schemes will apply to convert a good outlet to a great outlet!

2. Digital DSRs

An effective SFA solution minimizes administrative tasks that are crucial but take up precious time. By automating DSRs, salespeople can easily choose the distributor and file their daily sales reports at the end of each day. This helps them significantly free themselves from routine and tedious tasks and allocate their time to other strategic areas of business. 

3. Intuitive Order Booking

For a field salesman, the majority of the day is spent in the market selling their products. Automated sales flow on which beat and how many retailers to cover, viewing outlet-wise sales history, capturing outlet-wise sales order, communicating active schemes and promotions to the retailers, etc. can help reduce the total time spent at every retailer by nearly 60-70%.  the Sales Reps and SOs accomplish their targets with increased productivity.

4. Intelligent Selling

If your Sales Reps know exactly what to sell, they will be able to offer a powerful experience to your retailer. Pre-defined product assortment list with clearly tagged “Must Sell” and Focus products means that your field force can customize their selling approach for every outlet and ensure better higher TC/PC and range-selling. 

5. Cross-Selling

Customer order history per store is an important feature integrated with the SFA solution. A top-drawer SFA offers Surveys that help capture on-ground data right at the outlet. Managers can use this sales information to analyze customer preferences, order patterns, and customer demographics. In addition, other functions such as Marketing and Communications can use the derived metrics to design product campaigns and advertising strategies. 

6. Self-Performance Insights

A good full-service SFA should be able to let your SOs and Sales Reps get a quick view of their sales to date both outlet-wise, product/SKU-wise. They should also be able to view their own sales summary with respect to Total Calls/Productive Calls, Conversion rate, Start Day/End Day, as well productivity % per day to get daily visibility on their performance. 

7. Sales KPIs & Gamification

Even a basic SFA shows productivity indices like beat efficiency, adherence to plans, times spent at points of sale and analytics, etc. However if an SFA offers gamification, like FieldAssist’s Battleground,  that can massively turbocharge your sales team! You can break down company goals into objective KPIs and run daily contests, weekly and monthly goals, push team performance, and celebrate achievements together by giving winners company-wide visibility and social recognition.

Substantiating the above factors further, a Gartner Magic Quadrant report of 2020 on the salesforce automation industry indicates that 75% of companies invested in an SFA because they wanted to improve business process outcomes, and 69% said they wanted to drive revenue growth. 

By and large, FieldAssist is the preferred partner choice for SFA deployment. Leading FMCG and CPG players to trust our brand and its services to deploy and deliver enhanced benefits for a seamless sales process experience through the mobility-driven application.

Learn how you too can make your Sales Team into Sales warriors.

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