In today’s fast-paced business environment, sales teams face increasing pressure to meet targets while managing multiple administrative tasks. Sales Force Automation (SFA) is transforming the way businesses approach sales by streamlining processes, reducing manual work, and empowering sales representatives to focus on what truly matters—selling. From managing leads and tracking orders to forecasting sales and analyzing performance, an SFA app or SFA software acts as a centralized hub for all sales activities, helping companies boost productivity and drive revenue growth.
What is Sales Force Automation?
Sales Force Automation is the deployment of software systems to handle, simplify, and monitor essential sales activities, everything from managing leads, contacts, and potential deals, to creating proposals or quotes, overseeing orders, and predicting future sales. It alleviates repetitive administrative burdens so that sales personnel can allocate more time and energy toward the actual task of selling.
The 2024 Consumer Products Report from Bain & Co. indicates that with consumers switching from local or unbranded products to bigger international brands, retail sales value has advanced by nearly 15% since 2022, taking the Indian CPG market to an estimated $25 million.
If you are looking for a SFA software or SFA App for your growing FMCG brand, you will find all sorts of solutions across the technology world, from the very basic app – that captures salesman attendance and number of hours spent in the field – to an entire bundle of integrated solutions like SFA, DMS (Distributor Management System), Analytics and Reports, Modern Trade sales app, etc.
In CPG startups or small and medium FMCG companies, the Founder and/or the Sales Head makes the decisions to introduce any technology in their operations. Unfortunately, most decisions are based on which option is more economical rather than which fits better with the team’s KPIs requirement. Since the main ‘user’ of SFA app is salesman, you must think like a salesman when choosing your technology partner.
Ask yourself, “What is SFA that is best suited for a salesman for higher productivity and efficiency in retailing?”
What are the top features of SFA software?
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Intuitive Order Booking
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Easy Navigation
A CPG salesperson spends the better part of his day visiting retail shops to get orders from retailers. He will always want a SFA app that is easy to use, offers automated sales flows, and gives him visibility on the work he needs to complete every day.
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Real-time Order Taking
When SME brands in Delhi look for features of an SFA, they expect more than just the basic functionalities. They want an app that allows salesmen to punch in orders digitally, which are reflected in real-time on the dashboard. It should also be able to help salespeople offer consultative sales to every retailer. In the FieldAssist FA App, the salesman can suggest the right product based on the outlet’s historical sales, and communicate relevant schemes to book secondary sales orders in real time, thereby reducing the total time spent per visit by nearly 60-70%.
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Multiple Types of Schemes and Promotions
A key feature of an SFA app is the ability to create and run customized schemes. In a good SFA software, schemes and promotions can be configured according to shop types. E.g. mom-pop shops, semi-modern-trade, modern trade, chemists, paan-shop etc. CPG brands can also enable different schemes for different types of regions e.g. towns and city-wise schemes, state-wise schemes and different types of payouts like cash discounts, FOC (Free on Board), Free articles etc.
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Smart Beat and PJPs
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Structured outlet plan
It helps companies avoid route overlapping by clearly defining territories. Sales managers can develop a smart route map based on the nature of the business, customer profile, similar product needs or size of the retailer.
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Route Optimization
Route plans can be customized for salespeople based on strategic KPIs like category sales, LPC, historical sales etc to better drive market expansion plans and optimize each outlet’s serviceability.
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Instant beat-change approvals
To ensure transparency and accountability in the sales flows, the SFA should have an OTP-based Manager Approval mechanism whenever a salesman requests a route change.
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Smart Selling
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Product recommendations
‘Automated product suggestions’ are one of the most desired features of an SFA, especially for upcoming FMCG brands in Delhi, Gujarat and Chennai. At the time of order booking, the salesman gets auto-suggestions on fast-moving SKUs and suggested order quantities based on historical orders in the FieldAssist FA App. This helps the salesman increase his average ticket size per outlet.
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Must sell and focus products
Every SME brand and emerging FMCG company wants all SKUs to sell equally well. In reality, about 20% of the products contribute to 80% of the revenue. To build a greater market presence, FMCG businesses must identify ways to bring in greater revenue by selling across the portfolio. A good way to do that is by ensuring that the salesmen proactively sell the ‘laggard’ SKUs and not just the ‘cash cow’ products.
Therefore in your list of features of SFA software, look for a feature that lets you define ‘focus’ and ‘must-sell’ products. This feature, available in the FieldAssist FA App, enables sales managers to set sales targets for specific categories or SKUs, which nudges SRs to promote those products and improve their average ticket size.
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Digitised DSRs (Daily Sales Reports)
By automating DSRs, salespeople can file their daily sales reports at the end of each day and assign orders to the right distributor easily. This helps them significantly free themselves from routine and tedious tasks and allocate their time to other strategic areas of business.
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Self–Performance Insights
With 24/7 access to their own performance data, your salespeople can view their Total Calls/Productive Calls, Conversion rate, Start Day/End Day, as well as productivity % per day. This gives them a daily view of how much they have achieved and the distance remaining to reach their monthly goals. A lot of FMCG small businesses have been able to develop a strong data-driven sales culture in the early stages of growing their brand only because of sales force automation.
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Gamification in Sales
Even a basic SFA app shows productivity indices like beat efficiency, adherence to plans, times spent at points of sale and analytics, etc. However if an SFA software offers gamification, like “FieldAssist Battleground”, it can massively turbocharge your sales team! You can break down company goals into objective KPIs and run daily contests, weekly and monthly goals, push sales team performance and celebrate achievements together by giving winners company-wide visibility and social recognition. In the last 3-4 years, gamification has become one of the most sought-after features of an SFA.
Why Businesses Need Sales Force Automation (SFA) ?
1. Boosts Sales Productivity
Sales representatives spend a good part of their time in administrative tasks like data entry, scheduling, and generating reports. An SFA app or SFA software automates these mundane activities, giving the sales team more time to engage with leads, nurture customer relationships, and close more deals.
2. Enhances Lead Management
Salesman tracking apps and sales team tracking apps help businesses manage leads more efficiently by automating the capture, qualification, and distribution of leads from various sources, including websites and email campaigns. This ensures that promising leads are prioritized and contacted promptly, improving conversion rates.
3. Improves Sales Forecasting
Manual data entry is good but with that it also contain many errors and inaccurate sales predictions. By automatically collecting and analyzing sales data in real-time, SFA software provides accurate forecasts based on historical data and current pipeline activity. This empowers businesses to make well-informed decisions set realistic sales targets.
4. Reduces Human Error and Costs
Automation reduces the chances of mistakes caused by manual processes tasks, which can lead to costly mistakes. By streamlining workflows and optimizing sales processes, SFA apps reduce operational costs and enhance overall efficiency.
5. Strengthens Customer Relationships
Salesman tracking apps store a comprehensive history of every customer interaction in a centralized database. Sales reps gain a complete view of customer preferences, purchase history, and communications, enabling them to deliver more tailored service and enhance customer satisfaction
6. Streamlines Sales Management
Sales team tracking apps give managers real-time visibility into their sales pipeline and team performance. This allows them to track deals, monitor individual rep performance, and identify areas for improvement quickly.
7. Encourages Team Collaboration
With all sales and customer data consolidated on a single platform, team members can share information seamlessly and collaborate effectively. This transparency ensures everyone is aligned, reducing miscommunication and improving efficiency.
8. Enables Mobile Access
Many SFA apps offer mobile capabilities, allowing sales representatives to access and update customer information, track deal status, and manage tasks from anywhere. This is especially important for businesses with field sales teams, as it ensures productivity while on the go.
Conclusion
Chosen by 650+ Indian and MNC CPG brands, FieldAssist is the partner of choice for the deployment of sales force automation. We deliver tangible, measurable transformations towards an effective sales process for hundreds of emerging or rapidly scaling FMCG small businesses by offering all the possible features of SFA app within the FieldAssist FA App.
Learn how you too can make your Sales Team into Sales warriors.
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