Management

Sales-force automation

Sales force automation (SFA) is an integrated application of customizable customer relationship management (CRM) tools that automate and streamline sales inventory, leads, forecasting, performance and analysis

Sales Force Automation. Sales Force Automation (SFA) is the name given to a software application for sales people to help them with the sales process. It includes either contact management or opportunity management, together with email and diary sharing.

Contact management

Contact management lets users manage their communications programmer with customers. Computerized customer records contain customer contact histories. Contact management applications often have features such as automatic customer dialing, the salesperson’s personal calendar and e-mail functionality. The salesperson enters details such as product codes, volumes, customer name and delivery requirements, and the software automatically generates a priced quotation.

Activity Management 

Activity management is an integral part of customer relationship management (CRM) and administers all activities undertaken by the employees of your company. Any data saved in an activity is an important source of information that needs to be accessed by all relevant employees.

It answers day-to-day questions, such as:

·         What appointments do I have next week?

·         When can I arrange a visit to Ms. Smith?

·         Who can cover for a sick colleague in external sales?

A sales representative can view the outcome of a telephone call made after an initial customer visit. A sales manager can quickly get an overview of all the activities that have taken place in the department during a certain period of time.

Opportunity Management

Sales-force automation software enables companies automatically to assign leads and track opportunities as they progress through the sales pipeline towards closure. Opportunity management lets users identifyand progress opportunities to sell from lead status through to closureand beyond, into after-sales support.

 Opportunity management softwareusually contains lead management and sales forecasting applications.Lead management applications enable users to qualify leads and assignthem to the appropriate salesperson. Sales forecasting functionalitygenerally use transactional histories and salesperson estimates to produceestimates of future sales.

Issue Management Software

Issues, bugs, defects and faults are an unavoidable part of any undertaking, be it a high level software development project spanning several months, or a short term collaborative effort for a group event spanning days; because to err is human. How these issues and bugs are tracked, followed and fixed makes all the difference between a great job and an ordinary job. And great jobs are the ones that are recognized and valued.

The process of exclusively handling these issues or bugs in any project is called Issue management or Bug tracking in software development terms, with bugs and issues used alternatively these days.

Workflow management

A workflow management system is software that helps to define, administer and coordinate different business processes. ... For example, a simple universal workflow could control and supervise all required tasks or steps for a vacation or order request process.

Workflow automation is one of the more popular features, as it eliminates the need to perform a lot of tasks manually. Within a simple user interface you can easily set up rules to automate many of your day-to-day tasks.

CRM vendors provide a lot of options for workflow automation. Using drop-down menus, you can create automated responses to virtually any event in the CRM system. Here’s a look at some of the most common applications of workflow automation, and how they can benefit you.

Sales Process Automation

In a busy sales office, it doesn’t make sense for your sales managers to meet with every salesperson, every day. However, it does make sense for them to be updated when high-quality leads are entered into the system. Workflow automation simplifies that task, and makes sure that nothing is overlooked. Using field-dependent triggers, your CRM administrator can:

• Set up a activate that alerts the sales manager any time a business with more than a set number of employees is entered into the system.
• Automatically generate follow-up reminders for the salesperson in charge of the account.
• Receive automatic notifications about any status changes related to the account.

Account Management Automation

As contracts near their expiration date, it’s important for account managers to be actively pursuing renewals. You’ve already converted the lead into a customer; it only makes sense to retain them. Using time-based start, you can automatically:

• Send alerts to managers or retention specialists for high-value accounts.
• Automatically send emails to the client, letting them know that the expiration date is approaching, and offering those options for renewal.

Support Automation

If you want to keep your customers (and who doesn’t?), you need to be able to respond to support issues quickly and efficiently. Support issues involve multiple departments, and everybody needs to be on the same page. Using conditional triggers, workflow automation allows you to:

• Automatically change the client’s status to “contact immediately” in the salesperson’s CRM when a support ticket is entered.
• Generate an email to the client
• Notify relevant support staff, managers, and salespeople by email or SMS, especially in the case of high-value customers.

Workflow Automation and Business Processes

Customer interactions that rely heavily on manual processes can be hit or miss. A key benefit of automation is providing a consistent customer experience. Workflow automation allows you to develop standardized response protocols and ensure that they’re followed. A good process, that is consistently followed, will almost always translate to more positive customer experiences.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation (MA) applies technology to marketing processes.Campaign management modules allow marketers to use customer-related data in order to develop, execute and evaluate targeted communicationsand offers. Customer targeting for campaigning purposes is, in somecases, possible at the level of the individual customer, enabling unique communications to be designed. Some fashion retailers, for example, have multipletransactional channels including free-standing stores, department storeconcessions, e-tail websites, home shopping catalogues, catalogue storesand perhaps even a television shopping channel. Some customers maybe unique to a single channel, but most will be multichannel prospects,if they are not already customers of several channels.

Collaboration Process

Step 1. Identify the right type of collaboration

This means getting your problem statement right. 

We think there are three broad types of collaboration:

• Open Collaboration. With customers, ideamakers, your peers — and it's great if there is a practical question you’d like answered and where you have reasonable control over the action that follows. 

·         Vertical Collaboration. Where you need to work with your supply chain and influence other organizations to act.

·         Horizontal Collaboration. Where you need to create change that requires the system around you to shift, and needs cooperation between different actors from different sectors who share a common challenge.

Step 2. Secure permission to play

Really very clear, but often not there. For open innovation, senior management support is essential. Otherwise, the great ideas and insights from the brilliant minds engaged will go nowhere — and the next time you ask for their time, they may be far less willing to give it. When it comes to vertical collaboration, new supplier contracts might be needed, which is impossible without senior management commitment.

Step 3. Use great process, but make it flexible

Collaboration leading to results won’t just happen by virtue of the right people being in the right place at the right time. 

Step 4. Allow time

Build in time for reflection in the process, times when participants can be alone, think things over, settle, and calm things down.

Step 5. Reset the pre-competitive/competitive dial

And here is the rub. Businesses need to rethink the purpose of competition and collaboration, and move a bunch of activities into the pre-competitive box. For example, in order to change the mood music amongst mainstream consumers, such that sustainable products and services are the norm, we need to see the dial that marks the line between pre-competitive and competitive activities shift in such a way that greater collaboration is promoted.

Enterprise portal and dashboard

·         An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP), is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries in a manner similar to the more general web portals.

·         A customer relationship management (CRM) dashboard is an enterprise application (EA) interface used for the monitoring of business and sales opportunities, processes and performance. A CRM dashboard provides real-time business event snapshots, which are used to measure and develop analytics for business reporting.

When dashboards that support portals are deployed, the resulting solution provides several benefits to an organization:

• Users have a single location to access their dashboards as well as documents, presentations, and online discussions, along with other applications.
• Efficiency is increased as users can go to a single place to access a variety of related and unrelated information.
• A central point is established for an organization to deploy many or all of its BI applications.

DASHBOARDS AND STRATEGY

Once an organization has developed strategies and tactics, it can use strategy maps and scorecards that help managers visualize and track their goals and tactics. Modern dashboards (often as part of deployments in portals) can then display or integrate with these tools. Well - planned and well - designed dashboards can effectively display key performance - related charts and indicators together with strategy maps and scorecards to help an organization focus their employees on the most important performance - related activities and drivers.

DASHBOARDS AND PLANNING

What do dashboards have to do with planning? The main role of a dashboard is to provide a means for managers to monitor, analyze, and sometimes annotate (e.g. Explaining variances in an embedded scorecard), and there are several strong ties to planning and budgeting:

• Displaying, analyzing, and comparing historical figures with budgets, forecasts and targets
• Focused dashboards for deep analysis of budgets and forecasts
• Monitoring and sharing of strategies across business units
• Monitoring of resource allocation figures whereby business units can propose investments of discretionary funds in various programs and projects.

 Predicting churn and mange it

Every business loses customers. It just happens. Different companies have different ways of dealing with the impact. Most try to acquire one or more new customers to replace the lost customer. Most in sales management consider this process the normal course of business operations.

Some industries and companies take a different approach that involves looking at the concept of churn. The idea is to reduce the churn rate (or loss rate) of customers while still acquiring new customers.
Other companies embrace analytics to find at-risk customers. Those companies find real value in predictive analytics, learning that it can be technically advanced but that they have all the data they need within their customer relationship management (CRM) system already.

Basic Analytics
When a company has tens of thousands or even millions of customers, a model that performs a percentage or two better has a much bigger impact. When companies have hundreds or a few thousand customers, the machinations needed to get a better model are not worth the extra effort and time. For most companies, the CRM system holds the data to feed any of these modeling processes.

Basic Fields 

Ten to 20 fields are common to most customer churn analyses. These fields typically include first-order data, length of time as a customer, number of orders, value of orders, discount history, customer service events, customer type, and basic demographics. Although many CRM systems do not explicitly calculate each of these fields, a properly used CRM system holds the base records to do so easily.

Process

The fields lead to the next discussion: the process. In every analytic process, there is a period of analysis during which the data are analyzed for completeness and suitability. This is a step trained statistical analysts perform to understand the data.
For example, an analyst creates a series of graphs that visually represent how long customers have been active. He or she creates a pie chart that shows the distribution of customers by customer type. Then, the analyst creates a series of tables that summarizes the total value of customers by length of time as a customer. 

Applied Results

The factors and numeric values that determine action points are used in different locations within the CRM system or outside of it. Ideally, the CRM system is automatically set up so that when a customer’s CRM record reaches the entry for a warning, the system itself either takes action or alerts a salesperson to the situation.
Realistically, most companies periodically compare all customers against the model outside the system in either spreadsheets or more complex predictive analytics software. This is easier to understand for most managers and gives them a sense of control and management.

Improvements in Processes 

the next step is to find ways that mitigate the factors that cause customers to churn. Companies can change their business processes in ways the predictive analytics models suggest will lengthen a customer’s lifespan.
The data are within the CRM system. They just require analytical thinking to unlock their value.