Do you need a new Sales Force Automation System?

If you support a sales staff you know how difficult it is to train and maintain a great team. I have worked with sales teams and understand the challenges. Like the daily pressures to meet your financial targets and keeping your staff happy as well as management. It’s a fun balancing act.

A good Sales Force System (SFS) is an important tool for any company that faces these pressures. I have built these types of systems as well as worked with some that are currently on the market. I felt it would be valuable to document my experiences and outline the basic requirements of a great Sales Force System. This article is intended to outline features I have seen or built myself in the hopes that it may give you ideas on how you can improve your systems. The basic premise is to provide valuable, clean and detailed data to your sales staff to help them build a relationship with your customers to drive more sales and profits.

System Integration

A true Sales Force System (SFS) needs to integrate with several different systems within your organization. Such as marketing, customer service, order entry, the corporate phone system and even mobile computing applications. Below is a review of each system and how it should interact with your Sales Force System.

Marketing

The marketing team should be the main source of new leads for the SFS. Its marketing’s job is to find qualified leads, screen them and generate interest in your product or service. Then they apply campaign codes to the leads before they are sent to the SFS. I refer to campaign codes later as it is critical to your lead allocation and sales floor management.

Customer Service

You should be able to view all contacts the lead has with your organization. This includes all inbound and outbound contacts no matter what channel. You will want to know if they placed a customer service call and a help ticket was created. You should be able to view the tickets along with all comments entered about the customer. All contacts will be stored with the date and time the contact took place. Now the salesman will know in advance of a sales call if there were any issues that might help or hinder the sale. The more information they have about a lead will help them build a good relationship with that prospect. Good relationships lead to more sales.

Order Entry

Since the order will originate with the salesperson they should be able to enter the order online and get it validated and approved as quickly as possible. This means they will have discount approvals if required and all appropriate taxes and charges applied. The order entry will interface directly with the accounting systems and commissioning system. Order entry should also allow you to create a quote order. This is so the salesman can customize the order for the customer and save it in case they aren’t ready to buy. This will be important information to reference in a future call. Fulfillment of the order should happen quickly once the order has been approved.

Phone System

The interface to the phone system should have three possible ways to handle out bound calls.

On answer

The first technique I call “on answer”. Under these rules the system behaves like a classic auto dialer. Once someone answers the phone the call and the data page is automatically fed to the sales person.

Delayed Dial

The second technique I call “delayed dial”. The data page is sent to the sales person and the phone will automatically be dialed in a few seconds after the data page has been sent to the user.

User Controlled Dial

The last technique is a “user controlled dial”. In this case the lead is fed to the user and they are given a one button interface to dial the lead.

I am not a fan of the on answer auto dialer technique. There is nothing less professional than receiving a sales call and hearing the phone click over to a sales person standing by that proceeds to butcher my name because they don’t have a chance to look at the lead for a few seconds before placing the call. In my opinion a lead should be fed to the salesperson and they have a few seconds to review the lead before the call is placed. Then they can figure out how to pronounce the name, look at contact history, past comments and orders so you have an opportunity to understand a little bit about this person.

Mobile Computing

This isn’t the technology of the future any longer. Today’s sales people will expect and demand that the SFS integrates and supports a mobile platform.

Lead Management or Lead Routing

Lead management is the main function of a sales force system. This is the process through which a lead travels in order to end up assigned to a salesman’s book of business. The sales manager needs to be able to control the flow of leads to the sales floor depending on the company’s priorities. For instance a company may wish to push a certain campaign like renewals or win back or perhaps promote a new product offering. In this case the manager may want to slow the flow of some leads while increasing the flow on others. Even to the point of completely stopping the flow of some altogether. Leads are controlled at two main levels first at the campaign level and second at the salesman level.

Campaign level control

The campaign level controls determines how new leads are distributed to the sales floor. This is usually done by changing the priority on leads that have not yet been assigned to a salesman. The campaign code has a priority set on it to determine the flow of one campaign over another. Date also plays a role in this allocation. You may want to hold all new leads entering the system until old leads have been processed. The campaign codes may differ for your organization but I included a list of possible campaign codes below.

Initial Sale: The initial sale that turns the lead into a customer.
Up Sell: Selling an existing customer a higher priced product.
Renewal: Renewing a subscription or right to use your products.
Cancellation: The process of saving a sale when the customer calls to cancel.
Win Back: Getting a customer to repurchase your product after they have previously cancelled or their subscription has expired.

Salesman level control

There are several controls that can determine if a salesman should receive leads.

Book of Business Limits: This limits the amount of unworked leads a salesman can retain in their book of business. If the salesman wants to receive new leads they need to work the old leads to free up room for new ones.
Salesman Skills: New lead assignment should be driven by the ability of a salesman to work a specific type of lead. Skills are assigned to each salesman individually and determined by the sales manager based on training or ability. Salesman’s skills equate to campaign codes. For example a customer calls in to cancel an order. A lead is created with the campaign code of cancellation. It’s then routed to the first salesman available with the skill that allows them to work this lead.
Daily distribution limit: This limits the leads by campaign that can be given to a salesman in a given day. This keeps a poor salesman from burning through a lot of valuable leads. This limit is set for each sales person so the better salesmen can get more leads and your trainees get fewer.

Lead Cycling

Once a lead ends up in a book of business, lead cycling is the process in which the lead is recycled. It will continue to recycle until it receives a status that indicates the lead is closed. The system will track the type of lead and the current status of each lead being worked.

Lead status

This tracks the current status of the lead being worked.

No answer: The lead stays open and is recycled.
Busy: The lead stays open and is recycled.
Response: Do not call: Someone answered the phone and asked to be on the do not call list. The lead is closed.
Response: Not interested: Someone answered and said they were not interested. The lead is closed.
Response: Interested with no sale: Lead showed interest but did not buy.
Response: With scheduled follow up: An agreed upon future date is set up for a follow up call.
Response: Sale: It doesn’t get better than this so the lead is closed.

The lead status changes based on actions taken by the sales person. Depending on the status assigned the lead will recycle or not automatically. These rules will depend on your own business rules but for example. A busy signal could recycle in 15 minutes. A no answer should be reattempted at a different time of day. For example the day can be broken up into pieces like morning, lunch time, afternoon and evening. A no answer should be contacted in each of the different time slots. This will improve the likelihood that you will catch the lead at home and they will answer the phone.

Data Quality

I can’t stress enough the importance of clean data. I have seen dramatic increases in sale close rates just because we took the time and thoroughly cleansed the data before it was sent to the sales floor.

What exactly do I mean by clean data. No Duplicates, valid phone number, valid addresses, accurate names. Invalid information wastes your salesman’s time and reduces their effectiveness. You don’t want people wasting their time pursuing invalid information or worse yet angering your leads because you contact them multiple times with the same offer.

You can consider a company that is able to append phone numbers to your data. This has proven very effective for me in the past. But you need to keep the appended phone number separate from any other phone numbers in your system. Then be sure to scrub the appended numbers against the national do not call list.

Salesman’s interface

When a salesman sits down in front of the application it should be the one stop shop for all the information they require about the lead. This is their contact management system. This means they can view any interaction your organization has had with the lead or record any comments they have. This will give them the information needed to form a good relationship with the individual. They can communicate via phone or email and all of the contacts will be tracked and stored.

The Book of Business or Book of Leads will be the place they spend most of their time. Through this application they can ask for a new lead, contact a lead already in the book of business and schedule follow ups with their leads. The follow ups can be scheduled and viewed though a calendaring type of interface. The salesman will receive reminder messages before each follow up so none will be missed.

Managements Interface

I call the sales managers interface the Lead Management System (LMS). This gives the manager the ability to control what is happening on the sales floor day by day or hour by hour if needed. Some of the features are summarized below.

Set the priority of the new leads: This is the application that allows the manager to control the rules that regulates the flow of new leads entering the system. It also maintains the recycling rule for old leads.
Purge old leads: The manager uses this interface to remove any old leads from the system which are no longer viable.
bOrder approval: Occasionally an order is created that requires a manager’s approval. This could be required for many reasons like a discount that is beyond the normal range. The request for the approval will come to the manager in real-time. They then use a password to approve the order. The record of the approval is stored with the order for future reference.
Review orders: All order created by a team member should be viewable by the manager.
Clean out book of businesses: The sales manager should be able to remove leads from a salesmen’s book of business. This is needed in case someone quits, is on vacation or sick. The leads can be moved to another salesman or put back into the group of unallocated leads and will be redistributed automatically to other salesmen.

Management Reporting

The following is a list of reports will help the manager identify problem areas and top performers on the sales floor. I included a few report descriptions that should exist in your system with a short description of the benefits of each report.

Close rates by salesman: This is one of the most important reports you can get. You want to be sure you don’t have some salesman that is burning through your leads inefficiently.
Goal reports: Goals should exist at the sales person, department or lead campaign levels to track progress toward the goal.
Salesman report by Lead Status: This should point out unusual behavior that needs to be reviewed like a salesman recording an inordinate number of do not contacts or busy signals.
Salesman performance by Campaign: This will identify performance based on a campaign. You may have people that under or over perform in some campaign verses others. This can help you take action in training your staff or to improve lead routing.
Stagnant leads: Used to make sure salesmen are working their book of business. If leads aren’t being worked by a salesman you may want to reassign them to another sales person.
Commission reports: Track your top performers.

Calling Rules

I am not a lawyer nor do I want to be so I will just say that you need to comply with the calling rules generated by the FTC. Rules like scrubbing the phone numbers against the national do not call list or complying with the calling hour’s restrictions can be referenced on their web site. My advice is to be conservative in your policies so you don’t run into any issues with the FTC.

I hope there was some information here that is valuable to you. Feel free to send me an email with any questions or suggestions.

Regards

Scott Matson

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