There isn’t only one type of sales technology. Figuring out which software is the best fit for your business is a difficult process, so we’ve put together this simple guide to help you distinguish between the confusing terminology involved in choosing the right sales technology.
These are common types of software terms you might come across when looking at sales technology best suited to your unique business needs:
- Customer Relationship Management
- Marketing Automation
- Sales Intelligence solutions
- Sales Force Automation
- Field Sales Automation
Below are clarifications on what tasks each of these types of software perform, helping you decide which may be most helpful to your sales team.
Customer Relationship Management
- Keep track of all of your customer engagements, build stronger relationships
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process that businesses use to manage, track and even automate their interactions with customers. CRM systems store all customer information centrally for you and your team to access and benefit from a single view of all customer contact information, interactions and sales. The goal of CRM is to strengthen your relationship with your customers by ensuring you have accurate information about your customers and how you’ve engaged with them.
Marketing Automation
- Communicate and market in a consistent matter, automate marketing tasks and report on marketing effectiveness.
Marketing automation refers to technologies that automate, track and report on communication and engagements with prospects and customers, such as mass emails, social media posts and visits to your website. It also tracks the effectiveness of these engagements in generating leads, converting them into customers and retaining them.
Sales Intelligence Solutions
- Proactively identify and deliver up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Sales intelligence software improves both the quality and quantity of sales leads by using data to help salespeople find new opportunities. Basically, these technologies collect, analyze and present data in such a way that salespeople can have improved insight into prospective and existing customers’ needs. Sales intelligence solutions are specifically designed for salespeople and sales managers to proactively identify and deliver up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Sales Force Automation
- Manage your sales team, your sales process and pipeline efficiently and report back on sales effectiveness and progress accurately.
Sales force automation (SFA) automatically records and reports on all the stages in a sales process. It ensures certain steps are followed and information is logged during the sales process to enable accurate reporting on sales effectiveness and sales forecasting. Read a more detailed description of the differences between CRM and SFA tools here.
Field Sales Automation
- Gain visibility of field sales activity, capture product orders in the field, boost your sales rep productivity and effectiveness on the road, improve and increase customer visits
Field Sales Software is a sub-set of Sales Force Automation – a segment specifically focusing on automating product sales for reps in the field and managing a remote sales team. Field Sales software uses GPS technology to automate many of the mundane tasks for field sales reps such as logging drive time and customer visits, as well as provide important field sales effectiveness data for managers. Integration with inventory management systems and accounting packages can not only provide reps with accurate product information such as availability, descriptions and applicable discounts, but also allow them to submit orders from the field during a customer visit.
Adopting new sales technology doesn’t need to be scary. To learn more, download Skynamo’s Moving to Sales Technology eBook to understand how technology can help you and your business, or get in touch with Skynamo, the easy-to-use Field Sales app for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.
