The Ultimate Guide to Sales Force Automation: 100-Plus Links and Resources
If your company wants to do well in sales, it's important to have a system that helps it keep up with the pace of today's marketplace. SFA (Sales Force Automation) is a great way to do so, and it offers numerous options for eliminating or streamlining tasks that would otherwise distract your salespeople from doing what they do best: selling. Check out these resources to see how you can put this sort of system to work for you.
How to Avoid the Four Most Common Mistakes of Sales Process Mapping
January 8, 2009 by admin
Filed under Sales Process Mapping
By Michael J. Webb
Process mapping is a well-known technique for creating a common vision and shared language for improving business results. It helped one management training and development firm realize that people within their sales department had been working at cross purposes, and crucial executive-level discussions with customers were not taking place. Based on sales process mapping, the leaders reorganized their sales operations so that job descriptions and performance measures focused more on the customer. In six months, they reversed a five-year slump and earned big bonuses for team members. In another case, sales process mapping helped a large manufacturer’s national account teams discover a powerful new way to coordinate with field salespeople, yielding far more new business opportunities than expected.
Prospect Qualification Improvement Initiative
One possible area to focus on is the input specifications, also known in the sales world as qualification. For example, an electrical utility was attempting to sell a new array of technical services to its customers. They asked for help with closing skills because their close ratio was less than 10%. Sales people were overburdened, chasing as many deals as they could but not making their numbers. Prospects seemed to delay their decisions over and over. They went with engineering firms they already knew. Or deals simply died for no apparent reason.
Implementing a Formal Selling Process and Performance Measures in a Sales Organization
Joe Vavricka and Barry Trailer
Trailer Vavricka, Inc.
Summary: This paper describes implementing a process management framework and performance measurements into a corporate sales organization. It begins with describing the traditional approach to sales management and the potential impact of improving sales performance on revenue and profits. Then, the company s process-based approach to sales management is described along with the key performance measures most relevant for monitoring sales revenue production across sales, marketing, and customer support departments. This case illustrates that viewing sales as a production process and implementing process performance measures will enable a company to significantly increase sales and improve sales predictability by increasing productivity throughout the process.
Reconnect Sales Management to Profitability
by Jonathan Byrnes
How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free
Dec 4th in News, PHP by Alex Villmann
All great websites have a great server behind them. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up a dedicated web server (with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) using that old computer you have lying around the house and some free software.
How to Create A Sales Pipeline
There are any number of sales pipeline stages you can use: I’m going to use Leads, 10% Opportunities, 50% Opportunities, 90% Opportunities and Closed Won/Lost. I first adopted this methodology when I began using Salesforce.com which mapped well to how my mind works.
Sales Opportunity Management
Opportunity management enables sales teams to work together to close deals faster by providing a single place for updating deal information, tracking opportunity milestones, and recording all opportunity-related interactions.
Sales Stages
Below is a sample checklist that could be used as a starting point for the development of a company’s sales process.
Prospect Stage:
- Prospect fits our target customer criteria
- Prospect's vision and key operating goals documented
- First contact made (phone, letter, email, or personal)
- Potential opportunity identified
- Initial meeting scheduled and confirmed
SQL Server Data Types and Ranges
(SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000)
Applies to: SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005