Recently, another new trend has been observed in the market place with respect to CRM. Though most organizations feel that implementation of an integrated CRM is better, others including some reputed and successful organizations have implemented Sales Force Automation (SFA) in the recent past or are in the process of implementing SFA. Hewlett-Packard is one such organization. There are many reasons for organizations moving `back to the future'. We analyze this phenomenon by understanding evolution of SFA, the functionality and benefits offered by SFA, the many players in the SFA market, and the reasons as to why some of the organizations are reinventing SFA and how to prepare a good program for implementing SFA projects.
In a dynamic and complex marketing environment which exists today, to be successful the organizations need ways and means to accurately forecast the demand, identify the opportunities, fulfill the orders, manage sales pipelines and analyze the sales. They also need to be in constant contact with the salespersons in the field and also to understand their competitors. The salespersons need a lot of information about customers, products and tools to help them in follow up of the opportunities, track the leads, contact management, effectively concluding the sales and also to pass important information back to the organization. In the good old days, the common practice for the salepersons was to maintain little books to record the information they gathered. They passed on what they thought was important to their offices using telephone, fax or lengthy written or typed reports. This practice besides being unsatisfactory used to take a lot of salesperson's time on administrative work leaving very less time for his actual work the sales. SFA tools were developed to help the organizations and salespersons to manage the entire range of activities involved in the sales management process starting from gathering information about the customer to order fulfillment and after sales service.
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