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Focus Research © 2009 All Rights Reserved
Focus Research
CRM Group
January 2009
Sales Force Automation Market Primer
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 2Focus Research ©2009
Our SFA Market Primer is one of several research reports based on the Foucs Research Methodology, which is
designed to support your entire SFA purchase process.
SFA Market Primer — Want to know what SFA is?
SFA Buyer’s Guide — Want help defining your requirements?
Confused about how to define SFA (Sales Force Automation)? That isn’t surprising — SFA has a few basic features and
many “extras” that differentiate various solutions. Our Sales Force Automation Market Primer is intended to provide sales
managers, sales reps and anyone else involved in the SFA-purchasing process with a fundamental understanding of SFA
software. The Market Primer serves as an introduction to our Buyer’s Guide, which helps prospective buyers work through
the purchase process.
Table of Contents
1 SFA Basics: Market definition and the top 10 things to know about SFA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .p. 3
2 Market Summary: Market trends and vendor landscape. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 5
3 Product In-Depth: Requirements, support and cost. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .p. 7
4 Tools: Glossaries, checklists and vendor lanscape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 15
you are here
Introduction
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 3Focus Research ©2009
Sales Force Automation Defined
SFA (Sales Force Automation) refers to a set of tools that record all the events in the sales process, as well as all
pertinent data driven by those events. Even before the first SFA products began hitting the market in the early 1980s,
this data was recognized as useful for the cultivation of individual customer relationships and, in aggregate, helpful for
determining sales trends and setting sales policies. SFA solutions automate the collection of this data and instantly
propagate it to where it is needed, eliminating much of the manual administration that would otherwise go into managing
it.
Businesses have many motivations for implementing SFA, but the most prevalent reasons are:
To make sales representatives more efficient•To provide managers with better insight into their sales staff’s activities•To provide visibility into the sales process for other parts of the business •
SFA lets sales reps collect customer data in a streamlined manner so they can access it in an organized form when —
and often where — they need it. It allows managers to understand what’s happening within their sales pipelines and to
change how resources are allocated or how sales reps are selling in near real-time. It also provides data that other teams
in the organization can use to predict the need for raw materials, services or other products, and can feed into the finance
and marketing systems to improve their effectiveness.
Prime Yourself: 10 Things to Know About SFAYou may consider yourself a sales expert, but that doesn’t mean you know anything about SFA. Until you’re actively
working with an SFA solution, you won’t fully understand the complexities involved in deploying, maintaining and profiting
from the technology. Here are 10 things that will help you appreciate what SFA is and how it can help your business.
1. SFA and CRM are not the same. SFA is a part of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but CRM also
includes a marketing component.
2. SFA requires buy in. Getting sales reps and managers to alter the way they work is difficult. The classic issue that
diminishes SFA effectiveness is poor adoption.
3. SFA comes in many flavors. SFA solutions run the gamut from the extremely simple to the remarkably complex.
4. SFA facilitates other processes. Sales reps and other teams can use the data collected by SFA solutions
to enhance the effectiveness of BI (business intelligence), performance management, pipeline analysis and other
applications.
Basics1
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5. SFA helps sales training. Training components can be built into SFA, allowing reps to stay up-to-date on changes
and providing real-time coaching when they need it.
6. SFA can’t fix a broken sales process. SFA can streamline what you have in place. But organizing a defective
sales process will only get you the same bad results faster. SFA is not a panacea, but rather a well thought-out tool that
can help you find areas for improvement and act on them before the system is fully operational.
7. SFA’s costs go beyond the initial price tag. Be aware that licensing or subscription costs are often accompanied
by expenses for maintenance, consultants and data cleaning. SFA is not a “fire and forget” application — if it’s going to
work well, it must receive continuous attention.
8. SFA asks more of your sales reps. They’ll see the rewards, but they’ll have to get used to entering data into the
SFA system. Ultimately, that data will be hugely important, but expect some grumbling at first. Getting input from your
sales force during the buying process may mitigate some adoption pushback.
9. Company SFA decisions should be sales-based, not IT-based. While it will be important to have IT’s help in
implementation and useful to have some IT input during the buying process, the users and their unique needs should be
what drive decisions.
10. SFA leads to happier customers. By keeping data organized, your sales staff can sell to customers the way they
wish to be sold to, and you can avoid any confusion that can annoy them.
10 Things to Know about SFA
SFA is a subset of CRM.1.It requires buy in from sales reps.2.A variety of solutions are available.3.SFA facilitates other processes.4.SFA helps sales training.5.Products can’t fix a broken sales process.6.Costs can escalate.7.Your sales reps will need to be more hands-on.8.Salespeople will need to make decisions.9.SFA will help you serve your customers better. 10.
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The evolution of SFA applications over the last 10 years has been rapid, but many of the basic features have remained
the same. SFA solutions must achieve some essential tasks — most notably, scheduling and contact management — and
they must do so in a dependable, easy-to-use fashion. But the rise of reliable CRM solutions and the trend toward greater
integration of back-office systems is presenting a contradictory challenge: do more in an increasingly complex computing
environment, but remain easy-to-use at the same time.
Market Evolution
SFA tools existed long before the acronym SFA came around. Early incarnations of SFA were branded as contact
managers, and they included MarketMaster, SaleSoft and the first versions of ACT!. These first applications were little
more than the computerization of the sales rep’s “little black book” and initially had extremely limited functionality. Many
of these solutions were far more contact-centric than they were opportunity-centric, hamstringing them in terms of their
usefulness in pursuing new customers.
As developers started to see the value of linking pieces of data, and as sales professionals voiced their needs, vendors
began to evolve and expand their products’ functionality. At the same time, the concept of CRM began to gain momentum,
and SFA became one of the two pillars (along with marketing automation) of CRM applications. This brought a fresh
set of ideas and renewed attention to the concept of SFA. Although first-generation CRM applications had a poor track
record for delivering results, SFA was still evolving successfully, and a group of standalone SFA applications (Prophet, the
Siebel Sales Information System, etc.) continued to flourish.
In the mid-2000s, CRM made a comeback as a concept, and with it came the on-demand delivery model. This made CRM
— and more complex and integrated forms of SFA — affordable to SMBs (small- to medium-sized businesses) for the
first time and helped propagate the modern form of SFA. That said, many SFA vendors targeting the SMB market now
find that they are competing against Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or other very rudimentary home-grown solutions.
Market Trends
The three most significant recent trends in the SFA market are:
1. The rise of on-demand: Thanks to Salesforce.com’s successful implementation — and massive marketing effort —
on-demand SFA continues to gain market share. Recent economic trends favor the growth of on-demand solutions; by
eliminating the cost barriers of on-premise systems and shifting costs from capital to operational budgets, the on-demand
model is allowing vendors to reach new, first-time SFA users.
2. The emergence of the highly productive sales department: Over the past 15 years, major productivity gains
have been made in manufacturing, finance, human resources and other business-process areas. New IT solutions have
made manufacturing more efficient; applications have streamlined accounting and human resources; and financial
2Market Summary
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software and outsourcing have reduced the cost of business accounting. Investing in these areas today means an
incremental productivity increase instead of the dramatic leaps of years past. Only in sales, which has largely escaped
productivity through automation, are major jumps in productivity still possible, making an investment in SFA attractive.
3. The breach of the adoption barrier: Early SFA solutions were developed by software professionals. As a result,
their interfaces often appeared alien to sales reps, which hurt adoption. After all, would a salesperson rather learn how
to use a cumbersome interface or get out and sell? In the past three years, companies ranging from Avidian to Microsoft
have seized the idea of an easy-to-use interface to break down adoption barriers. For instance, many SFA applications
are integrating with Microsoft Outlook; others, like Salesforce.com and Sage, are paying close attention to the welcoming
aspects of their interfaces.
Vendor Landscape
SFA Vendors can generally be broken into two groups: pure-play SFA and CRM. The pure-play vendors (most notably
Avidian, FrontRange and the mixed-model Landslide) sell products very closely aligned to what sales professionals need
and have a slightly better history of focusing on meeting those needs. After all, they don’t compromise in any way to
accommodate the integration necessary to create a CRM solution. Landslide represents a new take on SFA; targeted at
smaller users, it complements its on-demand software with on-demand services for sales reps. This level of commitment
to sales professionals is difficult to match for CRM vendors.
However, there are advantages to choosing the larger CRM-category vendors (such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, Infor
and many others). These providers offer packages designed with integration between marketing and sales functions, a
powerful feature in an era when marketing is expected to play a greater role in lead generation than ever before. They
also come more equipped for greater integration into other business processes than pure-play options in many cases.
Rather than being point solutions, they are targeted at acting as a platform on which to base numerous interrelated
applications.
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3Before you start the buying process, familiarize yourself with three areas:
1. Product: Feature definitions
2. Cost and benefits: License fees, on-demand costs and delivery models
3. Vendor: Selling, implementation and support
Product Features
SFA solutions can vary wildly in their feature sets, but there is a core set of functionality that every SFA solution
should have — otherwise it should not be considered. Advanced solutions contain many “extras” — features that some
companies may see as “must-haves,” whereas others might view as “need-to-haves.”
Not all SFA solutions will work for your company. Make sure you take into consideration your specific needs before
considering a vendor and its product. Don’t forget to take a serious look at open-source solutions, as well as your
preference of an on-demand vs. an on-premise solution.
The BasicsThere are essential features that any SFA solution should have. Cross any application off of your list if it doesn’t come
with the following features:
Activity list: This function records calls, visits, conversations, demos and other events in the sales process so that sales
reps have a complete, at-a-glance history of each customer’s interaction with his or her organization. More advanced SFA
products can integrate into service-management systems so that reps know when other people in the organization have
contacted a customer; this helps minimize the possibility of a rep being blindsided later.
Contact manager: The essence of any SFA system, the contact manager replaces the manual recording of names,
phone numbers, email addresses and basic company information. Modern SFA products, in addition to allowing reps to
enter data as they collect it, can import data from a variety of sources. The next generation of SFA tools will import data
from what are known as Web 2.0 sources — blogs, social-networking sites and other Web-based locations where people
voluntarily provide details about themselves.
Database: The behind-the-scenes engine that makes the entire SFA system work, this software allows data to be
housed in a manner that is easily accessible and can be correlated.
Product In-Depth
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Email module: This component of SFA integrates your organization’s email system into the SFA system, providing an
automatic way for data from sales-focused emails to be incorporated directly into the SFA database, the scheduling tool
and the contact manager.
Scheduling tool: Not only does this feature keep track of appointments, but it populates scheduling data. By doing so,
it also provides others in the organization with the ability to see the availability of reps and the nature of the clients with
whom they are spending time.
Advanced FeaturesAdditional functionality is built into many SFA products. The following list includes the most important and most common
of these additional features. Buyers need to weigh the usefulness of these tools when selecting a solution since they add
some complexity. If the return in productivity does not offset that complexity, then that feature may actually be a detriment.
Activity workflow management: Organizations with standardized sales processes can employ this feature to
provide step-by-step rules for their reps to guide them through the selling process, based on activities and actions by
the customer. This is not intended to lock reps into a set of behaviors, but rather to provide guidance, help standardize
successful selling practices and offer a measure of training to new reps.
What is SFA?
SFA refers to a set of tools that record all steps in the sales process, as well as all pertinent data driven by those events. The value of this data is inarguably useful for the cultivation of individual customer relationships and in determining sales trends and setting sales policies. SFA solutions automate the collection of this data and instantly propagate it to where it is needed.
The main reasons for implementing SFA are:
To make sales representatives more efficient•To provide managers with better insight into their sales staffs’ activities•To provide visibility into the sales process for other parts of the business •
The essential features of any SFA solution include:
Contact manger•Activity list•Database•
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 9Focus Research ©2009
Advanced contact management: Manually keeping track of buyers moving from company to company is very difficult.
If the process is tied to the email system — and in more advanced products, social media data — advanced contact
management updates contacts quickly. By helping identify the replacement for a buyer at a customer company, this tool
helps preserve accounts.
Automated lead capture: This tool automates the importation of data from forms on your organization’s Web site
directly into the SFA system.
Automated quote generation: A useful complement to mobility, this feature ties into back-office applications
to quickly generate quotes using the most current pricing, discount and delivery data. It allows sales reps to provide
preliminary quotes on the spot in front of the customer, eliminating the need to return to the office and call the prospect
to close the deal later.
Contract manager: This feature tracks and maintains contract information for licensing or services as an integrated
part of the customer-management system. Some advanced forms of contract management allow customers to
electronically sign contracts and offer visibility into the process of delivering a contract to a client, potentially revealing
problems in the sales cycle.
Customer profitability analysis: This tool uses data from the SFA solution to help identify customers that provide
the greatest margin — and the ones who bring in the least — so that sales assets can be more strategically employed.
The tool can be useful in identifying growing customers who are showing large increases in profits and determine how to
allocate resources to help support those customers over time.
Integration with call-center software: Although many view it as something separate from the sales process, the
call center is increasingly being used to up-sell and cross-sell new products and services to the customer. This sales
scenario makes it important for call-center agents to have access to SFA data. It’s also extremely important in inside sales
scenarios, and it provides reps with an idea of a customer’s history with the call center and the organization’s service staff.
Mobility: Many SFA solutions now include mobile capabilities. At its core, this feature lets reps in the field access their
organization’s SFA data, either in its entirety or as a partial set cached on the handheld device (or a combination of the
two approaches). Many vendors develop mobile capabilities for specific platforms, like the RIM BlackBerry or the Apple
iPhone; others support multiple platforms; still others use third-party software to apply a mobile layer to their solutions.
There are few standards for SFA mobility, and different vendors are pursuing it in different ways.
Order management: By tracking the status of orders through manufacture, fulfillment and delivery, order management
prevents sales reps from being blindsided if customers are experiencing delivery issues. It also helps sales reps avoid
promising more than their companies can deliver.
Prospect manager: Since a company’s Web site is the source of many of its leads, and because marketing automation
permits the collection of large volumes of new leads, transferring this data from marketing to sales can be laborious. This
feature lets sales managers assign leads automatically to reps on the basis of preset rules and policies based on the
nature of the lead and its source, as well as the and degree of experience of the sales rep.
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Sales performance management: By automating the commission, bonus and salary processes for sales reps, this
application provides a way to motivate desirable selling behaviors and build better sales programs. It also removes the
hassle of monitoring bonuses, spiffs, contests and other incentives that are often difficult to monitor. Finally, the tool
provides sales reps with visibility into their own compensation and helps them monitor their personal goals.
Sales pipeline analysis: Essentially, an extension of the technology of business intelligence, this feature uses the
data in the SFA system and applies statistical analysis to give a real-time view of the sales pipeline. By using them, sales
managers can better understand not just how much potential revenue is in the sales pipeline, but at what stage of the
sales cycles each sale is. This, in turn, can help managers shift resources, spot areas for increased training and improve
forecasting.
Sales training solutions: Although traditional classroom sales training is a regular requirement for many sales
professionals, this technology provides a refresher — or exposure to new policies, ideas and techniques — as a rep is
using the SFA system. It does so through screen pop-ups or other interactive features, and it delivers the training without
taking reps away from the job of selling. Next-generation sales training tools can detect events automatically and pop up
boxes with tips to help in the precise circumstances the rep is facing, and can analyze sales activities to provide reps with
training customized to the areas in which they’ve demonstrated a need for improvement.
Social-networking features: Next-generation SFA tools include the ability to tap into social-networking sources and
import the critical data back into the SFA system. These sources include blogs, social-networking sites, user communities
and microblogging sites. Although at first the data on these sources may seem trivial, it can be used to track lead behavior
and enhance your profiles of existing and potential customers.
Territory management: Another process that’s been largely manual, territory management was ripe for automation.
Although a number of vendors provide territory-management applications that integrate with SFA solutions, several SFA
vendors have started adding some capability into their core products. These features allow managers to adjust territories,
reassign assets and track sales trends across geographic regions.
On-Premise vs. On-Demand SolutionsWhile many view these two delivery models in the context of cost, there are issues concerning their use and deployment
that should be factored into your decision-making process. On-demand solutions — also known as SaaS (Software as a
Service) and delivered over the Internet — are easier to deploy; IT and infrastructure demands are far fewer than with an
on-premise solution; and the vendor handles backups, software upgrades, removing that burden from your organization.
The downside is that on-demand solutions tend to be far less flexible when it comes to customization, so if your
circumstances demand multiple custom features, your ability to use an on-demand solution may be severely limited.
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 11Focus Research ©2009
Open SourceOpen-source SFA solutions, written using “open” code bases (as opposed to proprietary code), are beneficial for
economic reasons. In general, they are less expensive than proprietary software. However, to get the most out of these
solutions, a degree of customization is almost always required. If a company has IT skills to do this in-house, or has a
third-party partner who can provide such services, the open-source option offers the ability to craft a solution tailored to
its specific needs with a reduced up-front cost and greater agility than the company would find with typical on-demand
offerings.
Costs
Businesses of every size buy SFA solutions once their selling conditions require them to manage more data than is
practicable to manage manually.
Who BuysThe decision makers most often involved in determining which SFA solution is best for a company are:
Vice presidents of sales•Sales managers•CIOs•
Why Businesses BuySFA is the solution for several major issues that affect sales organizations as they scale their sales operations. These include:
1. The basic sales data needed for reps to close deals becomes difficult to handle through traditional manual means as their
customer loads increase.
2. Sales managers need to be able to shift resources, change programs or alter sales tactics more rapidly. SFA provides
metrics to evaluate past efforts and make appropriate changes.
3. Other parts of organizations can sometimes make use of the data generated by SFA (most notably, marketing,
manufacturing and finance). In the case of the marketing department, the customer information generated with SFA can be
used to cultivate more and better leads, providing a second major benefit to sales reps.
The overarching business benefit of SFA is that it enables fewer sales reps and sales managers to deliver more results. It
makes them more productive because it eliminates manual data-management tasks, reminds reps of what they need to
do and provides a basis for ready analysis of sales data.
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 12Focus Research ©2009
What They’re Willing to PayAlthough it can deliver ROI quickly, SFA is not inexpensive. On-demand SFA solutions carry a price tag of about $75 per
user per month, whereas on-premise software licenses can require an up-front payment of more than $1,500 per seat.
For instance, Sage’s CRM 6.1 SaaS solution costs $69 per seat per month, whereas Infor’s Epiphany on-premise solution
will run you $25,000 for 15 seats. The dramatic difference in price tags is in part because of the two distinct ways in
which SFA is delivered.
A conservative estimate of the implementation costs for integration, customization and configuration can amount to 300
percent of the initial costs. Even on-premise SFA solutions carry an ongoing license-fee cost.
On-Premise Software CostsTraditional software is described as “on-premise” because the user company owns and houses it, along with its operating
environment. The software carries a one-time up-front cost, plus an annual licensing fee (typically, 22 percent of the base
price). The user company also has to have an operating environment containing the hardware needed to run the solution
and the on-site staff to maintain the software, install updates, handle security and address any bugs that may arise. The
host company also must provide its own backup solution, its own storage and its own disaster-recovery solution.
One major benefit of on-premise software is that it can be customized more easily than on-demand software. Because
it resides in-house, it can be tailored to the organization’s unique needs, and updates can be made with those
customizations in mind.
From an economic point of view, an on-premise solution is a large one-time investment with an annual outlay for licenses,
hardware and staff. The money typically comes from a company’s capital expenses, making it a more difficult sell during
tough economic times. However, many businesses favor this approach because of perceived benefits in data security.
Over time, if the costs of labor and hardware can be managed, it can be a less expensive option than “hosted” software.
Hosted/SaaS Solution CostsHosted software, sometimes referred to as SaaS (Software as a Service), is delivered via the Internet on a subscription
basis. The terms of these arrangements may be month-to-month or in the form of a contract that can span as many as
two years. In this model, the technical aspects of the software — the computing environment, data storage, IT staffing,
security, backup and recovery and software updates — are all handled by the vendor. This also means that, typically,
getting an on-demand SFA solution up and running takes far less time; because the implementation is essentially similar
to those of other customers, all that’s needed is to integrate some data, assign passwords and start working.
Since the money for a hosted solution typically comes out of the operating budget, a hosted solution may be an easier
sell during tough economic times. For smaller organizations, eliminating the need for IT staff, computing space, hardware
and associated resources may be critical to the adoption of an SFA solution.
The downside of the hosted model is that, in general, hosted SFA is much more difficult to customize than on-premise
software. Hosted solutions can be provided primarily because, from the vendor’s point of view, they are multiple instances
of the same software. Not only would extensive customization be difficult to do in many cases, but it could also upset the
vendor’s economic model. Thus, customization is typically kept to a minimum in on-demand deployments.
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From a pure cost point of view, on-demand solutions start out less expensive than on-premise solutions, but over time
the monthly payments can add up to more than those of an on-premise solution. Researchers place this time frame at
between two and three years. However, for smaller businesses, the value of having multiple IT functions outsourced as
part of the hosted SFA contract may justify that additional cost.
In the past, on-premise and on-demand solutions have been very different products, right down to their code. Increasingly,
vendors are developing on-demand and on-premise versions of their SFA products that use the same code base (the
first of these was Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and CRM Online), enabling customers to move from on-demand to
on-premise if their businesses change and result in an environment where on-demand becomes preferable. These
vendors are also creating schemes that make it much easier to take data from their computing environments and install it
on a customer’s computing environment.
Support costs and third-party services may also add to your expenses. For more about support, see the next section.
Vendor
A list of vendors, current as of January 2009, is included in the back of this primer. Although the big names tend to cater
to large companies, even when their solutions were orginally targeted at small business, there are a large number of
SFA vendors focused on smaller customers. If you’re a small business, there could be a better cultural fit between your
company and a small SFA vendor.
That said, there’s nothing more important than a vendor’s stability, especially if you opt for an on-demand solution, since
you will be entrusting your sales operation to that vendor.
Our research shows that the most important event for you in the decision-making process will be the demo. Since
adoption is critical, testing the interface is very important — a cluttered or hard-to-use interface may destroy your chances
of a successful adoption. Also, the way the vendor treats you during the demo process is indicative of how it will handle
you during your tenure as a customer.
Implementation and Support
Naturally, how difficult your SFA implementation is will be directly tied to the complexity of the SFA product you
select. Simple, standalone applications will be far easier to get up and running than more complex and more fully
integrated applications. It’s important to honestly appraise the skills of your IT staff; if they’re not able to handle the
implemenation, you will need to seek outside help in the form of a consultant, integrator or professional services
organization (often available through your SFA vendor). Once the system is running, be aware that maintaining it is a
job that will last for the length of the solution; regular maintenance and upgrading will be required. Again, you made
need the services of a third party.
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Support for SFA comes in a variety of flavors. Most vendors offer basic support, but others sell various levels of expanded
service. Again, the level of support you opt for is based entirely on how technically competent you believe your IT staff and
sales reps are.
Some support offerings provide online help only; others have staff available 24 hours a day. It is wise to match the style
of support to the way the people using the system work; nothing is as frustrating as trying fix a problem remotely with a
support representative who insists that you communicate his or her way.
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To assist you in simplifying a complex subject, we’ve included a set of tools that can help you understand SFA jargon, the
vendors currently offering SFA solutions and whether your company is actually ready for SFA.
10 Signs You Need an SFA Solution
The 8 Benefits of Adopting SFA
Glossary of Key Terms
SFA Vendor Landscape
4 Tools
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The exact moment an organization needs SFA is hard to nail down, but far too many realize they need SFA only after they
lose a revenue opportunity. Instead of waiting for a missed sale as an indicator, look for these10 signs to know whether
it’s time for you to invest in SFA.
1. Leads fall through the cracks. These days, the last thing you can afford is to let the leads your marketing
department generates — or that your sales reps gather through prospecting — lay fallow. But that’s exactly what happens
at many companies because lead management and assignment is not properly automated. An SFA system can allow you
to route leads to the right rep — and make sure that the rep follows through with them.
2. Customer contacts change, and you don’t know it. In this economy, the people with buying authority may
change frequently. When they leave one company, they may turn up at another. SFA helps you keep track of these
changes, and should a contact pop up at another firm, it can help reps who may have responsibility for that company
establish an instant contact.
3. Sales expectations grow. With fewer sales reps and more demands, the old ways of keeping track of contacts,
appointments and sales notes just won’t scale. Not automating some of the basic tasks of sales scheduling, contact
management and activity tracking will leave sales reps drowning in a sea of paper — and at a disadvantage to their
competition.
4. Sales managers can’t organize sales data. Without a way of quickly aggregating sales reps’ data, managers
spend most of their time compiling reports rather than taking action. SFA allows them to assemble their reports faster and
makes it possible for them to examine data in ways they haven’t been able to in the past. This insight can make managers
more agile in reacting to sales challenges.
5. Team selling results in confusion. Team selling is a good idea, but keeping team members from stepping on each
other’s toes or dropping the ball requires constant communication. SFA provides that communication: at a glance, a rep
can see what his or her teammates have done and can get an understanding of exactly where a customer is during the
buying process.
6. Re-allocating sales assets becomes difficult. When sales managers make changes and reassign reps to
new accounts, there tends to be limited or no time for those reps to transition. This makes some managers reluctant to
make changes at all, even if they’re necessary. SFA allows reps to understand the intricacies of each customer quickly,
eliminating that obstacle to responsive management.
10 Signs You Need an SFA Solution
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 17Focus Research ©2009
7. Disputes arise over compensation and territory. Sales reps are motivated by money, so it’s no surprise that
compensation issues can arise. SFA can organize all compensation plans and policies in one place, and the system can
automatically tally cumulative compensation for specific periods based on results. Similarly, territory-management tools
can help keep clear what geographic region belongs to which rep. These tools also allow managers to make changes to
territory data quickly.
8. Meetings dominate sales reps’ time. Reps should be out selling, not sitting in a room with a sales manager
taking notes. By gathering important data in one place — including internal sales department information — the need for
meetings is cut down and reps have more time for their core responsibilities.
9. Customers know their sales histories better than you do. Sales reps have to keep track of many customer
relationships; customers have to keep track of just one. SFA prevents reps from walking into a situation where a customer
has a standing concern that the rep is unaware of and prevents embarrassing situations before they happen.
10. Customer data goes into a sales black hole. Other parts of a company — marketing, product development and
finance, to name a few — are eager to use customer information, but often it never gets into their hands. SFA provides a
bridge for that data and allows organizations to multiply the power of the information their reps collect on a daily basis.
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 18Focus Research ©2009
As the sales process gets more complex, and as reps are expected to manage an increasing volume of leads, sales-
efficiency tools — which are the basis of SFA — are becoming all but mandatory. Here’s a list of the benefits SFA brings;
if three or four address pain points in your company, then you’re probably ready to bring SFA into your organization.
1. Improved collaboration: SFA allows sales teams, managers and other departments to easily swap up-to-date sales
information, from price lists to products specifications.
2. Better managed territories: Having your West Coast-based reps manage New York City-based clients is an
exercise in geographic mismanagement. An effective SFA solution can automatically route leads to the right sales reps
based on territory.
3. Detailed reports: Collecting and integrating data is only the first step to improving the sales pipeline. SFA’s reporting
capabilities allow you to analyze revenue, forecast opportunities, rate sales-campaign effectiveness and track each sales
rep’s success.
4. Empowered sales managers: Allow sales managers to carefully track their sales force’s activities. By identifying
areas of weakness, lost opportunities and undeserved territories, managers can better coach and bolster individual sales
performance.
5. Enhanced sales productivity: Improve efficiency and drive revenue by better managing leads. This also helps you
identify leads that may have otherwise fallen through the cracks.
6. Strengthened field sales: By ensuring anywhere, anytime access to data, including client account information,
inventory availability and delivery schedules, road warriors are better equipped to respond to customers’ questions,
concerns and special requests.
7. Increased opportunities: Get a leg up on your competitors by tracking their pending deals and strategically
highlighting competitive trends and looming threats.
8. Better-educated partners: Don’t leave your channel partners to fend for themselves. Instead, automate your partner
recruitment, training and planning processes to build more mutually beneficial relationships.
The 8 Benefits of Adopting SFA
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 19Focus Research ©2009
BI (Business Intelligence): Dedicated analytical tools that draw data from back-office applications (including SFA),
correlate it and present it in the form of reports.
Call center: A central point for customer calls. These may be service calls (as in a help desk) or they may be outbound
calls for sales. Recent trends have moved away from centralized call-center facilities toward a model in which agents are
geographically distributed and work from their homes but are centrally managed (called a “virtual call center”).
Contact manager: The electronic equivalent of the sales representative’s “little black book,” this was the initial
application that led to SFA technology. It stores information about leads and customers in an easy-to-access way, and
may include other functionality, such as scheduling.
Cross-sell: The practice of suggesting extra items to a customer interested in a purchase.
Customer analytics: Software programs used by organizations to get better insight into their customers. These
programs help analyze customers’ product preferences, channel preferences, inclination to purchase, tenure with the
organization, etc. It enhances the decision-making process by helping to determine which product or services a company
should offer to a particular customer and through which channel, as well as which incentives it should use to attract and
retain customers.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management): A discipline centered on the people, processes and technologies
needed to build more intimate relationships between buyers and sellers. The aim of CRM is to better serve customers
individually according to their tastes and preferences to promote positive buying experiences.
Dashboard: A graphical user interface that allows reps to view customer data on a single screen. This may consist of
account details, complaint status, customer history and more. It presents the user with relevant information and files, as
well as the customer’’s immediate status and an evaluation of the current project or process. A dashboard enables users
to access the required information from multiple sources at the same time.
Data scrubbing/cleansing: The process of cleaning an entire database of irrelevant or bad data. Data-cleansing
software tools and applications help identify, dispose of and/or rectify redundancy in databases and eliminate any data
that is inaccurate or incomplete. Data cleansing also helps maintain consistency in data that has been imported from
multiple databases. The goal of data cleansing is to maintain standard, consistent and reliable data to be used across the
organization.
Dirty data: The term associated with erroneous, unnecessary or irrelevant data. Spelling mistakes, improper punctuation,
incorrect data, duplication in data collection and obsolete data are a few examples.
Glossary of Key Terms
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 20Focus Research ©2009
Field force automation: The use of mobile applications for real-time support of orders, arrangements, administration
and reporting in the field. The software blends the functions of CRM, mobile computing amd management of work orders
into a unified solution.
Knowledge base: A centralized storehouse of information. In the IT context, a knowledge base can be defined as a
machine-readable resource for the distribution of information, typically online. It can be successfully employed in CRM, as
it helps customers gain easy access to information without staff intervention.
Lead: A potential customer and his or her contact information.
Lead aging: The period of inactivity between the generation of a lead and the time a lead is acted upon. Generally,
the majority of leads are not acted upon as they do not reach the appropriate hands in time. If a business pays proper
attention to diminishing lead aging, it can attain a remarkable competitive advantage.
Lead generation: The discovery of possible customers through marketing efforts. Modern lead generation uses email
responses, Web site visits and other interactions to collect leads as opposed to the simple purchase of lists or other less
precise methods.
Lead qualification: A means of separating inquires from leads and determining where those leads are in the buying
process. The system determines a lead’s needs, willingness, position in the company and attributes. Lead qualification
plays an important part in targeting sales resources and attaining sales efficiency.
Marketing automation: A tool that helps organizations examine, prepare, devise, implement and assess marketing
campaigns. It helps identify target markets, marketing-delivery methods, budget and several other related activities.
Marketing segmentation: The sorting of customers based on responses to advertising, interactions and other
marketing variables. It helps attain the greatest market response with limited marketing resources by differentiating
between the response traits of several parts of the market.
Microsegmentation: A marketing strategy to narrow and refine a market into smaller segments on the basis of
common characteristics — age, gender, income, possessions, expenditure and preferences. Microsegmentation is critical
for direct marketing messages aimed at niche customer segments.
On-demand: A subscription-based software or service. See also SaaS (Software as a Service).
SFA (Sales Force Automation): The task of automating the entire sales process, including order tracking and
processing, contact management and customer interactions, information sharing, inventory control, lead management,
sales forecast analysis, sales processing, etc.
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 21Focus Research ©2009
Sales pipeline: A set of sequential activities that starts with the generation of sales leads and ends with the closing
of the sale.
SLA (Service Level Agreement): A contractual agreement between a client and a service provider which outlines
the criteria on which the performance of the service provider will be judged. It requires the provider to meet a minimum
performance or delivery standard. An SLA also spells out the punitive measures or changes in the contractual relationship
if the vendor fails to meet the service standards.
Social networking: The use of Internet-based sites and forums to connect with other people. Examples of social-
networking sites include Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Yelp!.
SaaS (Software as a Service): The delivery of software by a vendor to a customer on a subscription basis over the
Internet. The software is hosted on the vendor’s hardware at a remote location, and the vendor handles security, backup
and software updates in exchange for a periodic payment.
Territory management: A technology that simplifies the task of managing the geographic areas handled by sales reps.
Up-sell: The practice of suggesting cost products and services, generally of a better quality, to a customer interested
in a purchase.
VAR (Value-Added Reseller): A company that selects an existing product, adds more features, repackages it and then
sells to customers as a new product. There are several ways to add value, such as adding a novel functionality in keeping
with customers’ needs. Value can be added through various means, including customization, integration and consulting. It
is most common in the computer and electronics industries.
Web 2.0: An expression used to describe Internet applications that permit user-generated content and interaction.
Social-networking and social media sites, blogs and Internet tools that harness user-generated data are the primary
components of Web 2.0.
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 22Focus Research ©2009
The following summarizes the vendors serving various areas of the SFA market. While we have tried to be comprehensive,
there may be smaller SFA vendors or SFA modules to other business applications we have not included. This list is
current as of January 2009.
We’ve broken vendors into five categories; the first three are based on the size of the SFA customer they serve, while
the last two provide hosted products and solutions for vertical-specific industries. Be aware that vendors may appear in
multiple categories.
Vendors Serving Small Businesses
AppShore Itility CRM Salesboom
Avidian Landslide Technologies SalesCenter
BizManager LeadMaster Salesforce.com
Caspian LeadTrack Software SalesJunction.com
ClienTracker LongJump SalesMate
Cobault LookOut Software Stone Software
Concursive Market Master SalesPage Technologies
Consona Maximizer Software SamePageSolutions
ContactBook.Net Microsoft SmartCompany
ContactAdministrator.com NetSuite SugarCRM
Dalco Technologies NOVAData Information Systems SuperOffice
DataForceCRM Nxtranet Surado Solutions
Dovarri OpenBOX Terrasoft
EBSuite Oracle VanillaSoft
Everest Software ProspectSoft vtiger
FreeCRM.com Relenta xsalesOnline.com
FrontRange Solutions RightNow Technologies Xtenza Solutions
InsideSales.com Sage Zoho
Intelisis Sales Team Automation
Interchange Solutions SalesAhoy
SFA Vendor Landscape
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 23Focus Research ©2009
Vendors Serving Medium-Sized Businesses
Aplicor Maximizer Software SmartCompany
Caspian Microsoft Soffront Software
Cobault NetSuite Software Innovation
Concursive NOVAData Information Systems SugarCRM
Consona Nxtranet SuperOffice
ContactAdministrator.com OpenBOX Surado Solutions
DataForceCRM Oracle TechExcel
Dovarri ProspectSoft Terrasoft
EBSuite RightNow Technologies VanillaSoft
FreeCRM.com Sage Vertical Solutions
InsideSales.com Sales Team Automation vtiger
Intelisis SalesAhoy xsalesOnline.com
Interchange Solutions Salesboom Zoho
Itility CRM SalesCenterLandslide Technologies Salesforce.comLeadMaster SalesJunction.com
LeadTrack Software Stone Software
LongJump SalesPage Technologies
LookOut Software SamePageSolutions
Market Master SAP
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 24Focus Research ©2009
Vendors Serving Enterprises
Aplicor LeadMaster SalesJunction.com
Cobault LeadTrack Software Stone Software
Concursive LongJump SalesPage Technologies
Consona Maximizer Software SamePageSolutions
Dovarri NOVAData Information Systems Soffront Software
EBSuite Nxtranet Software Innovation
Entrepids OpenBOX SugarCRM
IFS Oracle SuperOffice
Infor RightNow Technologies TechExcel
InsideSales.com Sage VanillaSoft
Intelisis Sales Team Automation Vertical Solutions
Interchange Solutions Salesboom xsalesOnline.com
IItility CRM SalesCenter Xtenza Solutions
Landslide Technologies Salesforce.com
Vendors Providing Hosted Solutions
Aplicor InsideSales.com Salesboom
Cobault Landslide Technologies SalesCatalysts.com
Concursive Microsoft Salesforce.com
ContactBook.Net NetSuite SalesJunction.com
ContactAdministrator.com OpenBOX SalesPage Technologies
DataForceCRM Oracle SamePageSolutions
Dovarri Relenta SmartCompany
EBSuite RightNow Technologies VanillaSoft
Everest Software Sales Team Automation xsalesOnline.com
FreeCRM.com SalesAhoy Xtenza Solutions
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 25Focus Research ©2009
Vendors Serving Specific Vertical Industries
AIMcrmMortgage, addiction treatment, insurance, franchisers, higher education, home
improvement, printing and graphics lead aggregation
BNTouch Mortgage
CDC Software Financial services, medical-device manufacturing, construction and real estate,
manufacturing, legal services, health care insurance
CoreTrac Financial services
LeadOrganizer Insurance
MEI Consumer goods
ProfitCenter Software Direct marketing
RW3 Consumer packaged goods
SalesChain Office equipment dealers
Satuit Technologies Energy, financial services
StayinFront Life sciences, consumer goods, business
Surado Solutions Banking and finance, health care, education, homeland security, manufacturing and
technology
Target Software Fundraising
TreeHouse Interactive Channel sales
Trimble Consumer goods
XTEL Consumer goods manufacturing
Sales Force Automation Market Primer 26Focus Research ©2009
About FOCUS
Our Mission
Our mission is to support business professionals’ critical purchase decisions by creating and distributing the highest
quality, most relevant purchase research and tool sets.
Our Approach
To ensure maximum insight and relevancy, Focus has designed a four factor approach to buyer-centric research. All
research at Focus begins with defining the buyer factor. Categorized in our research as Buyer Types, the buyer factor
identifies the buyer needs and preferences in a market that make a difference in selecting the right product and vendor.
Buyer Types are studied and developed based on Focus’ interaction with thousands of buyers across a category. The
buyer factor in turn shapes Focus recommendations on how buyers approach three other critical factors: 1) product
requirements, 2) cost considerations and 3) vendor relationships.
Buyer Feedback
In addition to speaking with industry experts and other participants, a critical priority is to integrate feedback
from experienced buyers. We speak with thousands of buyers each month and conduct our formal buyer surveys
throughout the year.
For more information on our research approach, please visit Focus.