We work with lots of companies that are having a hard time defining, refining, and automating their sales process using modern CRM or SFA tools (customer relationship management sales force automation). For companies that are struggling to integrate CRM and develop a CRM tool to improve their sales efficiency, the great news is that there is outstanding tools out there today that allow companies to deploy sales force automation with relative ease and at very low cost.
We've deployed and managed salesforce.com for several of our clients and are using it internally, not only for automating our sales process, but also as an automation tool for automating our e marketing campaigns and lead generation programs.
The key to deploying a successful CRM tool is defining your sales process up front. Many companies buy CRM software like ACT or Goldmine or even more expensive systems than that, but they don't do the upfront planning to define and lock down their sales process so that they can integrate it into their sales force automation system. We see a lot of “garbage in / garbage out” coming from Sales Force users who are using the system in different formats and not following a common set of rules. This makes it impossible for management to get good pipeline information, forecasts, as well as sales activity data on each of their sales team members.
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