Sales Force Automation helps many FMCG companies in many ways and recently has caught the eye of many small and medium scale enterprises across the globe. Adopting Sales Force Automation is now faster than before as many SFA providers have entered the market with the latest advancements.
Employing different use cases and millions of possibilities, SFA has rapidly expanded and evolved into a massive topic that cannot be neglected by FMCG companies.
All major companies in the present market scenario have given a nod to SFA because of the solutions it offers. In spite of SFA entering this new realm of possibilities that look to maximize how it can enhance employee productivity and the several other factors for the company, a large number of companies are still sceptical towards it and rely on a traditional and narrow use case of SFA – attendance and sales management.
“ Let’s Dig a little Deeper!! ”
But it's sad to say that only 20% of major companies who actually require it leverage the benefits of SFA solutions. Granted that attendance and sales capture used to be the very foundation of SFA when it came into existence but now is the time to explore SFA beyond sales too.
We understand that many small and medium enterprises can still seem surprised by SFA and are incorporating only baby steps towards SFA implementation but companies now need to take a giant leap to understand how SFA can lead to success.
It is important for companies to know and understand the breadth of SFA possibilities and explore these possibilities to leverage the benefits for their employees and the company. We discuss a few of these benefits/features that are simple, easy to implement and can add immense value to your first SalesForce Automation initiative.
Competitor Analysis
SFA helps to stay ahead of market competition by capturing information from the market. This works best for industries like FMCG as many players are up for an intense competition to rank on top. An ideal SFA software has the ability to capture ad-hoc data and leverage data from competitors like top-selling products, market plans, branding and other sales activities. Such information plays a major role for both the sales team and also for the marketing team to plan and initiate strategies accordingly. These inputs help the market leaders to enable decision making to stay on top of the competition ladder.
Consumer Insights
We are aware that the customer's opinion plays a huge role for brands in terms of differentiation, pricing, product launches, etc. Another great way to utilise the ad-hoc data is by capturing the capability of an SFA solution for using it for the last mile rep to capture consumer feedback and queries about the company’s products or those of its competitors. FMCG companies can seek such consumer insights of their preferred brand by BTL sampling activity where the in-store sales rep can gather customer feedback which further helps the company to make amends to their products.
Gamification
Gamification is defined as the application of elements of our hyper-intelligent dashboards such as points, badges and leaderboards to regular activities. It is said to be a fun and improved way of driving a learning or competitive initiative. Due to gamification, we can 30% increase in engagement in applications when compared to traditional applications. Gamification can be leveraged in SFA in many areas like sales, reporting, product knowledge and others. It's an ideal way to boost overall usage and increase user engagement.
Virtual Learning
Gone are the days when salespeople had to wait for in-person events or classroom training to improve their skills. Kudos to virtual learning platforms and Learning Management Systems, sales managers can provide salespeople with various ways to engage with sales management training from almost the comfort of their homes. But the key here lies to leverage these tools to reinforce and enhance the coaching eco-system which will lead to group collaboration. It’s not just enough for salespeople to log on to an LMS, take random quizzes and sign off from it. Salespeople will always require direct engagement and feedback from managers to improve their selling skills.
Therefore Sales Force Automation with the above mentioned are some benefits that a company stands to gain by exploring the non-traditional areas of the SFA spectrum. Since SFA continues to evolve with the latest advancements and technology, businesses can expect to see much more new avenues and use cases coming up from Sales force automation by SANeForce.