Preface
The technology used in business has gone from early eighties PCs in the Back Office running financial and accounting software to today’s Front Office sales processes being run through servers, notebooks and networks. Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation are the solutions that sprang up to ease business pains.

Chapter 1: Blending Technology with Techniques
Technology continues to transform the way salespeople work, and when you combine it with proven selling techniques, the outcome is a strong sales methodology for an SFA solution to build upon.

Chapter 2: Direct and Indirect Benefits
There are two distinct types of benefits to sales automation: indirect and direct. These benefits can potentially bring increased efficiency and effectiveness respectively. It’s easy to take just one of them and run with it, but if you can compound the benefits of increased efficiency and effectiveness, the payout is astronomical.

Chapter 3: Sales Methodology
Implementing a sales method across the entire organization brings in a degree of consistency that benefits everybody. This requires a set of definitions that makes describing the aspects of the sale unambiguous to all.

Chapter 4: SFA and CRM
A discourse on Sales Force Automation would not be complete without discussion of Customer Relationship Management. Unfortunately, these two terms are often confused and used interchangeably while they aren’t actually the same.

Chapter 5: Customer Knowledge Store
Disparate databases often lead to frustration for users having to access information from other departments within their company. Lists of support requests, warranty commitments and service contracts, are strewn all across the office landscape, camouflaged among other tall stacks of paper documents—the result is confusion and chaos. If the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, the customer inevitably suffers.

Chapter 6: The Four Waves
Most companies that have a functioning sales automation system got there the hard way. Looking back, they would probably agree that there are faster and more effective ways to achieve the same results. The process of reacting to perceived business pain points leads to the division of four distinct phases of growth toward a technology solution—the Four Waves.

Chapter 7: The Challenge of Managing Sales
A common way to deal with what seems to be an insurmountable task is to break the whole into manageable chunks. A salesperson’s responsibilities can also be chunked into core competencies—Territory, Account, Contact and Sales Cycle.

Chapter 8: Territory Management
Territories are highly prized by salespeople, but that’s not surprising because the size and quality of the territory directly impacts the salesperson’s income. The Territory sets the boundary limits within which salespeople are given responsibility to sell their products. The most efficient way to set up an administrative structure of territories is by forming Territory Groups.

Chapter 9: Account Management
Salespeople are fixated with “owning” accounts; that means the competition is so convinced they can’t win that they won’t give it much time. Accounts are directly related to organizations. With sales automation, the breakdown of an organization structure into multi-level account structures can lead to more effective marketing and sales efforts.

Chapter 10: Contact Management
The contact is anyone that salespeople communicate or associate with. In sales automation, the scope of that definition gets narrowed down to include people who directly affect or influence the salesperson’s business. The aim of Contact Management is to record a complete list of interactions with the contact in order to develop an understanding of the relationship with them.

Chapter 11: Sales Cycle Management
The sales cycle is measured in units of time (days, weeks, months, years), and essentially represents the only available time for the salesperson to sell to the customer. Managing a sales cycle involves realizing when it starts, when it will end, how to influence its length, and knowing what to do at which point, anywhere in between.

Chapter 12: T, A, S and C
The salesperson’s responsibilities can be broken into four core competencies (Territory, Account, Contact and Sales Cycle). This chapter discusses relationship and opportunity focus as it applies to the core competencies and how a balanced approach to focus results in the greatest chance of sales success.

Chapter 13: Finding Sales Opportunities
Sales opportunities don’t just grow on trees—salespeople have to actively find them. The earlier the sales opportunity is identified and recorded, the sooner a strategy can be put together to win it. Harvesting opportunities takes several stages; from finding a lead, to qualification to either becoming a long term lead or an Identified Business Opportunity.

Chapter 14: Customer Interactions
A customer interaction is any event in which the company touches the customer with regard to fostering a mutual business relationship. The two distinct selling styles of opportunity and relationship focus are used in customer interactions to various degrees in order to achieve different means. Customer interactions are also the essential pieces of knowledge that populate a CRM system’s Customer Knowledge Store.

Chapter 15: Putting Interactions to Work
All customer interactions provide useful information on relations with the customer. In this chapter, sales automation done right explores a bevy of customer interactions to recreate an understanding of the relationship with the customer.

Chapter 16: Fundamental Skills of Selling
It’s only natural that the three fundamental skills of selling follow the evolution of the customer’s buying process. The salesperson must first probe the customer to understand what their needs are, and then prove that their product or service is a viable solution. The last stage involves the close, where the salesperson must remove any barriers standing in the way of the customer awarding the business to them.

Chapter 17: The Three Phases of the Sales Cycle
Just as there are three fundamental skills of selling, there are also three phases of the sales cycle where a combination of the skills is used to varying degrees. Each phase takes into account the customer’s present concerns at that point in the buying process, and within each phase, only one fundamental skill is dominant.

Chapter 18: Grading the Opportunity
Forecasting is tricky—there’s no two ways about that. There are far too many problems with the more commonly used methods of forecasting because they can be inaccurate, confusing and inevitably, frustrating. The best way to do it is to ask the salesperson a few simple but penetrating questions about crucial elements of the sale, and to limit the number of possible responses.

Chapter 19: Priorities
It’s not sensible for a salesperson to work their opportunity list from high to low probability because if they aren’t at all involved with any opportunity that the competition pursues, they have no chance whatsoever of winning it. As we discover here, priorities should be determined with due consideration to the time that’s left in the sales cycle.

Chapter 20: The Priority Cube
Combining probability with skill phase and taking into account the amount of time left in the sales cycle leads us to the creation of a 27-point Priority Cube, which dictates many of the unique sales situations that can occur in the real world, and provides the proper advice on prioritizing opportunities accordingly.

Chapter 21: The Sales Environment
It goes without saying that knowledge is important to winning sales. As such, having an intimate understanding of the Sales Environment, that is, all the aspects and circumstances surrounding the sale that determine its outcome, can help salespeople win sales. What’s more is that salespeople can also influence the Sales Environment to sway the buying decision in their favor.

Chapter 22: Intelligent Response
Not all sales automation solutions are cut from the same code. While most of them are merely glorified number crunchers, some of them can actually develop an understanding of the Sales Environment. Proper applications are intelligent, and are capable of providing advice while responding to changes in everyday sales situations.

Chapter 23: Establishing the Sales Environment
In order to help the computer understand the Sales Environment, the salesperson must answer a few carefully crafted questions as accurately and as truthfully as possible. From here on in, the computer can compose intelligent responses to keep the salesperson on track going forward.

Chapter 24: The Interface
The user interface is the medium between the user and the sales automation system. It’s the personality of the software, so the way it is designed has an immeasurable impact on how it is used and the overall success of the project.

Chapter 25: The Nuts and Bolts
Good sales automation systems will accommodate all the different types of technology currently available today and being developed for tomorrow. Salespeople can take advantage of the Internet and mobile technologies like notebooks and PDAs to stay on top of their opportunities wherever they are.

Chapter 26: Getting It Right First Time
It’s important to build and maintain a vision of how an organization can be positively affected by the introduction of sales automation. Outline this vision in a Success Document and keep recording the progress while taking the necessary steps to implementing the solution. If the project goes off track, take immediate measures to bring it back on course.

Chapter 27: Final Thoughts
The business world is results-oriented, but to get results from a sales automation solution, processes, methods, technology, attitude, and everything needs to be right. This final chapter sums up all the foundational ideas of sales automation done right.

Glossary
A list of terms scattered throughout sales automation done right is presented and defined here to help the reader foster a better understanding of the concepts.