Background
Last week we started to look at the sales business function, with the focus on Sales Force Automation (SFA). As discussed last week, sales force automation basically includes all of the technologies, techniques, and strategies on which successful sales are built. We will continue with this topic this week by looking at the concepts of contact management and pipeline management in the sales function and the involvement of ERP / Business Management Systems.

Contact Management
Contact Management enables you to gather comprehensive prospective and existing customer, contact and relationship data and share consistent information across the business, regardless of geographic location. Proper contact management eliminates data duplication, inconsistency, and reduces operational inefficiencies in all related business units. No more keeping of contacts in several different places —in rolodexes, in spreadsheets or on the back of cigarette boxes… This may seem trivial, but studies have shown that sales people spend a great deal of time searching for and managing customer information, where that time could have been spend on following up on a quote or delivery or just a courtesy call. Where does the ERP / Business Management System come in? Once again…. integration, if your customer contact base is integrated throughout all modules in the system: no need for recapturing customer details, no need for looking up addresses for deliveries, no need for searching for details for invoicing and no need for losing out on a sale! Make sure your system has integrated contact management capabilities and that your contact management system is not a standalone system.
Pipeline Management
A sales pipeline is a very important concept in selling because it is the recognition of the origin and result of each sale. Each sale starts as a lead - which is a phone number, a name, an email address, a referral or someone who walks into your store - they are leads. From there, you qualify the lead, which means, you make sure this person is capable of becoming a customer. After you've qualified a lead, you sell to them and they become customers. So a sales pipeline goes like this: lead - qualified lead - continue/advance – customer - repeat customer.
The idea of sales pipeline management is to guide your sales team to quickly and effectively translate sales opportunities to sales quotes to sales orders by ensuring each step is completed before initiating the next step. Your sales force collects critical customer data that is made available to all stakeholders in real-time, while ensuring that most of their time is spent in front of clients and not burdened with administration and consolidating different data form different sources.
The idea of all this “tools” and functionality in your system is to ensure that your sales staff no longer needs to manually create sales pipelines or track activities, expenses and other information in applications that don’t link the data to the business. The idea is to have all this data integrated in one system so that your system provides a consistent, accurate sales pipeline automatically. This function allows an easy analysis of the true cost of a sale and can help to improve your budgeting, revenue and cash flow planning and to manage, monitor and increase success of your sales staff.
Next Week
We have investigated the topic of the business management system and the sales process by looking at the concepts of sales force automation, contact management and pipeline management in the last two articles. In the next couple of articles, we will investigate Supply Chain Management and ERP / Business Management Systems and we will start by looking at Just in Time (JIT) and Stock Level Optimization and Re-ordering. Until next week, and remember…keep it (A)FRESH!