Here are several excerpts from an article by Rick Cook, Convincing Your Sales Force to Use SFA.

About the only thing I’d add is that I believe that it’s critical that representatives from the sales organization, (both management and staff) be integrally involved in the SFA technology selection process. Also, once you’ve narrowed down the SFA technology alternatives to two or three finalists, the sales organization should have the opportunity to compare and contrast the usability of each. They will be expected to use the solution every day. So, you want them to be happy with (and excited about using) the solution you choose.

An SFA (Sales Force Automation) effort is only as good as its implementation— and its implementation is only as good as the degree to which the sales staff, CSRs (customer service representatives) and others use it.

The old apothegm “Technology is easy, people are hard” is never more true than in SFA. If your people don’t buy into your SFA effort, it will at best be only a partial success.

The proof is easy to find. Another old CRM truism holds that the majority of SFA efforts fall short of success — more than two-thirds of them, by some studies. According to those same studies, the most common reason for poor performance is the problem of getting employees to adopt SFA.

Read the rest of this entry »

bookmark to: