By Quinton Pienaar, CEO, Agilitude.

Your brand is no longer just a visual symbol; it represents the ethos of your entire business, including your products and services, the experiences customers have with these and the people selling them. In the rapidly rising digital economy, sales people need technology to work harder for them, to make knowing and understanding the customer easier, as well as streamlining the sales process as much as possible.

Meet sales force automation software (SFA), the answer to so many sales peoples’ woes. Designed to eliminate several of the necessary, but time-consuming tasks associated with selling, sales force automation is the perfect tool to deliver better results.

Research house, the Aberdeen Group reported that best-in-class adopters of SFA systems saw their deals increase in size by an average of 27%. In addition, these top SFA adopters decreased the sales cycle by 16% and cut the time-to-quota by 15%. Using SFA systems, these organisations' customers' revenue - and, therefore, buying power - grew 26%, while their sales administrative time was slashed by 14%.

A centralised, automated business software solution designed specifically for sales professionals can eliminate much of the monotonous, repetitive administrative work, freeing up salespeople to do what they do best – sell!

Here are 7 reasons why you need salesforce automation:

·  Coach and mentor the team to success. SFA will assist with developing an account strategy, structure and provide frequent feedback. 

·  Set objectives and demonstrate how the team is achieving these goals.

·  Help with knowledge. Assist sales people to have a better understanding of the product, know your competition, and know your customer. 

·  Make it repeatable. Embed the process into systems to make it easy for sales people to perform consistently.

·  Provide the tools to do the above. Use a CRM system that enables you to plan your account strategy, log activities, put the customer at the centre of what you do, while   collating all the important information. It ensures that you are able to use your best people at the right time and sell together. 

·  Capture your sales success (win plan) and loses (loss review) to allow others team members to learn and improve

·  Ask for referrals. Ask customers to refer you to others that may benefit from what you do. Capture these relationships so you can track it and use the network.