Third Wave and Advantage CRM Software can help your business acquire new business while being extremely cost effective.

New Business Development and Opportunity Tracking

• Track prospects along a sales path
• Records potential values, expected sales date, sales probability % by opportunity
• Generate Quotes as MS Word documents
• Automatically raises opportunities for each quote
• Opportunity reports and sales forecasts for new business
• Overdue activities
• Track contact history and activity history

Lead Management

A function valued by many sales departments is the automation of the lead routing process, based on predefined business rules, whether to a sales team, channel partner or reseller. Lead management provides such features as guidelines, alarms and ticklers. Look for:

• Automatic qualification of leads against predefined criteria and prioritization via score or grade with colorization, shading or icons indicating level of priority.
• Tracking of leads via differing criteria (date, status, SIC code, campaign, product, territory, etc).
• Reporting capabilities especially on results of lead tracking.
• Linkage features. Many leads come from the marketing department or a call centre. Also the sales professional will also want to marry their lead management process with word processing, spreadsheets and the like.

Pipeline Management

Many sales departments need pipeline sales and order information made available to sales professionals and other qualified individuals. Comprehensive reporting by territory, region, product group, individual and line business should be a requirement. Many vendors also offer pipeline analysis, such as forecasting, sales cycle analysis, win or loss rates and other sales metrics.

Software that can help sales managers and executives perform their duties more efficiently and effectively is one of the keys to a successful sales automation initiative. Technology helps sales managers deal with such complex functions as setting budgets, aligning territories and objectives, deploying sales people, defining quotas and designing compensation plans, particularly in the large- to enterprise-sized companies with more complex sales organizations. Advantage is also promoted by many vendors that can help sales managers to identify best practices, anticipate marketplace shifts, identify at-risk sales personnel, ensure commission programs are adequate, and more.

Some are just trumped up SFA tools, so it pays to be careful and do your homework. When looking at products that purport to offer sales manager features, look for the ability to:

• Manage individual opportunities and relationship information, such as probability metrics, amount of sale, closing date, competitors, etc.
• Manage assignment and reassignment of market segments, geographic territories, product/service lines and accounts.
• Automate distribution of leads to sales personnel based on user definable rules.
• Provide sales analysis
• Territory and account assignment and/or alignment.
• Coordinate multiple direct marketing and sales channels for both new customer sales and current customer cross-selling, including distributors.
• View individual sales staff reports.
• Generate comprehensive written and screen reports that provide information such as win/loss, close rates, probability analysis by individual staff members etc.
• Generate sales metrics, such as lead source pipeline analysis or competitor analysis.
• Generation of analytical data on best practices of top sales personnel.
• Quota management.
• Create and provide suggested guidelines for handling different sales situations.
• Identify the right time to make the right offer to the right customer group through sales planning and forecasting.