What Is SFA?
SFA software deals specifically with how salespeople interact with customers and potential clients, analyzes individual employees’ effectiveness, and forecasts sales expectations. It’s just one component of customer relationship management (CRM), which provides a window to all aspects of a company’s dealings with customers, marketing campaigns, lead management, and support desks. CRM is expanding to include things like partner relationship management, customer analytics, workflow, and integration with legacy business systems. Many SFA products are adding CRM capabilities. SalesLogix and salesforce.com, for example, have marketing and campaign management. The latter plans to offer an inventory module. Both CRM and SFA are fast-growing markets. According to AMR Research, 66 percent of surveyed midlevel executives say that CRM is critical to competitive positioning, yet only a third of their companies plan to increase CRM spending next year. This puts enormous pressure on CRM and SFA prov
