CRM - Sales

A core function of any CRM system is so-called SFA - Sales Force Automation. The main goal is to provide company´s sales forces with tools to better interact and understand their customer. It consist of three main features:

Account and Contact Management provides the track of attributes and relationships of all customers, vendors and employess with the company. For that functionality of business partner and business partner relationship is provided.

Activity Management is used to track nonfinancial interactions with customer. It can be any type of interaction, i. e. phone call, email, customer visit. The purpose is to categorize and record every possible interaction for further analysis and operative immediate steps. Activities can be recorded as post steps (i.e. after phone call) or can be planned like i. e. visits.

Lead Management can be from some point viewed as a part of Activity Management. It records potential interest in buying a good or service from the company. It is not yet qualified as opportunity - represents only simple interest in company that may in the future lead to sale. After the process "qualification" where you assign the level of the interest, timeframe to purchase and consider purchasing power the lead becomes opportunity.

Opportunity Management itself is the process of managing and tracking potential sales to customer. It helps you to follow the progress of your team effort and shows you for example:
- how much sales you can potentialy gain in the future;
- when and how you loose potential business;
- shows effectivness of converting leads to real sale;

As a part of your business processes you can use Order Management in CRM system. For further processing of deliveries and additional functions they are transfered to your ERP system. But using Order Management in CRM you can build your own closed scenario in CRM system benefit from build in marketing features.

Contracts can be created in your CRM system and you then can benefit from the closed sales cycle in CRM to better utilize your sales processes. Once you have all documents from lead to contract in SAP CRM system it enables you to optimize and analyze your sales processes as the whole.