Electronic Commerce Semester 2 Term 2 Lecture 17

Salesperson Productivity Tools Planning and reporting of sales calls, reporting of expenses, entering orders, checking inventory and order status, managing distributors, tracking leads, and managing accounts In addition, mobile salespeople can reduce sales lead times by requessting product specifications, sending product samples and updating forecasts directly from their laptop computers

Online Telemarketing Targeting qualified prospects, managing demand creation, processing responses, providing literature fulfilment, and tracking sales campaigns’ effectiveness This requires tracking and forwarding qualified leads to the sales teams for immediate action; ranking prospects and prompting scripts (sales, customer service and support)

Direct Mail & Fulfilment Merging, cleaning and maintaining mailing lists; tracking and forwarding leads; customising letters, envelopes and labels; generating picking lists for literature and managing literature inventory

Sales & Marketing Management Providing automated sales management reports; designing and managing sales territories; and analysing marketing and sales programmes by such criteria as territory, product, customer, price and channel

Sales Force Compensation Management Sales management has difficulty with accurate forecasts, visibility into sales productivity and accurately compensating employees for their accomplishments The problem is further complicated when firms have global sales teams Managers need to be able to track market activity and develop incentive compensation solutions for various selling channels

Sales Process Management The most important factor in any sales automation system is the sales process Automating a bad process leads to more chaos The sales process must be analysed for problems, and the system should be designed to address these problems

Overall Online sales automation systems can automate the work of a single salesperson, a single marketing activiity like direct mail, or a company’s entire marketing or sales operation These systems combine direct selling, distributor relationships, telemarketing and direct mail to: generate, qualify, rank-order, distribute, and track sales-leads; fill prospects’ requests for product and price information; update customer and prospect files; provide sales and technical product support by telephone; and automate order entry and sales reporting