Sales Force Automation

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What Does Sales Force Automation Mean?

Sales force automation (SFA) is an integrated application of customizable customer relationship management (CRM) tools that automate and streamline sales inventory, leads, forecasting, performance and analysis. SFA tools include Web-based (hosted CRM) and in-house systems.

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SFA is also known as sales force management system.

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Techopedia Explains Sales Force Automation

All SFA systems are built with two core components:

  • Content management system: Tracks customers, activities, forecasting, contacts, communication/sales history and analytics
  • Sales lead tracking system: Tracks lead and opportunity pipeline data

SFA also includes features like account management and sales/product market research.

Hosted CRM, a web-based service, integrates the application service provider (ASP) model with cloud computing and is popular in small organizations without established CRM infrastructures. In-house SFA provides greater customization but is more expensive than hosted CRM SFA packages.

SFA software is known as Sales Automation (SA) software and CRM software.

Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and GoldMine are popular SFA products.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.