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For the upcoming study, "The 2009 SFA Report: Best-in-Class Strategies for Increasing Returns on SFA Investments," Aberdeen surveyed over 195 companies that are automating sales activity. In the research, Salesforce.com featured prominently as a solution provider of choice. In fact, 74 percent of the 50 Salesforce.com users who completed the survey are satisfied with the effect the solution has had on sales productivity, compared to 41 percent of respondents using other sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Companies seeking to organize and centralize customer, account and opportunity information are leveraging sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to provide sales managers with better visibility into internal operations and improve overall sales productivity. Despite the proposed benefits of an SFA/CRM initiative, some companies are still not realizing the sales potential of their SFA/CRM solutions due to inefficient processes and incomplete employee adoption...

The proliferation of customer relationship solutions presents an interesting challenge for small-business owners. How does a small organization looking to control spending decide between common productivity tools, such as Microsoft Outlook or Excel, or a more robust solution? This decision is made more difficult by the emergence of free customer relationship management (CRM) and contact management (CM) solutions.

When poet John Donne wrote, "No man is an island," he suggested that that all human beings are bound by the experiences of others. This timeless notion can also be applied to the business world: "No marketing channel is an island." When online information is examined on a larger scale across several thousands of customers, trends emerge that lead not only to Web site optimization, but also to the improvement of offline marketing campaigns.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the more information a person has concerning a particular issue or event, the more likely they are to accurately predict the outcome. This applies to such diverse areas as baseball, meteorology, and, of course, business. ...

The traditional sales pressures of lengthening sales cycles and low quota achievement have only been exacerbated by the recent economic downturn. Many businesses have been forced to cut costs, eliminate waste and often freeze spending. The few organizations that might be looking to spend are increasingly engaging in intense due diligence through various online sources, such as consumer-generated content forums and other third-party information providers, to inform their purchasing decisions.

The budget cuts and spending freezes resulting from the current economic downturn have reduced the number of legitimate opportunities for sales representatives; therefore, organizations are placing a renewed emphasis on cutting costs and customer retention to combat certain economic realities. ...

As the proliferation of online social media forums has forever changed the way customers gain information and feedback concerning a particular company's products or services, sales representatives are challenged to sell to a prospect base that potentially knows as much, if not more, about the competitive landscape than the reps themselves. ...

As the advent of new customer-facing technologies (such as social media platforms) changes the way consumers gather information about a particular company's products or services, sales representatives are challenged to sell to a customer base that better understands the competitive landscape. As a result, companies realize that they must enable their sales force to work smarter, not harder, to acquire and retain customers. ...