Sales Management System is information systems used in marketing and sales management department to keep check sales process, which start with a sale and finish with sending invoice to customers. When it meets Marketing Information System, they will become Customer Relationship System (CRM). Sales Force Automation Systems (SFA) is part of the CRM system; it is a system to recode all steps accrues in the sales process, keeps trucks all information which have given by customers, helps to follow up customer requires, reduces duplication information, collects potential customers information from phone list, and oversee sales forecasting, order management, and product knowledge.

Sales Management CRM System is automating system for sales process to help salesmen organizing their entire customer accounts. Revenue increase and decrease can be affected by this system too. Also, this system can provide statistic analysis which shows how each salesman does during the sales process and sales cycles.  In addition, Sales Management CRM System is one of the sales and operational CRM technologies to increase customers’ satisfaction for the sales department.

 Advantage of Sales Management System:  

1.    Save managers’ time - since the system analyzes data and information from sales process and presents all information through tables, charts, or graph.

2.    Sales management has a better control throughout the system since the system will send out all the update order information, production knowledge, and production activities reports frequently. The system makes sales managers have a better idea what’s going on in the company, and then they can give out advice directly and discover problem in the early stage.

3.    Sales managers can set up the system as automatically analyze the information using sophisticated statistical techniques, and then the sales managers can get more useful information out of the system. Such as

a.    Sales manager can provide the most up-to-data details and material to their staffs.

b.    Provide marketing research results to staffs for sales forecasting.

c.    Work with other departments in the company

d.    Classify customer level, who are the most valuable customer and who are the worst one.

e.    Giving productivity report, salesmen performance report, table sales report, individual customer sales report, margin-profit report, and so on

All advantages can increase productivity and profit and reduce production cost. Also, sales managers can control the department more efficiently, and salesmen can use their time more effectively on customers.  Sales department provide a better service or products in order to make customers get more than they expected. This satisfaction will lead to increase customer loyalty.

Disadvantage

1.    Requiring extra worker to keep truck and input data

2.    Not easy to work with the system

3.    Requiring lot of up-date of data and technical maintenance for the system

4.    Expensive

5.    Difficult to work with other systems.

Even though these are some disadvantage about the system, lot of the companies still use the system because the system provide lot of useful information for salesmen to plan and structure their customer accounts; also, they provide a better services and products to customers.

Reference:

CRM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management

How to Create a Better Sales Management System For Your Business http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Create-a-Better-Sales-Management-System-For-Your-Business&id=2069159

Marketing information system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_Information_System

Open Source in a Sales Management System  http://development.gbdirect.co.uk/sales_management_bryant.html

Sales Force Management system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_force_management_system)

Sales process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_process