Salesforce Automation: An Exploratory Study on Sales Professionals’ Perceptions of Performance Benefits

Nothing developed to date has the potential to affect all areas of sales management and to facilitate the selling process as does the use of salesforce automation (SFA). This study reports the results of a survey of sales professionals (sales managers and salespeople) that assessed their perceptions of the use of sales automation software and hardware. The results of this study suggest that sales managers and salespeople have not moved much past traditional contact management tools when it has been predicted that such tools would be heavily used by salespeople today. The real gains in SFA appear to be in the areas of hardware and communication tools (i.e., laptops, e-mail, fax, and Web) and not software. The respondents in this study did not support the notion that SFA would lower the cost of leads and sales.