One of the biggest challenges for small business owners is how to increase sales and customer satisfaction without having to increase staff, or with a reduced staff.   One way to help achieve this is by using a technology called Sales Force Automation.

Sales Force Automation (SFA) uses software to automate and streamline the many phases of the sales process, with the intent of minimizing the time that sales staff spends on any of these phases. The goal is to allow a business to use their existing sales representatives to manage a larger number of prospects and customers. SFA and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are sometimes thought to be the same. However, CRM applications are likely to have more accounting and customer support features, while SFA applications have more sales and marketing functionality.

At the heart of SFA is a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to contract signing. Many SFA applications also include insights into opportunities, territories, sales forecasts and workflow automation, quote generation and product knowledge.

The reason a company invests in SFA is to help it to find, attract and win new clients, as well as support and preserve those existing clients. The reason many small businesses don’t invest in a SFA solution is that the costs can be prohibitive, and rarely does a small business have the staff necessary to train and support it.

Another challenge of SFA is the staff overhead of having to learn and maintain yet another application.  When management asks an employee to use SFA, it means that in addition to e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation software, he/she now also has to find the time to master a SFA solution such as Salesforce.com®, SAP®, Oracle® or Goldmine®.

Microsoft Outlook® is used in most offices for e-mail, contacts and calendars.  However, for a sales team that is working on leads, opportunities, or orders, Outlook can be limiting. When using Outlook only, each person has his/her own e-mails, tasks and appointments, which make it hard to get an overall picture of what is happening with a customer or prospect.

For small businesses that find SFA too expensive, Microsoft has a solution called Business Contact Manager, an add-on for Outlook. BCM allows a team to organize, in a single place, all their information related to contact management, e-mail messages, appointments, sales stages, and customer service activities. BCM was first available for Outlook® 2003, improved for the 2007 version, and is fully integrated and highly customizable in Outlook® 2010.

Because most Microsoft Office users are already familiar with the contacts, e-mail and calendaring in Outlook, each of these tools will feel familiar in BCM, even with the extra functionality included. In the 2010 version of BCM, the user is offered multiple views, each flexible enough to be customized for the specific needs of a small business. These views allow you to view and act on the accounts you need to do your job, and show detailed histories of prospects or customers.

BCM manages information by company or accounts instead of only by individuals or contacts. These accounts can contain multiple contacts for a company. BCM tracks sales leads, business opportunities and direct marketing campaigns. You can create custom tabs that can be modified to help your employees follow company-specific business practices. BCM automatically links e-mails received from or sent to each business contact.

BCM comes with a robust SQL database, allowing all the customer and sales information to be shared with those in your company who need it. When a potential customer calls, the whole team has the information needed to answer questions and provide product information. After the sale, BCM provides detailed information on subsequent phone calls, e-mails or correspondence with the customer.

You can view and edit your business contacts from anywhere you can access Outlook: smartphones, tablets or via the Web. BCM also supports an offline mode, which allows you to work out of the office on your portable computer and then synchronize the data when you return.

BCM is composed of four separate workspace modules: contact management, sales, marketing and project management.

The sales module allows you to manage sales leads and automatically prioritize these leads based on your custom criteria. BCM can be easily modified to include your company’s specific sales stages; e.g., lead, qualified prospect. As your prospect moves through the stages, BCM sets a reminder for the next step, based on your business’ sales procedures. BCM uses a dashboard and reports to produce sales forecasting and close tracking of a company’s sales pipeline and sales funnel.

BCM organizes sales teams to select exactly the contacts that need to be called, and provides a script or talking points during the call. As the call progresses, notes can be taken directly in the contact record.  Following the call, BCM tracks next steps such as providing brochures or a personal visit.

The marketing module goes beyond standard SFA functionality, as it allows you to create and distribute personalized marketing communications using Publisher or Word. It also allows you to filter the prospect or customer data, and then create targeted marketing campaigns and, over time, monitor the results.

If you have several hundred suppliers and active prospects, BCM may not be the best choice for your small business. BCM assumes you’re buying and selling things with suppliers and potential customers that number a few hundred at most. Another shortcoming is that there’s no integration between BCM and any accounting data. You only know a customer is overdue to pay if you manually mark their record as overdue. In fairness to the product, integration with an accounting system typically falls into the realm of a CRM application.

Because it is an off-the-shelf solution, there are limits to how much can be customized in BCM.  It is, nonetheless, flexible enough to be adapted to the requirements of most small businesses. You can customize the interface of each module by adding or removing tabs, and contact management fields.  You can easily edit the dropdown lists to show your own values, including lists of items for sale, complete with cost and price data.

BCM uses “gadgets” to track information within each workspace. Depending on your role in the company, you choose the ones that show information that matter to you. For example, you can use gadgets to monitor the effectiveness of your entire team, or focus only on your own contribution.

BCM offers a useful visualization of your business data through various charts and a customizable dashboard. The dashboard gives users a quick summary of the status of your sales pipeline and marketing campaigns, and even business projects, if you decide to track them with BCM.

BCM ships with over 70 predefined reports which will provide most small businesses ample information on their sales and marketing activities. In addition, you can create and then share customized reports that contain exactly the data you need to match your current sales and marketing reports. All the reports (and their formatting and formulas) can be exported to Excel® for deeper analysis.

BCM is included with the Office Professional 2010 or Professional Plus 2010 through volume licensing.  Volume licensing requires an organization to purchase a minimum of five licenses from a Microsoft Partner. However, you can download BCM for free if you purchased a copy of Outlook with BCM with Microsoft Office 2003, or Office 2007, or standalone Office Outlook 2007, and you purchased a copy of Office Home and Business 2010, Office Professional 2010, or standalone edition of Microsoft Outlook 2010.

In summary, Outlook BCM is a SFA tool that will require minimal training, yet will provide most small businesses with strong contact management and sales tracking capabilities. And, if you have purchased Office Professional 2010 with volume licensing, you already own the licenses. Bringing ease of use and low cost together in one SFA product is an appealing opportunity for small businesses.

		Phil Deschaine is a sales executive with PTD Technology in East Lansing. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it