Excerpt from: Globally AWhere
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| August 20, 2008 | | Upgrade SFA initiatives with location intelligence, creating a powerful new combination. | Management teams love the promise of sales force automation (SFA) products for their tracking ability and delivery of hard data on sales activities, processes, and administration. Sadly, SFAs often produce data that is complex, difficult to summarize and understand.
 Geo-analytics helps sales (and other) executives quickly extract the meaning in the data. Mapping SFA results can produce easily comprehensible visualizations that clearly show results by territory, customer, individual, or other relevant markers. Managers can use geoanalytics for:
- Territory Management – creation, optimization and load balancing in a geoanalytic context
- Lead Generation – more targeted hit lists served up from a fresh perspective
- Competitor Strategies – quickly visualize opportunity
- Sales Goal Visualization – track performance in real-time
- Distribution Points – identify the weak links in the supply chain
- Marketing Analysis – target promotions to the area’s profile to quickly assess the value of a promotion
 SFAs get mixed reviews from sales reps because they can be seen as electronic babysitters – a way for management to control the rep’s activities. But combining the SFA with geoanalytics is a different story – sales reps can then use the tools to better manage their own territory:
- Time Management: prioritize tasks/optimize travel dollars
- Prospect Prioritization: by stage in the sales cycle/potential opportunity
- Customer References: save time and manage references
Regardless of which side of this debate suits you, constant process improvement is mandatory in today's business climate. And the recognition of signal in the noise of corporate data is holy grail.
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