Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) have similar but not synonymous attributes. They automate processes and manage sales avenues and pipelines.

There is nothing wrong with this. Sales people can benefit highly from cutting out tedious but necessary paperwork so that they can concentrate on making more sales. However, what CRM and SFA don't do is make this process more effecient.

Saving time to do another task is important but what if the task you concentrating on isn't the right task?

At whatever level, whether you are managing a company or managing your own work process, it is important to know what you are doing. An easy statement to make, but in all the processes that a sales person or department goes through, is it possible to know at which point of the sales process is the weakest? Perhaps you know that at a particular stage of a sale you know down to a percentage probability that a particular sales person is going to succeed or fail?

We have plenty of smart people who can find all sorts of useful information about the company and they usually use spreadsheets. Unfortunately, they can also take a long time to find out this information.

Spreadsheets tend to be numerous and time consuming and because of the human factor; unreliable. Collating information from many departments and analysing a particular question can take hours or even days, and then even when you have answers, more questions are raised.

If you are spending huge amounts of time analysing key areas of your business then it is likely that the huge amounts of time you are saving from your CRM and SFA software is pointless...