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Are there potential disadvantages to Sales Force Automation?

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As a general approach to sales management and customer relationship management, SFA seems to offer few negatives. The ability to quickly enter and retrieve data and the increased ease with which business owners can streamline their sales workflows are certainly attractive features. However, the implementation of a SFA system may also present you with certain problems. One obvious deterrent, of course, involves the added cost of SFA software and the computer networks that make it worthwhile. While it’s certainly possible to obtain those items at a reasonable cost, it’s one more added expense. Some other potential disadvantages include:

• Unhappy employees: Ideally, SFA should improve your employees’ ability to identify customers, sell goods or services, and enjoy more time because of the ease with which information can be entered into your system. However, if your employees haven’t previously been required to input any data, they may not appreciate the extra work required in order to provide the SFA system with adequate information.

• Dehumanization: The entire point of SFA is to automate certain decisions and tasks within the sales and customer relationship processes. Some of the benefits of that automation have already been discussed, but there is at least one potential negative to that automation as well. As a business enterprise, sales are often viewed as a venture that revolves heavily around human interaction. Increased profits and efficiency notwithstanding, some of your clients and employees may resent the removal of some of that human interaction.

• Inadequate data: The implementation of a SFA program should result in better, more copious amounts of sales data for your sales analysts. However, that proposition depends largely on the ease with which your field employees may enter data into your system. If your SFA software makes it too difficult for those employees to enter or retrieve sales and customer data, you may find yourself with even less information than under a more traditional sales reporting system.

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