Sales force automation (SFA) software: Kadient Sales Playbook
Sales force automation (SFA)
Gold Award:
Sales force automation (SFA) software: Kadient Sales Playbook
Sales force automation (SFA) software is a key ingredient of any sales team. With the economy currently still in flux, it remains as important as ever to have a fully integrated product that is also cost-effective.
With this in mind, our judges named Sales Playbook, from Lowell, Mass.-based Kadient, as the recipient of the 2009 CRM Products of the Year Award in Sales Force Automation, citing its integration capabilities and creative ways of managing sales.
Sales Playbook is “an innovative way to manage sales effectiveness,” said one judge.
The interactive Sales Playbooks comprise situation-specific content, messages and tools, right in agents’ own SFA systems, according to Kadient’s submission. The Playbooks are fully integrated with Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand. “Because of the full SFA integration, when salespeople use Sales Playbooks, companies get unique insights for multiple stakeholders that uncover how people, processes, activities and content impact the buying cycle,” said Kadient’s press representative, Amy Black, senior marketing communications manager.
Kadient is the first software company to provide SFA-based interactive sales playbooks, according to its submission materials. While sales playbooks are not unheard of, many companies used them on paper, without full integration to an SFA system. Kadient’s Sales Playbooks help users know what’s working and what’s not, and they put that knowledge into the hands of sales reps so they can quickly and easily get up to speed on what’s happening.
The Playbooks make the SFA system a more valuable place for sales reps to spend their time, getting the information they need to be successful without wasting time keying in data. In addition, Sales Playbooks use a “mash up” with SFA data, as Kadient’s submission calls it, giving sales and marketing a more complex view into what’s happening while reps are working deals. In the past, this data was either unavailable or had to be composed manually, with a great deal of effort.
This software was “another great choice for this competition,” one judge said. “Like some of the other products, this is not an SFA tool but more a sales enhancement tool. Together with a product like Salesforce SFA or Oracle CRM On-demand, Kadient Sales Playbooks can provide a company with a rich context of knowledge about its sales processes -- the good and the bad.”
On average, customers can expect to pay $40 per user. Subscriptions are on a named-user basis, and pricing varies depending on the components selected. In addition to subscription fees, Kadient also offers implementation and training packages, whose prices vary.