The rep finishes the visit with an order, an out-of-stock to check and a request for training. An SFA package has to let them pass on all three without re-entering everything that evening. To choose one, follow a full working day, from preparation through to handling exceptions.
What SFA covers
SFA stands for Sales Force Automation: automating some of the sales team’s tasks. A CRM organises the customer relationship; SFA functions cover visit preparation, activity tracking, orders and targets. The two scopes overlap and are often sold as one product.
Describing a CRM as a glorified address book would be unfair. Some general-purpose suites offer field sales functions, directly or through modules. The right comparison is about the workflow available, the configuration required and the cost of maintaining it.
Prepare a visit with the right information
Before setting off, the rep needs to see appointments, recent history and outstanding commitments. A pharmacy with a delivery complaint is not visited the same way as a prospect interested in a new range. Order data provides context; its absence can also point to a source that is not connected.
The map helps group journeys together. It has to keep fixed appointments, useful opening hours and parking time. A sales route calculated from mileage alone can become impossible once visit durations are added.
Record an order you can explain
The catalogue, the pack sizes and the customer’s terms have to be available at the moment of entry. Test the volume tiers, the discounts, the free products and quantity changes. The rep has to understand the final amount and be able to raise an exception rather than work around the rule with a free-text note.
Pin down what works without a connection
“Offline mode” can mean reading a screen that was already loaded, or entering a complete order. Ask which records are stored on the device, how long prices stay usable and what happens when the session expires. Data that was available yesterday is not necessarily there after a reinstall.
Test an interruption at the moment of sending. After reconnecting, the user has to find one order and its real status. If the price has changed on the server, the tool has to apply a known rule and flag anything needing approval. An order waiting on the phone has not yet reached the sales admin team.
- On the device
Find the data available and save the work permitted offline.
- On reconnection
Send the expected version and flag any conflicts.
- After processing
Confirm acceptance or explain the error, without creating a duplicate.
Have the exact behaviour demonstrated for orders, notes and attachments.
Keep the visit report short and usable
A useful report states what was observed, what was agreed and the next action. For example: “Display unit received but too wide for the counter; send the dimensions of the small model before Thursday.” That note gives someone concrete work to follow. “Good visit, customer interested” gives you nothing to prepare with.
- →Observation: product missing, facings seen or objection raised.
- →Commitment: action, owner and expected date.
- →Next step: next visit, call or answer to send.
For a shelf photograph, get the pharmacy’s agreement and frame the products with no patient or prescription in shot. Avoid unnecessary personal data in the comments. The record should serve the sales activity without turning into a health file.
Define the indicators before displaying them
Count visits planned, visits made and visits that led to an order separately. A training session can be useful without an immediate order. For amounts, separate ordered from invoiced and document how credit notes are handled. Compare like periods and allow for territories that changed hands recently.
An activity indicator lets you spot a gap; it is not enough to explain performance. A rural area and an urban one do not have the same travel times. Look at useful visits per field day and at priority accounts left uncovered, together with the rep concerned.
Compare the cost and the work left over
Count licences or usage fees, connections, hardware and training. Per-seat pricing can be predictable; usage-based pricing can suit a team whose size varies. Model both on your own volumes rather than treating one as always better.
The pilot has to include a rep, the sales admin team and a manager. Check the data export, the access rights after a territory change and the fallback procedure. Keep a list of the tasks that stay manual: it is how you judge the gains across the whole workflow.
Where the tools on the market sit
For a brand selling into pharmacies, the tools fall into three families. The platforms of the large labs, Veeva CRM and Salesforce Health Cloud, cover medical rep visits and the reporting obligations, with a long roll-out and a budget to match. The pharma and field verticals, Sidely, Solupharm or Nomadia’s OpenPharma, offer route planning, order taking and visit reports for teams of a few reps up to a few dozen. The general-purpose CRMs, HubSpot, Pipedrive or Sellsy, need configuration for the commercial terms specific to pharmacies.
Salesia sits in the second family, with two deliberate choices: pharma commercial terms are handled natively inside the order (wholesaler price, discount tiers, free-shipping threshold, asilage, buying groups), and an order taken on a visit joins the same hub as those received by EDI, distributor API, e-mail or marketplace, before being pushed to the ERP. Pricing follows the sales actually made rather than the number of seats. These choices suit brands whose pharmacy channel is the core of the business; they matter less to a lab whose main challenge is medical rep visits.
Choosing the route tool itself is covered in the guide to sales route planning software, and the customer record in the guide to the pharmaceutical CRM for pharmacies.
What to ask the supplier for
Ask for a demonstration of your own typical day and a written note of the limits observed. For each requirement, record what exists, what needs configuration and what needs development. That list stops an option promised for later from being counted as a capability available today.
Follow a complete visit in Salesia
Appointment preparation, visit report, order and sales admin follow-up: let us walk through the workflow and the connections your team needs.
To test the handover to the sales admin team, use a visit report template that separates observation, agreement and next action.
By Anatole Briant
By Anatole Briant
By Pierre Lerebours
COO of Salesia
Pierre Lerebours is COO of Salesia. He is your contact for implementation, training and ongoing support.