Sales Force Automation, or sales automation, was “in” in 1993, and everyone talked about it. It made sense because most people were automating their sales teams, but they were going about it the wrong way, by bringing together their processes into inadequate Contact Management software. They thought it would fix all of their problems, but the sales opportunities were still getting neglected, along with the strategies, skills and techniques that occurred in the sales cycle.

Just as software developers were coming to grips with these problems, up springs this concept of Customer Relationship Management.

Almost overnight, SFA and CRM got hastily paired together in the growing e-business lexicon, and they came out synonymous. The industry, the experts, even the customers, used them interchangeably, believing them to be one and the same. But they’re wrong.

SFA and CRM are related, dependent and intertwined, but they are not the same thing, and it’s a disservice to the market to suggest they are. It’s time to clear the air.

CRM focuses on building and maintaining good customer relations. On the other hand, SFA centers on providing salespeople with the proper tools to win the all-important sales opportunity. The former takes on a relationship focus, while the latter promotes opportunity focus. While these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, they simply should not be lumped together.

The industry is simply out of touch with this concept. Let’s put the spotlight back on SFA, and concentrate on making it work first. Along the way, we can figure out how it meshes with CRM. And then, we’ll be ready to move on to e-business.

This agreement gets full marks from me, and is a step forward in providing an optimized mobile platform for salespeople to conduct business. RIM gave us universal, easy access to information in the form of e-mail. Palm gave us the ability to run complex business applications from a very small footprint. The ideas in sales automation done right have already been running on the Palm platform for three years, and they work well. When they run on the Treo with RIM software, they show the promise of working even better.

Palm is also bringing out a Treo that will run on the Microsoft operating system. If you were to ask Steve Jobs today if his highly protective stance on licensing out the Apple operating system decades ago was the best thing to do – he would say NO.

Palm has got it right.