A Sales Management System (SMS) will provide a sales manager with a tool for tracking sales leads, identifying who has the lead and what they are doing it. These tools will quickly identify the hot leads allowing for adequate resources to be spent on the leads that will most likely close. They will also provide a number of forecast reports that can be generated in minutes, not days.

Sales management systems provide 1) the tools that sales managers need to more effectively manage the selling organization and 2) enable sales teams to manage their sales and products.

For sales managers, this includes:

• Methods to better organize and allocate selling resources within and across accounts or territories at the beginning of the sales year, as well as during the year in response to market or company changes. This ensures that the right selling resources are in the right places to exceed sales objectives.
• Effective account and opportunity review processes, using web conferencing and collaboration technology, that provide management with a more accurate view of the pipeline, as well as enables managers to focus resources on the highest-value opportunities and to advance those opportunities toward a win
• Improved forecasting and pipeline management processes and tools that provide management with better visibility into the future, which enables management to forecasting more accurately and allocate resources where and when they can be most effective
• Methods and tools to more effectively profile and hire the right people, develop those peoples' execution capabilities, as well as measure and improve their performance with leading indicators rather than trailing results
• Improved planning and reporting systems, implemented in software, that enable sellers and management to more effectively manage their business throughout the sales year.
• Guarantees tight accountability and control.

For sales teams, the sales person can:

• Track your customers, products, regions, key accounts, brands and packages.
• Examine monthly and yearly performance all in one view, or drill down to see sales, revenue, and margin at the daily level.
• Identify customers who didn't buy this week, month, period, or year; find out which customers are buying one thing but not another.
• Point out the biggest contributors to sales, revenue, or margins.
• Replaces paper reports, most spreadsheet work, and hard to maintain casual databases.