THE EFFECT OF SALES FORCE AUTOMATION ADOPTION ON JOB PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF EAST AFRICA BOTTLING SHARE COMPANY

Abstract

Understanding how technology investments create business value is a research priority in today's technology-intensive world; one of these technologies is the sales force automation (SFA) technology. The role of SFA systems on building and sustaining increased performance level of sales, effective customer relationships and the fact that most SFA implementations constitute a great boosting investment for the sales organization is well documented. In spite of their critical roles, research on sales force automation applications is very limited. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of technology usage of SFA on the job performance of sales people; the study also considered other factors such as experience, level of education, sex and salary as determinants of the performance of the company sales representatives at EABSC. The researcher used Simple Descriptive Statistics and Multiple regression model using OLS for the estimation purpose. To do this, the study takes on a quantitative approach and used secondary data from a sample of 142 sales persons in East Africa Bottling Share Company out of which 71 were SFA users. The key performance indicator taken into consideration to measure the performance of the sales representatives was Average Daily Sales of Boxes of Coca Cola Beverages. The result shows that those CSRs using SFA scored better sales volume. Factors such as education, salary, sex of the sales person and experience also showed a positive relationship with sales people performance. This implies that SFA usage brings about better sales person performance and is recommended that EABSC continue to invest on SFA hand in hand with availing trainings on SFA usage and user support programs.