CRM Manufacturing Automation - Global Vision Technology Blog

Most of the CRM Manufacturing companies provide a product price list to their sales team and also provide a word document template to help to quote. A few companies allow their sales personnel to send pricing information directly to their customers by mail. The sales team prepares a periodic daily report, a weekly report which is forwarded to the head office for necessary action.

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Major issues of concern in the traditional model are:

The price list needs to be changed periodically as per the changes in the price of the raw material. The head office must continuously update the price list to the Sales Department, to enable them to pass on the price change to the end customers. The Sales Department needs to ensure that the Sales personnel across all regions adopt the revised price list with immediate effect.

When quotes are given by the sales personnel, it is at their discretion to mark a copy head office or not. Some sales personnel might do this while others might want to send information only for selected prospects that they are sure to win, rather than all.
The daily Report and the weekly report need to be forwarded and checked as a must. If for some reason one report is missed, then the link is broken. The next report would start as a new one and historical data and comparison would become a challenge.
If a sales executive or manager leaves the organization, the information managed in silos might be lost or taken away. The knowledge transfer process becomes very tricky in such situations.
Sales personnel may project the prospect and the value of the order but probably would not be able to give accurate and detailed information on the product in daily or weekly reports.
Nurturing lost orders and/or fine tuning the product is not facilitated.

CRM Manufacturing not only helps to address these bottlenecks but also brings in more value to the table. Customer Relationship Management now involves Sales Force Automation, Customer Support Automation and Marketing Automation components. The most important being the Sales Force Automation.

CRM Manufacturing products facilitate the products and quotes module, whereby the company can put their comprehensive product catalogue in the system. Typically the head office or the product team can put it up and maintain it. As and when a new product is launched or price of product changes, the product catalogue is updated. All sales personnel are trained on the CRM application; which is typically a web application. The sales personnel enter the new product or the data into the system and create a quote. Products and quantity a prospect is interested in can be added as and when interest is shown by the prospect. As per progress, alterations can be incorporated easily as all data already exists.

The system facilitates sending the pre formatted quote to the customer either by an email template designed in the CRM or generating a PDF quote, which is attached in the email to the prospect.

An automatic consolidation of all quotes created by sales personnel from across the regions is available in the CRM Manufacturing. More than anything else, the management gets to know details of the products which have been quoted to each prospect / customer. Manufacturing division can take decisions to clear their inventories from different regions.At the same time analytics of which products are moving in which regions can all be looked into and future plans be drawn accordingly.

This process allows for a uniform quote to be given by the sales personnel across the organization and also makes it available to the managers and more importantly, to the head office. If and when the sales personnel leave the organization, all the information remains intact within the system.

An automatic forecast will be readily available for the sales manager and a product specific forecast is also readily available for the CRM Manufacturing head. Over a period of time the company can make accurate forecasts by implementing certain processes as also by training their sales personnel accordingly.

To find out more about CRM Manufacturing, click hereto conduct a free call.