CRM Manufacturing Management - Global Vision Technology Blog

Manufacturers may sell directly to the end user, through distribution or a combination of both. Without the right tools and processes in place, it can be very difficult to manage national accounts, territories and the overall relationship structure between all parties involved.

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CRM Manufacturing helps these manufacturers in several ways when it comes to managing their channel relationships. Below we dive into three of these. If you are more of a “visual” person and like to see how it actually looks within CRM.

Parent-Subaccount Relationship

Using the Parent Account and Subaccount functionality within CRM enables you to clearly see the relationship between all related Accounts. You may have a National Account Manager that is responsible for the headquarters and individual sales reps assigned to regional locations. By utilizing the parent/sub relationship, the parent Account will always show all activities related to any of the sub accounts. This provides a National Sales Manager and everyone involved with great insight that is often times lacking or not easily accessible.

Using Connections

If your company is selling through a distribution model often times you may need to see the relationships between the end customer and the distributors that each of them work with. Whether you are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce this can be accomplished a number of ways. One of the more common approaches is to establish a connection between two separate Accounts which offers a great way to easily view how each is related. This way, you can easily see not only the information associated with that distributor, but see all of your customers, through Connections, that are utilizing this distributor.

Territory Management

Finally, effective Territory Management for outside sales reps on the road can be quite challenging. By using CRM Manufacturing your sales reps can get a quick view of accounts (including current customers, prospects and leads) within a specific radius of a location to more effectively plan their appointments each day and week. How many times have you arrived at a customer’s location just to have them cancel at the last minute or had your appointment end much earlier than you anticipated? By utilizing Territory Management in CRM, manufacturing sales reps can now easily see what other customers; prospects or leads are close by that they could call on.

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