Manufacturing Sales: Traditional VS Digital End-to-End

Posted by Sabine Kempe on Feb 22, 2022 4:50:00 PM
Sabine Kempe
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Traditional manufacturing sales teams are overburdened with paperwork. On a good day, a semi-feasible customer quotation, RFQ or tender takes a few days to reach the customer. But that does not mean your sales staff are idle. It just means that your sales process has plenty of room for optimization.

In a typical RFQ scenario, your sales team would have to prepare by going through a drawn-out process. They would need to manage the customer, extract cost, material and price data from your ERP, configure a customer solution, make manual calculations, get the necessary input from various specialist departments, undergo reviews and approvals, and organize all that information into a presentable format. And possibly deliver it in the customer's required template.


Does that sound familiar? Are you trying to solve the same problem? Download our Guide to "Accelerate Manufacturing Sales" to find out how!


The worst-case in manufacturing sales

In the worst-case scenario, your customer accepts an offer with unhealthy margins, wrong prices, or technically unrealizable products. What was previously "only" causing a high cost-of-sales is now generating massive error correction costs, which later become visible in increased production costs, cancellations, returns, or customer service.

The comparison: traditional vs. digital

To illustrate our point, here is a simplified breakdown of what a salesperson has to go through during the preparation of a quote in a traditional sales process and how a digital end-to-end process can streamline this process.

inforgraphic_Traditional VS End-to-End (1)

In most situations, sales reps have to jump through dozens of hoops (manually) to get the 100% accurate quotation their customers expect. Along the way, there can be even more steps added due to human errors that accumulate along this traditional, labor-intensive way of creating a quote. And this reflects in your margins. 

The way out - A digital end-to-end sales process

By digitally automating the entire sales process, your manufacturing business gets an effective, repeatable, scalable, end-to-end sales process. With digital, you can eliminate low margins, improve customer satisfaction, and more importantly, increase revenue. The potential impact on your manufacturing business can be immense.

Your sales teams play an important role in keeping your business running smoothly at the best of times. In recent times of economic uncertainty, their time must be better spent on what is most important - your customers.

 

Guide Digital Sales_enAre you ready to find out how you can take your sales process to the next level? Download our Guide to "Accelerate Manufacturing Sales"!
Download the full Guide
Sabine Kempe

Written by Sabine Kempe

Sabine - a digital enthusiast at heart, she is dedicated to matching the challenges of manufacturing businesses with the opportunities of a digitalized world.

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