Manufacturing businesses have taken important steps to integrate advanced technology into several facets of their business including product development and the factory floor, engineering, tools, productivity, and processes. When they don’t, they can lose market share, cut into their revenue streams and face a drop in customer satisfaction. However, when it comes to integrating technology to update supporting functions like sales and customer service, manufacturing businesses are finding it difficult, given the inherent complexities of these functions.

Today, technological innovation in sales is expected. It is demanded by customers who are used to ‘Amazon-like’ sales experiences that put customer needs at the center of all digital transformation efforts. It has become critical for manufacturing businesses to adopt digital sales management technology to deal with the vagaries of market forces, disappearing margins, global competition, and the growing expectations of partners and customers. In short, they need a Digital Sales Platform.

A single platform to manage all things sales

Manufacturing is a complex industry. Naturally, the sales process can be just as complicated. You need to sell products, variants, spare parts, consumables, and more recently, services. You need to manage the associated costs and prices that determine your margins and your profits. You need to make sure your quotes reach customers before the competition with zero errors. Following that, you need to ensure that customers get the best possible aftersales care. The entire sales process comprises multiple interdependent layers and sub-processes. And each one of them has a measurable impact on the other—and your business. Get something wrong along the way, and your problems will snowball.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that siloed teams and legacy software isn’t enough. Manufacturers need something much more powerful, that’s fully integrated with their business. They need an operating system for the sales organization. They need a Digital Sales Platform.

A Digital Sales Platform for manufacturing is a technological solution to streamline and simplify your complex manufacturing sales processes. It comes with all the key digital sales tools like CPQ, CRM, and eCommerce all fully integrated with each other, and with your existing ERP system to provide a unified sales platform. The result is a fully managed sales process that improves the buyer experience at every stage from quote management and pricing, through after-sales and service. Manufacturers that have adopted digital sales management have gained a strong competitive advantage in the global manufacturing market, through the following ways:

1. Cost Reduction

In the race to meet customer expectations, manufacturing sales teams can find themselves losing revenue at every step. A Digital Sales Platform has an advanced CPQ feature that eliminates misconfigurations, order errors, and long, tedious sales cycles. Manufacturing costing is a critical make-or-break step in the sales process. A CPQ enables sales teams to use real-time data from the ERP to manage your manufacturing costs with complete accuracy and efficiency. At a time when manufacturing margins are already low, protecting margins and getting them right can prevent disastrous losses. Reducing the number of wrong orders, and lowering lead times, can provide a better customer experience as well as help the business reduce the cost of sales significantly—an obvious competitive advantage.

2. Improved Efficiency of Sales Process

Complexity is inherent in manufacturing sales. As a result, sales teams can spend a lot of time on administration rather than sales. Automated workflows in a Digital Sales Platform enable seamless sales collaboration with different departments in dispersed geographies, from a single cloud-based portal. A sales dashboard provides a unified view of all the information that is needed to spot the best opportunities and create offers with the highest chance of success. Historical data from online and offline sales help sales teams identify trends, prioritize the opportunities that can deliver the most revenue, and direct their precious resources towards those opportunities. And because it’s cloud-based, the benefits of a Digital Sales Platform can also be extended to partners, distributors, and dealers in any region. This empowers manufacturers to scale quickly with minimal loss of time or productivity.

3. Increased Revenue

Digital sales management allows you to focus on the customers with the greatest potential and grow your revenue through this. The sales process becomes highly repeatable and scalable, enabling your sales organization to expand even during a talent drought. Transparency facilitated across the sales pipeline allows sales teams to focus on revenue growth opportunities, win more deals and prioritize customers with the potential for long-term profitable relationships. The 360-degree view provided by the platform enables a business to understand how and when customers are buying and create opportunities for up-selling, cross-selling, and new revenue streams from spare part sales or service.

A Digital Sales Platform for manufacturing is a technological solution to streamline and simplify your complex manufacturing sales processe

4. Customizable Buyer Experience

Customers expect a personalized experience, especially from manufacturers with complex products and solutions. A Digital Sales Platform lets you maintain full control over prices and margins, so that sales reps can create solutions that meet individual budgets. Being able to see the customers’ historical data (past purchases or discounts) gives reps the information needed to generate custom proposals at speed. When the platform has an embedded customer portal, the experience intensifies. They get self-service configuration, personalized discounts, the latest innovations, and access to your entire business at their own pace. In a business traditionally plagued by slow processes and tedium, the agility and flexibility offered through digital sales can be a major competitive advantage.

5. Better Customer Retention and Loyalty

Think of a Digital Sales Platform as a doorway to your business. It gives customers direct access to everything you have to offer, and makes it possible for you to meet them at every stage, from RFQ to aftersales. It helps them get their work done with less friction—a very strong incentive to keep them coming back. Once you’ve effectively bound them to your business, your sales reps can focus on improving key customer relationships while intelligent guided selling within the system keeps them spending.

Get your manufacturing sales to where it should be

Digital sales was traditionally viewed by manufacturing businesses as an expenditure and cost-center as well as a major disruption in the short term. But with cloud computing, many of these objections are no longer valid. Cloud-based sales platforms do not require high upfront costs, and manufacturers can be live on the platform and see returns in as little as 3 months. These advantages mean that manufacturing businesses can now start to relook at their sales digitization strategy.

What they will see is that digital sales management plays a key role in their business transformation–and is a profit center. It will be how manufacturers sell in the future. Businesses that adopt this digital sales technology early can use it as a strategic tool to gain a valuable competitive advantage. In short, sales digitalization with a customer-centric approach can be the key to staying relevant and profitable in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced global market.