When they’re stuck plugging data into a system, retyping emailed orders, or responding to standard requests (“What’s the status of my order?”), your sales and customer service reps are held back from doing what they do best: helping the customer do their jobs better.
Manual work gets in the way of value-added work.
The result:
This is the reality of sales operations today.
But when you remove those rote tasks from your reps’ plates, you’ll see dramatic improvements. According to Harvard Business Review, companies that execute digital transformation report significant performance improvement compared to those who stick with the status quo, including:
Sales operations include sales planning, analytics, enablement, the quote-to-cash process, order management and fulfillment, lead and opportunity management, performance management, resource allocation, customer support, and more.
Anywhere you can introduce automation into those areas means more time for the customer. According to an analysis by Distribution Strategy Group, your customer service and sales reps are key in driving customer satisfaction and retention.
Distributors must increase sales process efficiency to unlock their full potential and sell more with less. The benefits of automation in sales include:
Increased productivity. Your team can save time and energy on repetitive tasks in entering and processing orders, communicating with customers, checking order status and planning sales calls.
Improved accuracy. Automation reduces the risk of human error, which translates to fewer issues on the back end. That means happier customers.
Better customer experience. Automation across sales channels can provide a more consistent experience and better support. For example, automated response systems can quickly address simpler customer requests and funnel more complicated needs to a person.
Lower costs. You can allocate your resources more strategically when you automate essential but repetitive tasks. You also rely less on the person and more on technology, which removes bottlenecks in the process and enables growth.
Improved revenues. Sales grow faster when sales reps target the right accounts and spend more time with existing ones.
Happier employees. Sales and customer service reps will experience greater job satisfaction when they can focus more on what they enjoy.
Lansing Building Products’ customer service team wanted to move beyond manually entering new orders by typing data from PDFs, emails, and MTO submissions into their processing system. They implemented Catalyst, ProfitOptics’ proprietary platform.
Catalyst automatically exchanges order details from emails, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, and third-party systems. As a result, Lansing Building Products increased order efficiency by 10X, reduced process errors by 90%, and enhanced user experience with automation. Read more.
Taking the burden off their sales teams, one distributor worked with ProfitOptics to combine customer contracts and attributes into one system. Because the intuitive interface is integrated with Salesforce.com, sales reps are now fed opportunities to vet and act on. Read more.
Sales reps are often on the front lines of delivering prices to customers. Automation can take that responsibility off their plates. A Fortune 25 distributor found that their selling prices needed to keep pace with inflation. So, they worked with ProfitOptics to move off spreadsheets and mass emails (which they used to communicate with more than 1,000 sales reps) and deploy our Pricing Platform. They experienced a 4X increase in margin recovery and high user adoption rates within the sales team. Read more.
With direction, chatbots can serve as an excellent first line of defense to solve most low-level problems and pass advanced problems to the humans on your support team, who are free to focus on higher-value tasks. Read more.
Contact ProfitOptics today to learn how automation can grow margins, accelerate sales performance, and elevate your employees’ experience.
