Maximizing Your Margin: Your Guide to Optimizing Your Sales Operations

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April 19, 2024

Saying that today’s business climate is challenging is a massive understatement. Executives are feeling the pressure to adapt to the dynamic environments while increasing their bottom line. With fierce competition, every dollar counts. 

Luckily, there’s a tremendous opportunity to achieve peak profit performance, particularly for those in the manufacturing and distribution space. Imagine a situation where you can reduce costs and increase revenues, all without having to make massive resource cuts, generate new customers, or even sell another unit of your product. Yes, this can happen. 

So what exactly is needed for this kind of success?

Want to start your journey to record-breaking profits? Click to download our sales optimization guide on Maximizing Your Margin for insights on how hidden financial insights, data visibility, and automation are vital to sales success. 

Data Quality, System-Supported Workflows, and Profit Clarity are the Key to Peak Performance

Clear, trusted data is the foundation of good decision-making. Unfortunately, many C-Suite leaders can’t maximize business performance because they are stuck using poor-quality, out-of-sync data. Non-integrated systems create silos that prevent efficient cross-team collaboration and keep decision-makers in the dark. 

For example, suppose data records from an order processing tool aren’t connected to an inventory management system. How do you know what to order? 

With clean information synchronized across the entire technology stack, you can get accurate insights on your customers, products, pricing, and sales process. This is the first step to enabling clarity so you can more easily spot opportunities to increase revenue, cut costs, or improve profit margins.

Dated technology is holding businesses back from getting insights they need. 70% of organizations want to become more data-driven, yet, 88% of organizations face technology constraints for data and analytics tools. 

Manual processes also eat into a business’s margins. Relying on people to take in sales orders, generate quotes, track commissions, or calculate convoluted price add-ons by hand adds to the risk of making costly errors. System-supported workflows geared to your unique operation are a game-changer to improving the bottom line. 

Businesses are not maximizing automation potential. While more and more companies are looking to deploy automation in their operations, only 31% of organizations have fully automated at least one key business function. 

The “Usual” Solutions Don’t Get the Job Done 

If your business has tried to get more from its data in the past, you likely tried out a few alternative solutions that failed for one reason or another:

  • Collected and analyzed data via a spreadsheet → Didn’t offer sophisticated enough tools to provide valuable insights, see the whole profit picture, or find margin-cutting opportunities. 
  • Subscribed to Software as a Service (SaaS) product → Wasn’t customized to meet your specific operational or business data needs. 
  • Built an in-house system now considered “legacy” → Lacked integration capabilities with new products to keep data synchronized.
  • Tried working with an outside technology consultant → Lacked industry-specific knowledge in the manufacturing or distribution space to properly understand unique business needs and provide adequate solutions.

Untapped Profit Could Already Be Sitting in Your Data 

Separately, your business may be in the position to improve performance immediately. You just need better visibility and tools to access your maximum profit potential. 

Don't let hidden price and rebate analytics prevent you from peak profitability. Download our sales optimization guide on Maximizing Your Margin to see how revenue opportunities could already be right in front of you.  

The Keys to Closing the Profit Leaks: An Accurate Profit Picture, Data Visibility, and Automation 

Complete clarity of a sales operation requires you to look underneath the surface-level metrics. It demands a detailed “Profit Picture” through specialty analytics tools that can pool together your financials, sales and product data, and other resources to provide precise insights: 

  • The true profitability of each customer 
  • Gross margin analysis on specific products lines or customer segments 
  • Customer retention risks 
  • Fixed operations costs 
  • Alternative pricing scenarios 
  • Rebate and sales tracing metrics 

You also want to have enhanced data visibility that proactively seeks out ways to improve sales operations. From spotting upsell opportunities at the point of sale (POS) to identifying earned rebates to optimizing pricing models that widen gross margins, organizations need to adopt tools that can give them more out of their data. 

Finally, sales operations automation is vital to reducing costs caused by manual errors and producing better workflow efficiency. Teams need custom-built tools and system integrations to put critical activities, like quote generation, order processing, new account setup, and price change requests, on auto-pilot while reducing mistakes. 

Getting More Revenue Without the Hassle

More revenue doesn’t have to mean increased customers or units sold. The ProfitOptics Margin Express tool analyzes transactional pricing scenarios for peak sales performance. The tool lets you set price increases that are backed by marketplace trends but are virtually unnoticed by customers—seamlessly adding the potential for millions of dollars to your bottom line. 

Getting Everything Due to You 

While resellers use rebate arrangements to promote cost-savings to their customers and resellers, they aren’t always delivered as promised. The ProfitOptics Rebate Optimization tool widens your margin gaps by ensuring you recover all the rebate dollars entitled to your business. 

A Solution for Every Team 

Everyone has a role to play in the journey to closing profit leaks and enhancing performance. Therefore, organizations must adopt solutions that meet various needs across their sales operations function to improve insights gathering and streamline workflows. So what does this look like by team member and department? 

For Sales 

  • Quote automation tools
  • Detailed customer profitability analytics
  • Improved sales reporting mechanisms
  • Customer business review tools
  • Opportunity identification tools

For Pricing

  • Software to efficiently manage vendor cost changes
  • Customer and item segmentation tools
  • Customer price protection tracking systems 

For Data Management  

  • Duplicate data detection mechanisms
  • Item cross- referencing functions
  • System integrations across the sales operations tech stack

For Operations 

  • Automation for order processing, new account setup, contract management, and price change requests
  • Customer case ticketing systems
  • Rebate and sales tracing processing tools
  • Sales commission calculation systems 

A Winning Approach: Clarity That Spots Cost-Saving Opportunities, Optimizes Pricing, and Reduces Costly Errors 

Getting a precise profit picture, improved sales data visibility, and system-supported automated workflows ultimately reduce the cost of doing business and maximize profit margins.

Data shows that companies who execute digital transformation report significant performance improvement compared to companies that remain “status quo” with data and technology:

  • 16% increase in revenue 
  • 21% increase in market share 
  • 15% increase in IT cost predictability 
  • 32% increase in customer retention 
  • 22% increase in total predictability 

Ready to take your business to the next level? Click to download our sales optimization guide on Maximizing Your Margin to get the tricks of the trade for reducing your cost of sales while achieving peak revenue numbers. 

A Clear “Profit Picture” Finds Hidden Profit Leaks 

Consider the value that comes with removing the veil on hidden profitability metrics. You can do things like pinpoint customers that are costing money to retain, run thousands of scenarios to find the peak price point that yields the lowest customer churn rate, and keep accurate tabs on rebating. These are actionable insights that drive real change.

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