Focus on Profitable Growth
In an intensely competitive industry with mature demand and constant pricing pressures, process manufacturing companies are focused on profitable growth. To capture growth opportunity, companies are bringing the same discipline to their sales and marketing organizations that they have used to achieve excellence in operations.
Profitable growth is about increasing margins as the business grows. It requires a focus not only on revenue drivers such as price and unit volume, but also on increasing the productivity of their people in sales and marketing.
What is preventing those teams from being more productive today? For some process companies, it starts with having the right model in place. Are the sales resources optimized for the most profitable customers and business segments? Does the right value proposition for each target customer exist? For other companies, it’s about giving their sales force more time to sell. Success is about freeing people to develop and build customer relationships. It’s about high-value activities.
A more productive, higher-performing sales organization is able to retain customers, drive revenue growth, understand the business issues that customers face, and keep costs in check. This ultimately contributes to the overall health and profitability of the company.
Arming Sales for Success
Creating a more sophisticated sales model and increasing sales productivity requires the appropriate technologies and tools. The foundation for this productivity is customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM does more than just track customer interactions; it helps process companies optimize their operations while better serving their customers. But a CRM solution is not all that sales needs. Productivity tools are critical for salespeople to communicate and collaborate more effectively whether they are in the office or on the road. The tools need to be easy to use and facilitate their productivity.
By using sales solutions from Microsoft, process manufacturers are able to spend more time selling to the right customers and prospects. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution forms the foundation for helping you to streamline and automate your sales processes so your salespeople can create a single view of the customer. This helps ensure a shorter sales cycle, a higher close rate, and improved customer retention. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, your sales staff can work productively through the same Microsoft Outlook user interface that they already use today rather than through other systems that have more difficult, slow, and complex user interfaces.
However, chemical sales organizations also need complementary productivity tools integrated into their CRM solution. They require information technology (IT) capabilities such as collaborative tools to negotiate, escalate, and share; unified communications that help cut the cost of travel and improve relationships; and business intelligence for insight into customer profitability and cross-selling scenarios.
There are further specific challenges for pharmaceutical companies that have long relied on large, expensive sales forces to influence physicians in their prescribing behavior and to drive revenue. This is changing. To increase marketing share in this new environment, pharmaceutical companies need secure, up-to-date business intelligence so they can determine the most effective channels for delivering timely messages to physicians, payers, hospitals, and consumers.
Maximize Your Return on Sales
Microsoft and partner solutions can help chemical manufacturers improve sales productivity, ultimately increasing profitable growth. Microsoft helps the sales organizations of process manufacturers identify and better understand their most important customers and prospects. These solutions help optimize sales cycles by automating and streamlining processes so that sales teams are able to focus on higher-value activities. Sales cycles are accelerated through timely access and communication with members of the sales team, which enhances opportunity and content collaboration. Finally, Microsoft solutions help chemical manufacturers focus on the right opportunities so they can improve sales performance through powerful insight and forecasting.
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Key Benefits:
- Streamline and automate key sales processes.
- Accelerate sales cycles through highly connected sales teams.
- Gain full visibility into customer information and purchasing history.
- Improve lead qualification and conversion rates.
- Simplify opportunity management and deal tracking.
- Improve forecasting and pipeline accuracy.
- Streamline quote-to-invoice time for greater sales velocity.
- Ensure accurate pricing strategies.