How does software improve your sales performance? In the chemical industry, improvements happen in two areas: the productivity of your sales teams and your next-generation customer experience.
In Microsoft's work with chemical companies, we see strong interest in giving teams more time to sell and in lowering their cost of sale for certain customer segments. When we look at our customers' sales process, we see a gap between the business applications (such as customer relationship management, order management, and pricing management) and the personal productivity tools that salespeople use every day. This gap arises from the notion that sales teams spend most of their day working in business applications, which is largely not true. In fact, we find that a majority of salespeople spend most of their time communicating, negotiating, and collaborating with their customers and internally with the technical services, marketing, and sales management groups-all within their personal and team productivity environment and outside the formal, structured sales process. This gap in both process and software creates a disjointed experience that the salesperson then has to resolve on his or her own. If you extrapolate this issue across your teams, you will find a significant impact on productivity (sometimes referred to as time to sell) and an increase in your cost of sale.
Our second observation is that our chemical industry customers are building their next-generation customer experience. In many cases, however, their online presence hasn't changed much since they made their original investments during the last decade's dot-com boom. But much has happened in the past eight years. Whether you are looking to build a consistent global Web presence, transact with customers online, or build communities with your distributors and customers, today's software and technology can help you get there.
At Microsoft, we focus on solving these challenges for our customers through software that is familiar and easy to use, widely supported, and simple to integrate with your existing applications. We provide both business applications and productivity solutions for the chemical industry, and we are uniquely focused on bringing those worlds together through an integrated software approach.
We invite you to explore our sales effectiveness solutions for the chemical industry and to take a look at our partners and the case studies our customers have been happy to share with us.
Business Challenges
As your sales performance becomes increasingly important to meeting your objectives for profitable growth, software is a key enabler for giving your teams more time to sell, increasing your understanding of your business, making better decisions, and ultimately achieving the right cost-of-sale metric. The following scenarios describe the sales effectiveness challenges facing the chemical industry and solutions that technology systems can offer.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
| Business challenges | Benefits |
|---|
Finding new revenue opportunities Increasing existing customer profitability Managing field service effectively Getting more out of marketing Enabling a mobile sales and service workforce
| Microsoft offers a fully integrated CRM system that gives you the capability to create and maintain a clear view of customers, from first contact through purchase and after the sale, using tools that enhance your sales, marketing, and customer service processes. |
Next-generation customer experience
| Business challenges | Benefits |
|---|
Creating a consistent global customer experience
Finding new revenue opportunities Making new content available in a timely manner across your customer experience Building an integrated e-commerce experience Innovating quickly with new customer experiences for marketing or building communities with your customers
| Microsoft provides the platform, products, tools, and solutions for building your next-generation customer, distributor, and e-commerce experiences. |
Sales force productivity
| Business challenges | Benefits |
|---|
Giving your sales teams more time to sell Adopting key business applications (CRM, order management, pricing management) Improving the productivity of your sales and technical service teams in the field and traveling across the globe
| Equipping your people with familiar and easy-to-use software increases productivity by helping your sales teams fill the gaps created by disjointed business and personal productivity applications. |
