Empowering the sales team to build business resilience

Businesses have acknowledged the inherent uncertainty. Higher volatility is the new norm. However, historically resilient firms were successful in weathering the storms. 

The most important aspects of building such resilience would warrant strategies to help identify and capture new opportunities quickly, as well as go-to-market models that increase the importance of digital and remote sales.

It is critical to enable the sales team to sell remotely. However, such digital transformation may only help sustain and may not help rebound, if the process of generating quotes/sales orders is complex and requires a bespoke bill of materials calculations and price engineering.

Our recommendation is not just to enable but also empower the sales team by simplifying the process of generating bespoke complicated quotes/sales orders. Here are a few steps that a wholesale distributor or manufacturer who uses a digital platform to sell complex, bespoke products, may follow:

• Organise the product family to simplify the product selection for generating quotes or sales order. Make it easier for sales agents to find products and services in a product catalogue by creating a product family and classifying similar products in it. In our experience, this is the starting point for most of the businesses. Majority of the   businesses have organised the product catalogue in a sub-optimal way.  
• Segregate and classify direct and indirect product costs. Price matrix should be engineered expertly for all the bill of  materials. Indirect costs, such as delivery charges should be classified separately.
• Do not underestimate the effectiveness of a simple and configurable configure, price, quote (CPQ) software application. At the very least, a software application should allow configuration of  product families, dimension calculations, price bands for calculating      quotes. This process should have minimal interventions, thereby empowering the sales team to generate quotes and sales orders quickly.

If you would like a complimentary assessment of your quote or sales order generation process, please use the "Contact Us" page to get in touch with us