Three reasons why manufacturing needs a CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is essential to growing your business efficiently. It’s important to find smart ways to allocate resources to ensure high business growth. Change is constant in the industry, so often it becomes difficult to manage certain factors that impact sales and demand directly. In this post we unpack the three reasons why manufacturing needs a CMS and take a look at ways a cloud-based CRM like Salesforce allows manufacturers to optimize business functions and increase ROI:

Forecasting: Better results, Now

Working in a fast-changing industry, manufacturers often overlook the benefits of investing in demand forecasting through a CRM. So, what are the benefits of demand forecasting and how can implementing a CRM help?

• It allows businesses to optimize inventory, increase turnover rates, and reduce costs more effectively.

• Companies can adapt faster to customer requests and create products and features before their competitors, essentially gaining a competitive advantage over their competition.

• The Salesforce platform provides access to 1,200+ application solutions to assist in tasks related to sales forecasting, quoting and configuration, workflow automation, and more.

• The right CRM system enables manufacturers to gather data from sales processes, to identify purchase patterns, and predict market behavior.

• You can build reports and executive dashboards for mapping your business’s growth and performance on a larger scale.

It’s also important to point out the adaptability of a cloud-based CRM, like Salesforce, because it can be easily customized and reconfigured to meet changing market trends.

ROI: Creating Sales Opportunities

With the complexity of the sales cycle in the manufacturing industry, faster implementation, point-to-point customizations, and other leading features generate a high ROI for business using a modern cloud CRM.

Within Salesforce, your team can track opportunities as they move through a series of stages: prospecting, developing, negotiation/review, closed/won, and closed/lost. Each customer or opportunity is linked to the type of task being performed. This will let your team know the progress of the sale and how likely it is that the actual sale will be made.

By leveraging the proper sales staging process, your team can better organize their sales pipeline and customize it depending on each type of sale they make. You can also identify trends to better predict close rates and cycle times.

Using the information a CRM has already collected on your customers, leads, and prospects, your sales team will be able to provide a better experience to their contacts because they know what the customer is interested in. This not only saves time, but it also ensures you’re only presenting products that the customer or prospect would be interested in.

Perks of a modern CRM for sales:

• Cloud-based: make a sale anytime, anywhere, with access to your cloud-based CRM. Easily grab insights on the go and on any device.

• The right CRM can be fully customizable with features to suit your individual customer needs.

• Modern CRM solutions are equipped to integrate with your other systems. Are you currently using an ERP? Connecting your ERP with a CRM can streamline your accounting and finance processes. Once your sales rep makes a sale and puts it on the customers’ account, it automatically gets passed onto the accounting system to track and organize your billing and revenue.

Did you know?

“Without a CRM system, 79% of all marketing leads are never converted to sales.”

Customer Service: Exceptional Communications

The right CRM will help create a personal and efficient process for your teams to use across the entire organization. Your customers will seek answers about your product, new features, and more. This is where your CRM will come in handy, specifically for those post-sale phases which are critical for both product success and the company’s future. Your customer service and support departments play an important role during this phase.

A CRM tool will make sure your sales teams and customer support departments are on the same page and continuously staying connected to give the best support to your customers as well as the latest offerings.

Did you know?

“CRM’s store key information about customers but can also contain information about the product and any special customer demands or questions connected to it.” — CRM’s can make a significant impact on both your company and your customer’s future.

When a CRM is implemented in a manufacturing company, it provides your teams with real-time data and customer insights to help make better and more cost-effective decisions that allow your business to thrive.

For any manufacturing business, a CRM can improve the sales team’s ROI, sales forecasting, and customer growth. See how CPQ can help your manufacturing business.

About the author

Stephanie Gaughen is a senior Pardot consultant at Concentrix Catalyst. She holds a master’s degree in media and communications. She has a passion for entrepreneurship, technology innovation, and next-generation marketing.