How Manufacturers Can Enhance Salesforce to Thrive in a Recession

With economic uncertainty looming for 2023, there’s a natural tendency to keep a tight rein on expenses, deferring “nice-to-have” business improvement projects until factors look more favorable. Yet, we’ve found many of our more successful manufacturing clients are increasing their Salesforce investment.  Their reasoning is that focusing on foundational improvements that truly deliver value will further differentiate them in a highly competitive market.

Investment focus areas for a down market include:

1. Finding how your customers buy and adjusting: Salesforce allows manufacturers to track and manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, which can help improve customer satisfaction by providing personalized and timely service.
2. Finding revenue in places you didn’t look before: By using Salesforce to analyze customer data and identify sales trends, manufacturers can improve their sales and marketing efforts, resulting in increased revenue.
3. Doing more with what you have: Salesforce can help manufacturers streamline their processes, such as by automating tasks and providing easy access to customer information, which can lead to increased efficiency and productivity.
4. Getting a jump on competitors: deploying new capabilities—whether Field Service, a new portal for engaging with distribution, or CPQ can improve customer experience and provide competitive differentiation.  The investment in customer experience can deliver critical market share gains for manufacturers.

At Demand Chain, we work with our manufacturing clients to reinforce core strategies, seek areas for revenue or communication automation, and create opportunities to surface data insights.  As we engage with clients here are some of the key opportunity areas and related questions we discuss:

• Operational Excellence.
  • Are your sales reps leveraging account plans?
  • Do your sales reps have automation tools for organizing and prioritizing their outreach?
  • Are your sales managers actively managing account plans and an opportunity pipeline?
  • Is your company leadership leveraging good data to make good decisions, from the Salesforce platform?
  • Are you creating an effective data and process loop from lead to cash, through support, product management, and back to lead?
• Revenue Automation
  • Have you enabled your channel partners with a tool to manage business with you?
  • Do your channel leaders effectively manage partners leveraging good data and good decisions?
• Data Insights
  • Have you set a good data foundation in place to be able to effectively ask questions of your data?
  • Have you analyzed buying patterns of your customers and partners to proactively create opportunities?
  • Have you analyzed product ordering patterns to optimize your sales efforts on reorders?
  • Have you analyzed service consumption patterns to proactively suggest upgrades, product replacements, RMAs, or new products?

Through carefully asking questions and listening to your unique challenges, we can quickly pull together a game plan that will deliver results quickly and is easily cost justified.

by