Having a sales unit is basically a prerequisite for any kind of business. Of course, as with any other part of a business, a sales unit should always strive to perform better – increasing productivity, reducing costs, and so on. An ideal situation for a sales unit would have all of its processes optimized and easily monitorable in real-time mode.
As such, it’s not uncommon for a sales department to implement various measures to improve their results – with automation being one of these measures. Sales processes on their own depend heavily on the entire structure of the organization, and it also extends far beyond the work of the sales team in question.
Some of the instances that are included in the problem of automating a sales unit are:
- Contract management
- Bid management
- Sales collaboration
- Lead management
- Campaign management
- Pipeline management, and many others.
One of the best ways to optimize your sales cycle is to allow the entire sales unit to focus more on the actual selling process and less – on the routine paperwork. Automatization capabilities come in handy here, allowing for easier data export/import, automatic reports, simplified approval processes, efficient collaboration – and more.
It would be easier to explain all of the potential benefits of sales automation using an example of sorts. Let’s say that we have an organization with hundreds of customers, with each of these customers submitting various requests to us as a company. These requests can be collected automatically in a unified SharePoint list, already saving the entire sales team the trouble of sorting through all of the requests manually.
The sales manager can receive an alert each time there’s a new lead that is detected among these requests. After that, it’s up to the manager to verify the customer’s identity – by comparing it with either one of the existing client bases in a SharePoint list or creating a new entry in that list.
As soon as the customer’s identity is confirmed, that same manager has to review the order, check if the requested product or service is available, and then approve the order in question. This process can often be delegated to several different people at once – in this case, it’s possible to use a Kanban board to keep track of every employee’s progress in the task. At the same time, additional communication can be set up and prepared if needed, and the manager in question would receive an alert about it before it happens.
SharePoint workflows can also be used with the majority of document-related operations in the sales department. This allows for a number of advantages, such as task automatization, taking advantage of templates, and more. Workflows can also act as a great addition to various reporting tools, providing graphs and charts based on the data from SharePoint lists.
That being said, there are several different software providers that can offer such a wide range of software to cover your automatization needs – and VirtoSoftware is one of these examples, offering multiple different instances of software appliances, such as:
- Custom lists
- Calendar pro
- Adaptive forms
- Kanban boards
- Workflow kit
- jQuery charts
- Cross-site check, and more.
In conclusion, the introduction of automatization to your sales unit allows for increased productivity, heightened collaboration, and higher efficiency overall – three parameters that are heavily involved in the general performance results of your business.