It’s one of the first things you’re taught at school: team mentality. So why are we still operating with a siloed mindset in the business world?
The need for cross-team collaboration has never been more imperative, especially with customers demanding greater customer experience and even faster responses. And with 57% of sales reps expected to miss their quotas this year, the last thing companies want to do is leave their sales reps out to dry. Here’s how your sales and finance teams can work together to deliver exceptional customer service and make it easy for prospects to sign on the dotted line.
Put yourself in your sales rep’s shoes
Sales reps are continually on the go. Think meetings, calls, emails, dashing in and out of the office generating leads and following up prospects.
Now, imagine putting in all that leg work and then telling your prospect it will take two weeks to prepare a quote. It’s hard to deliver exceptional customer service when you’re keeping your prospect waiting – a delay that could have a direct effect on the probability of securing the deal. Next, imagine preparing that quote and needing input from different teams. Suddenly you’re faced with a spreadsheet containing 20 tabs requiring sign-off by various people and missed cross-sell opportunities because you had no visibility of related products.
Not a seamless process, right.
It can be hard for your sales team to be nimble and responsive when their quote has to be touched by so many people. And when quotes are created manually the chance for human error and losing out on time-sensitive sales leads is high.
Consider your finance team’s pain points
Collaborative selling doesn’t just mean the alignment between sales and marketing, but also between finance and sales. For those working in accounts payable and receivables, probably the most common phrases to the sales team are: “Where’s the purchase order? Where’s the invoice? Where’s the sales receipt?” The list could go on.
Just as much as sales reps don’t want to waste time on mundane admin sales processes, finance departments don’t want to be spending their hours chasing sales reps for customer information, triple-checking figures and trying to quantify costs. And it’s usually when a deal is lost that companies realise that having their sales and finance team operate in silos is actually counterproductive to the bottom-line of the business.
The solution: bring sales and finance together with CPQ
No, this doesn’t mean sitting your sales and finance teams in a room to talk it out. It’s about giving them the right tools to guide their quoting effects and track sales transactions.
The good news: sales teams are already receptive to this. Seventy-seven percent of salespeople say selling collaboratively with other departments is important. And the even better news: accurate and streamlined quotes can be created through CPQ (Configure Price Quote). A CPQ system can crush department silos by automatically pulling together all product and customer data into one place – simplifying the quoting process for both sales and finance teams.
“Salesforce CPQ serves as a bridge between your front and your back office, sales and finance, and allowing your entire company to be focussed on one thing, which is your customers,” said Pascal Yammine, Senior Vice President and General Manager, CPQ and Billing Salesforce at the recent Dreamforce conference.
Having the tools needed to better track sales numbers and automate quotes and invoicing means faster sales and billing turnaround. It’s streamlined. It’s collaborative. It’s accurate. And it saves your company money.
Find out more.
For more insights into CPQ and sales quoting, contact the team at Simplus today.
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