Transform Manufacturing Sales with Apttus Quote-to-Cash for Manufacturing
Imagine that your team has worked diligently with a potential buyer, discussing project scope and circulating it for feedback, toiling away at producing the best quote possible. Then your team presents the quote only to find out that the potential buyer went with another manufacturer earlier in the week. All the time your team spent on the sales process was wasted because your team couldn’t get their quote out fast enough.
Speed and adaptability are two things that manufacturers strive for in their production lines, but have not yet built into their sales processes. Orders are complex, often with a huge variety of possible configurations, and require significant coordination and compliance across global supply chains. In addition to that, technological advances continue to break down traditional barriers to entry for new manufacturers, creating new competition and tightening margins.
In addition to confronting new competitors, manufacturers also have an opportunity to rethink how they engage with their customers. As more and more aspects of customer relationships have shifted online, manufacturers are finding E-commerce storefronts as a great way to meet their overall sales goals. Web-based systems can satisfy customers’ increasing desire looking for rapid, personalized engagement across all sales channels. Manufacturers who adapt their systems can avoid having to pass complex product specs through multi-channel customer engagements that result in slow quote times—and lost business.
Sales Process integration with Quote-to-Cash
Data silos that currently exist between departments make it difficult to deliver quotes to customers quickly. Traditionally, items like contract management are owned by the legal team while finance teams own revenue management. These separate departments each utilize their own tech stack, and critical customer data flows slowly and erratically from inbox to CRM, to applications and ERP.
Right now, if a quote gets stuck in an inbox halfway through the process, there is no way to track the progress or way for other teams to move forward, and delayed quotes can quickly translate to lost opportunities.
Imagine if you had a single system that took you from the initial customer conversation all way through fulfillment and renewal.
This becomes possible when you do something as straightforward as integrate your configure-price-quote (CPQ) and contract management systems. You could create your quote and send it immediately to the contract stage for approval, tracking its progress all the time. Imagine if you had an online storefront, where you could build every step of the sales process – configuration, quoting, and additional pricing complexity into the shopping cart and deliver a completely self-sufficient e-commerce system?
The efficiencies these configurations can bring are huge. The more you integrate your processes, the more value you can generate, even if it starts with just streamlining quote-to-contract or cart-to-cash. Once you are ready to integrate your entire sales process, all of these steps fulfilled by a single end-to-end “Quote-to-Cash” solution.
Quote-to-Cash: A key competitive advantage
A full quote-to-cash (QTC) system is the best way to for manufacturers to transform their sales process. A CPQ system can be helpful, but it only benefits a single operational team. From quoting to contracting, approvals, ordering, billing, and renewals, QTC is designed to help manufacturers sell complex products more intelligently. Quality and speed are both paramount to a successful sale. QTC pushes for these two things from beginning to end. The integrated system allows for visibility between teams that helps eliminate detrimental departmental silos, shift the focus to customers, and streamline the review process. Instead of wasting costly time moving a quote back and forth between teams, an automated QTC system helps you expedite the review process. It highlights who needs to review and where, allowing multiple teams to work simultaneously on the document and ensuring all steps are followed correctly.
It also encourages follow-up with customers. The 360-degree view of the customer provided by a QTC system creates cross-sell and upsell opportunities based on insights from previous transaction history, improving the ease of doing business for customers and boosting their satisfaction. By using QTC to consolidate activities and increase cohesion, visibility, and insights, manufacturers can achieve profits they never could before.
Introducing Apttus as your Quote-to-Cash solution
Consistently an industry leader, Apttus has partnered with Microsoft to bring their QTC solution to the cloud and open a world of integration possibilities. Apttus has a proven record of success – manufacturers using the QTC solution have found that it promotes revenue lifts of more than 7%.[i] If you are ready to reimagine your business for the digital sales age, invest in the Apttus Quote-To-Cash for Manufacturing solution.
With Apttus QTC, you can manage the entire revenue process in one place thanks to a system integrated across all channels and teams. The flexible interface natively integrates with back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to improve visibility into expiring contracts. Plus, tracking potential contract renewals helps with accurate demand forecasting. These insights can be sent to executives so they can assess cash flow and determine the impact to revenue targets. They can make adjustments and reap the benefits of the sales transformation provided by Apttus’ QTC solution.
Try it today
Use Apttus Quote-to-Cash to sell more intelligently, outsell competitors, and raise your performance in the marketplace. Apttus is recognized as an industry leader by multiple analyst reports, including earning the top score for its offering and market presence in the most recent Forrester Wave report. Try the solution for yourself on the Microsoft AppStore today: Apttus Quote-To-Cash for Manufacturing solution.
[i] Satmetrix Apttus Quote-to-Cash Impact Study, 2016
