you’re running a successful business today, you’ve likely hired some talented salespeople. They’re highly skilled at prospecting the right customers, speaking your customers’ language, and understanding how to solve their pain. Those qualities in a salesperson are what keep your pipeline flowing. While your salespeople may be just fine at doing the administrative tasks associated with sales, that’s not where their strengths lie. Things like entering data and manually routing orders to the next step are not where your salespeople should be devoting their time.
That’s what automation is for.
Sales order automation specifically helps you optimize your inbound sales process in several ways — all of which revolve around handing time-consuming, necessary tasks to technology. Below are the top seven benefits your business will see from using sales order automation.
Fulfill Orders Faster
Automation in your sales order process enables you to generate invoices sooner, reduce the time involved in your order-to-payment process, and generally fulfill orders in a shorter amount of time. With a faster internal process of orders, you’ll maintain a better cash flow.
Get a Better Picture of Your Sales
Better cash flow means better visibility into your sales processes. Since the sales order automation processing software takes care of manual aspects of orders, your order data will be visible faster, and you’ll gain insight into the status of all orders through a dashboard. You’ll also be able to track orders to ensure they make it through all required steps and conclude. The software ensures you don’t lose orders and makes it easier to see when they have exceptions from the standard process.
Reduce Risk
There is lots of room for human-based error in manual sales order processing. Involving humans in data processing always opens the door for risk and having to backtrack to fix mistakes. Automation allows you to reduce the number of opportunities for errors in your sales order process, which ultimately improves the customer experience and your compliance.
Improve Customer Experiences
With sales order automation software taking on the menial tasks involved in processing orders, your sales and customer support people can do what they do best: cement long-term relationships with customers, offer empathy when problems arise, and contribute to more strategic work. They can quickly problem-solve and innovate for ways to improve the customer experience. Customers also will have the most updated statuses on purchase orders and be able to receive notifications about where their order is in the process.
Reduce Costs
Your salespeople’s time and effort will be optimized in an environment that uses automation. Better use of time means less wasted money in the sales process and more efficient, productive sales and customer support teams.
Boost Sales
Happier customers equal more sales. McKinsey reports that sales automation leads to “efficiency improvements of 10 to 15 percent, and sales uplift potential of up to 10 percent.” By simply introducing software, your team can better meet quotas and rank higher in customer satisfaction reports — boosting your brand reputation and solidifying a healthy sales trajectory.
Improve Employee Satisfaction
Your salespeople don’t want to be doing tedious manual data entry. That’s not why they got into sales. And your customer support people don’t want to be chasing down information. They want to provide stellar experiences. Sales order automation enables your employees to be more engaged in the work they like doing — driving up their happiness factor and contributing to happier customers.
The same McKinsey report noted that more than 30 percent of sales-related activities could be automated. From pricing and quoting to order management to post-sales activities, your organization can improve multiple facets of sales operations. With sales order automation processing software, your business will ensure that humans do what humans are best at work which involves intuition and judgment — and the technology takes care of the rest.
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