What a sales tool!

It's cut-throat out there these days, no secret there. Rep firms across the country are looking for competitive advantages and differentiators to help them stand apart from the rest. At our oldest (and largest) customer, Ewing Foley, sales people are now regularly receiving quote summary reports from RepConcert. In other words, a spreadsheet of recent quotes in there territory, sorted by distributor. The sales team is finding this is a powerful tool when calling on distribution. They are able to use the brief amount of time they get with management or sales personnel to talk about business they need to go close together; this is a "Win - Win".

Watching every penny?

Most businesses are these days, but in the outsourced representative business, many pennies go out the door as unidentified “soft costs”. Those expenses incurred representing your manufacturing partners in the territory, but not reimbursed or even recognized as a significant portion of the cost of sales. Tracking expenses directly related to a partner (lunch and learns, trade shows, travel to factory meetings, etc.) are only part of the problem, other expenses that are difficult to track include meals or entertainment, out of territory travel, promotion and material supplies, and many others. RepConcerts unique expense (and mileage) tracking module allows users to enter their expenses directly into the application, linking each to an applicable Manufacturer, Distributor and/or End Customer. Users can even allocate percentages of an expense to multiple partners for increased granularity in tracking where all those pennies are going. Imagine rolling up reports like all non-reimbursed expenses by manufacturer, or total expense for supporting a customer or distributor last quarter. This is a simple process that can yield a wealth of information.

Some of our favorite best practices:

- Enabling Notifications, outside sales people are notified via email automatically when a quote is created or modified for one of their Customers or Distributors.

- Setting Quote Reminders “pre-sends” a follow-up email at a future date the user selects.

- Report auto generation allows managers to receive custom Quote, Expense, Opportunity or Commission Reports emailed to them daily, weekly or monthly.

- “Monthly Report Day” can be replaced with custom fields in Opportunities. Users maintain three Opportunities per line; all will be rolled up into the manufacturers’ monthly format.

- Maintain Contact “Types” for targeted mailing to Engineers, Purchasing or Branch Managers and OEM’s, Contractors and Distributors.

- Generate Open Quote logs by distributor for sales management meetings.

- Record RGA’s in “Cases” for 360° instant access.

- Convert Quotes into Opportunities to feed monthly reporting requirements.

Quote Management

Most of our customers cite increased conversion on quotes as a top company goal. Think about it for a second; what is a quote? Basically it is when a customer has done some level of research on your product or they may have used your product in the past and they have called for a price. Quotes often are the single best opportunity for increased business and at this stage are typically the lowest hanging fruit. RepConcert allows users to strategically manage the two main “types” of quotes in our business:

- The customer calls for a “verbal” price. Usually a distributor needs to provide a price for a customer or a contractor is bidding a job. One strategic way to manage these instances is to record what you are telling the customer and “link” the record to the customer, distributor, contractor or manufacturer in a centralized database.

- The customer calls and is ready to place an order. The difference is that a formal (contract) quote has been issued confirming the factory acceptance of the terms. Like the verbal quote, one strategy for better managing these contracts is to associate them in a central database with the relevant accounts.

In both cases, the “M” in CRM is critical. Managing this information in an efficient, simple-to-use format creates instant value for your salespeople and your company. Taking quotes out of the individual email boxes or non-relational file servers and managing them in a centralized, relational format has incredible collaborative value for your organization. Features like reminders and reports help automate the crucial follow up process, relational features ensure a history of quote activity for each account and analytical features reveal an in depth understanding of quote activity, conversion rates and open quote pipelines.

Regardless of the solution you choose, definitely consider one that helps you achieve your most important sales and service goals.

Reminders, Notifications, Tasks and Alarms

Far too often salespeople do not follow up with a simple phone call or email on Quotes, Opportunities or Projects. Often is simple act is the difference in getting the order or not. Another “best practice” I would like to touch on is the use of reminders, notifications, tasks and alarms. These are powerful, simple to use, automated tools that can help users remember, organize and follow up on things in the system. Some examples of how these might work for you include:

• - Create Project Tasks to help organized all the things you need to do over the life of a Project. Coordinate and schedule follow up or action items on bills of material, quotes, cross references, submittals, samples, etc.
• - Set your profile for notifications (email) when a Quote or Opportunity is created for one of your customer Accounts.
• - Synchronize Tasks for Contacts, Accounts, Meetings or Opportunities with Outlook® and smart phone devices.
• -Set a reminder when a Quote is due to expire for renewal or follow up.
• -“Pre-send” a follow up email to your customer on a Quote or Opportunity and schedule the date it will automatically be sent.

Monthly Reporting

Monthly opportunity (sometimes referred to as “pipeline”) reports are a fact of life in sales but especially challenging in the outsourced sales model. The challenge for manufacturers and reps alike is consistency. Manufacturers often partner with 30 or more reps in North America and reps usually represent between 10 and 20 manufacturers each. Aligning processes with any single partner is challenging enough but aligning processes across such multifaceted relationships is an entire different story. Because each manufacturer requires specific, often unique, information from the field to help plan and run their business, RepConcert supports the ability to evoke specific fields based on the partner manufacturer selected for many documents like Opportunities, Quotes, Accounts, etc. For example, a monthly report for Manufacturer “A” may include Distributor Name, Product Family and Amount, but a report for Manufacturer “B” includes End Customer, Vertical Market and expected Close Date. By selecting Manufacturer “A” (or “B”) in a new Opportunity document, these specific fields appear and can even be required for successful completion of the Opportunity. Customized reporting can capture, filter and present the data that is required for each manufacturer. These reports can even be automatically generated and emailed to you on a specific day of the month. Imagine your sales team going to one Opportunity document to satisfy monthly reporting for six or seven manufacturers. Then imagine a technical product marketing manager at the factory collaborating with your salesperson to help win the opportunity and convert it into additional business…..

Contacts vs. Accounts

Possibly the single most powerful aspect of (most) CRM products is the relational way they use and present data. (An organized set of tables where data resides and can be accessed in predetermined ways) In our case we consider the “Account” to be the most important way to organize and associate other documents in the database. An Account (Company) can be linked to Quotes, Opportunities, Expenses, Campaigns, etc. This allows superior organization of this information and allows users to not only locate the specific documents from multiple areas of the tool, but provides greater insight into your customers’ relationship with your company in general. Users will see any open Quotes, Cases, Opportunities or Projects in which the particular Account may be involved. Show me.

Contacts are unique documents for individual people. They too may be linked to an Account (the place they work) and even incorporate certain Account attributes like Business Address, Phone or Account Type, but the record itself provides specific fields designed to capture specific information about the individual. Contact records can also be synchronized with Outlook / Exchange Server providing sales people with multiple options for maintaining Contact information in the database.

Probably the second most powerful aspect of CRM is the fact that it is a “centralized” repository for all of this information. Often territory knowledge is one of the most important things a sales rep brings to the table. CMR lets you organize much of this information, make it available for all to participate in customer intelligence gathering and ultimately leverage it in company strategy.