A Sales portal is a handy digital extension for your offline sales
Many organizations in the B2B segment struggle with digitizing their sales organization. Only 30% of their orders are fully online; the vast majority still go through remote sales or offline through the account manager. But that doesn’t mean that offline sales can’t reap the benefits of digitization.
By making smart use of innovative tools, account managers can optimally serve their customers and their work becomes more fun and varied. In this blog you can read how.
In B2B sales, there is a great need for human contact and personal advice. The account manager therefore remains indispensable. But that does not mean that this professional group can ignore the wave of digitization. If you want to win the competition and strive for the optimal customer experience, you as a sales department will have to seize the opportunities that digitization and innovation offer with both hands.
Gartner recommends organizations in the “2022 Strategic Roadmap for B2B Digital Selling” to acquire and integrate the right technologies to support both the digital and physical customer journey. The market research firm also recommends enabling intelligent coordination, which makes it possible to have all contact moments with the customer integrated. This way you are always able to offer an optimal customer experience anytime and anywhere.
The Propeller Sales Portal is an advanced tool for handling all your offline and online orders and quotes. By integrating with your own ERP and CRM system, account managers, office staff and customer service specialists always have all relevant customer data at hand and they make intelligent sales suggestions. In this way they serve customers optimally in their own self-service portal.
Smart quotations and booking orders
This way you can quickly and flawlessly create and send quotations and directly process orders. Because connections are possible with every ERP and CRM system, you always have all customer data at hand. For example, things like previous quotations, order history and customer-specific prices. This allows you – wherever you are – to always respond well to the wishes and needs of your customer.
These quotes are made available on the customer’s ‘my account’ page. Here the content can be discussed with a chat function. Is the offer approved? Then this can be converted into an order at the push of a button.
With the help of the Sales Portal you prevent data from being stored in different systems. At the moment, the view of the big picture is often still lacking. But the time of data silos for online and offline sales is over with this solution and you always have 100% insight into customer behavior. Moreover, you offer your customers maximum insight and transparency by communicating with them digitally in their own self-service portal. So no more misunderstandings!
Through an automated workflow, account managers can also request permission from their sales manager if the customer asks for more discount than the account manager is allowed to promise. Sales managers can approve the relevant quotation with one click and proceed or reject and return it to the account manager.
Finally, you can easily make intelligent up- and cross-selling suggestions based on customer data. For example, automatically or manually show relevant offers or frequently purchased products or accessories. Or use your customers’ order history and behavior to automatically and dynamically match your offers.
Digital cheat sheet
In the Sales Portal you have access to all workflows at both account manager and sales manager level. See at a glance the status of all your quote requests, outstanding quotes and completed online and offline orders. At home, in the office, on the road or when you are visiting a customer. The app also works on your tablet or smartphone. This way you always have the correct data and the latest version at hand in real time. Handy, isn’t it, such a digital cheat sheet?
Your customer can approve a quote in their own portal with the push of a button, after which the order is automatically placed and the data in your ERP and/or CRM system is updated. After the order has been sent, the invoice will be sent automatically. Because the entire workflow is zero-touch automated, you significantly shorten your sales cycle and reduce the chance of errors.
Our Sales Portal takes a lot of work off the hands of everyone who performs supporting tasks in offline sales. No more switching from one system to another, or communicating through different channels. From now on, everything happens from one integrated platform. This gives a clear overview – both for you and your customer.
By automating and digitizing as many processes as possible, there is less administrative work and your sales team is freed up again to really spend on sales and advice. This makes their work more fun and varied, which means that they enjoy their work more. And let’s be honest: that’s nice in this overcrowded labor market!
A wealth of customer data
This way of working also allows you to build up a wealth of customer data. This enables you to better serve your customer, increasing customer satisfaction and making customers more likely to return to you. We have already mentioned above that account managers and service support employees can do their job better. But sales managers also have the right management and control information for their own department. This way they can see how many deals are being won and by whom, what discounts are being offered, and so on.
Online and offline sales no longer compete for the same customer with Propeller. Everyone has access to real-time information and knows the wishes and preferences of the customer. In this way you manage the customer integrally again.
The Sales Portal from Propeller is therefore a handy digital extension for your offline sales. Do you want to know more?