Digital transformation is requiring many organisations to re-invent their business processes and approaches to their customers. Most organisations are considering an End to End approach with the help of the latest technologies.
Silos, disconnected applications, and dis-organised information across business units prevent an organisation’s ability to be proactive to the ever-changing customer and market needs. Buyers are now more sophisticated and in control and they want a variety of goods and services customised to meet their own needs. These also need to be readily available on their preferred channel and at a competitive price.
Marketing
In any business, in order to achieve Sales, you require a Marketing department to generate interest (leads). You will require the use of a Sales team to convert these Leads to services and products. Finance needs to record this and invoice the customer for you to be paid as revenue.
From the sales perspective, you want to focus on the clients which bring you more revenue, these are clients found in lower volumes but have a higher deal value. For the high volume of clients with lower value deals to can automate most of the processes so you can focus on the larger deals.
Sales Department
The motivation for a Sales department with following the lead to cash methodology is ensuring everyone is following the same best practices and methodologies throughout all stages of the lifecycle from Identification to Closed/Won. The sales stage of Closed/Won revenue is not the end of the story with your client, there is also the expansions and renewals piece.
The expansions piece (growing the contract size, perhaps with more services and the product you are selling) and renewals part can all be taken care of ensuring better alignment with other stakeholders including the Financial Operations team to ensure necessary approvals are made for approvals and information is synchronized with your financial systems.
Within Sales, everyone wants to know how they are performing so they can make informed decisions. As part of Lead to Cash, we have defined and built reports and dashboards for the Sales rep, Sales Management team, and Board Level to assess performance and take quick and decisive actions. These have been developed from our years of knowledge of working with many high-performing and successful teams across many industries.
There is a process to be followed, which explains the scenarios above, which is known as Lead to Cash. Lead to Cash is one of the most complex and business-critical processes within every company. It spans various departments including Marketing, Sales, Product Development, Delivery, Finance, and Supply Chain with multiple supporting systems involved to support different process stages. In Salesforce, it optimises the right combination of processes for your sales teams.
In most organisations, the pieces and components are not entirely connected or they are dealt with separately or are completely broken (this requires manual effort to ensure everything works together). At Smplicity we have solved this problem by automating the full process by connecting all separate activities and departments and bringing everyone within the organisation together to drive revenue and customer success using Salesforce.
Lead to cash is the next generation for a fully integrated solution that automates the whole cycle by making the whole process more efficient through automation and best practices. By achieving a successful implementation companies can acquire more opportunities and better customer satisfaction.
As a business partner with Salesforce, Smplicity has the ability and experience to develop a fully integrated solution for lead to cash. Salesforce allows a company to have a 360-degree view across the whole process which include Marketing, Lead, Opportunities, Price, Quote, Orders, Renewals, and much more.
Salesforce is the best Customer Relationship Management which is supported by a strong framework to help companies run a fully integrated solution.
Business transformation is inevitable when trying to automate a good process of lead to cash. This involves changes to technology, people, and processes. When each department uses their own preferred software, this leads to data silos, inefficiency, and affects the revenue. A fully-integrated lead to cash solution will help to overcome all these inefficiencies within an organisation.
However, this transformation will not be a simple one. Any organisation looking to have the lead to cash implementation should be ready to expect a change in the technology road map, strategy, and processes quite often.
Salesforce will allow any company to have 360-degree visibility of their leads and customers. We have taken a lot of the best practices through many years of our experience to shorten the time from gathering requirements, design, and build to implementation and testing of a Lead to Cash solution which your team can leverage quickly to support the whole Lead to Cash process including reporting and dashboards for your team.
Key to successful Implementation
The key to a successful implementation of Lead to Cash requires meticulous planning and commitment, with the right people at the beginning will be key drivers for a successful project. The Time frame to deploy a good solution is much lower now, however, it will still take some time to develop the strategy and deploy a fully integrated lead to cash solution.
Marketing Automation
From the time when a lead first engages with your company until the time they are converted into a close won opportunity. The whole process needs lead nurturing through a marketing automation system.
A fully optimised marketing automation system will allow your sales team to focus on the best opportunities at the right time. As a result, this will enable a prospect to receive the right content at the right time.
With Marketing, automation businesses can target customers with automated messages across email, web, social, and text. Messages are sent automatically, according to sets of instructions called workflows.
Smplicity makes use of Pardot which is a B2B marketing automation solution. Pardot is built on Salesforce and provides a full solution that helps marketers create meaningful connections, generate more pipelines, and empower sales to close more deals.
Some common tasks that Pardot automation includes:
- Tracking customer behaviours
- Creating digital marketing campaigns
- Webform management
- Website tracking
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Social marketing
- Landing page marketing
- Creating reports to track performance
- Lead generation
- Personalisation of landing page content for the current viewer
Lead Generation
Lead may be obtained from different sources and through various channels, such as websites, google ads, events, and so on. Through Pardot forms and landing pages on a website to convert visitors into leads. Website and Social Media should be taken into consideration when performing initial strategy planning.
Sales Management
An effective sales management process will encompass Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, and Campaigns, which empowers sales representatives to meet and surpass their targets. All paths should be well defined and standard across the organisation for a better end-to-end process.
Configure Price Quote (CPQ)
Organisations need to make the transition from Spreadsheets to a cloud-based CPQ system. This will help organisations to gain an advantage over their competitors but provide quotes much quicker and in a timely manner. This will also ensure consistency and accurate pricing for any product and service.
Contract/Order
It is critical to managing your orders/Contracts accurately and on time from lead to customer satisfaction. Within Salesforce, using workflows can use to automate the processes to facilitate the operation. Based on the requirement, a custom contract/order management solution can be developed or apps can be found on AppExchange.
Customer Service
Customer service is an important aspect, this may include identifying up-sell, cross-sell opportunities, renewal, or order cancellation. The customer service team must have access to the same data as your sales team and this is possible with Salesforce. Cases can be used as a tool to manage the same. For more complex organisations, we can even build a customer portal to provide self-service using community.
- Expansion – Existing customer and Existing contract but it’s not expired. Customer likes modules or upsell has happened and you need to expand your footprint or services with the customer.
- Renewal – Customer reaches the end of the contract they decide to renew the business. Different renewal versions expand the footprint of more users and products. Stay the same – flat might go down as circumstances.
Finance Management
Salesforce allows your finance team to cash in more easily, by integrating with your ERP or billing system. Automated workflow can be used to trigger notifications when the invoice is ready. Accounting people can easily get invoices ready by referencing the original quote/opportunity. This will make it easy to collect payments from customers.
360-Degree-View sales model
Within Sales, everyone wants to know how they are performing so they can make informed decisions along with other departments including finance. As part of Lead to Cash asset Smplicity has developed, we have defined and built a series of reports and dashboards for the Sales rep, Sales Management team, and Board Level to assess performance and take quick and decisive actions. These have been developed from our years of knowledge of working with many high-performing and successful teams across many industries. With Lead to Cash, you get the full overview of your customer journey from lead generation, opportunity management, revenue, and client growth and retention.
Who needs a 360-Degree-View sales model using Lead to Cash?
Organisations usually identify major issues in their sales process, which include:
- Product Catalogue is difficult to manage.
- Revenue does not tally with the number of opportunities
- Selling wrong products
- Pricing is not standard across all sales representative
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Too many days to provide a quote to a customer
By using Lead-to-Cash, an organisation can overcome all these issues. All information in respect to the product, customer, the price will be standard and in sync, thus providing a better customer and seller experience.
Lead-to-Cash adds value to your organisation to help you achieve valuable opportunities.