Context

A company specialized in the production of packaging sells its products all over the world.

The sales office, made up of various employees, is responsible for promoting the product, collecting specifications, preparing offers, following the development of new products and reviewing current ones, supporting planning and ensuring that deliveries are met.

Problem

The management of offers and orders is mostly manual and based on the sales staff’s mnemonic skills.

Offers are sent to the various customers, but there is no traceability of the different conversion and delivery phases; therefore, progress is not known, and it is not possible to measure and improve productivity indicators.

The most demotivating factor for the company is the inability to know the organization’s actual revenue potential and its ability to increase overall profitability.

Improvement actions

We installed our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and customized it 100% according to the client’s specific needs and internal processes.

The sales team is supported by the management system through these features:

  • Traceability of any lead - recording of any contact with customer records and an automatic follow-up system, with revenues, margins, discounts, conversions, etc.;
  • Control of the entire supply chain - the management system tracks orders from the first contact to delivery, through all intermediate phases. Management can thus ensure the control of volumes and the entire company;
  • World-wide monitoring - the system is visible to all management worldwide, ensuring control and resolving potential issues promptly;
  • Decisions based on contribution margin instead of revenue - negotiations and profitability calculations have been migrated from revenue to margin, providing realistic guidance (avoiding the vanity metrics);
  • Sales performance indicators and commissions - developing a specific merit algorithm made it possible to reward salespeople for a set of commercial and operational characteristics that are much more important than revenue alone, in order to pay commissions based on the real value generated;
  • Workflow automation - following a detailed mapping of the sales process, the various stages—from customer acquisition to product delivery—are guided automatically by the management system to standardize guidance for staff through the stages and efficiently fulfill the order;
  • New pricing rules - the management system enables measuring metrics of various kinds in order to guide salespeople in defining the pricing based on a data-driven approach, both for market conditions and internal processes;
  • Sharing common goals with salespeople - before the improvement activities, all sales offers were handled by the sales manager, creating risks to business continuity and process fragility, as well as a workload far exceeding available capacity. The CRM to support process changes enabled the development of standard price lists and delegating part of the order types to other salespeople, freeing up time for the manager to focus on improvement actions with greater economic-operational impact. The activity also made it possible to increase the scalability of the sales process and therefore the conversion capability;
  • Order tracking - e-commerce tracking doesn’t exist only for Amazon and B2C: order tracking can be implemented in any company. Through the development of a lightweight web-app and fully customizable, the CRM was connected to a simple user interface available to the various customers. By entering their own order number, customers can see purchases with 4 progress statuses (the CRM has many more, but only internal staff can view them): in a few seconds, the platform makes it possible to know the progress status, the expected delivery date, and to avoid emails or phone calls to back-office staff to find out the status of their order. Tracking also provides the customer with solid reliability of the company and therefore a more authoritative brand awareness as well as innovative compared to direct competitors;
  • KPIs with a data-driven approach - salespeople make decisions based on a dynamic dashboard of sales and delivery performance focused on creating value for the customer, the company, and internal processes through a unique integrated ecosystem. Data layering makes it easy to make decisions and target resources effectively.

The CRM was also supported by changes to the planning process, establishing a daily routine with all staff involved in purchasing materials, sales, production, internal logistics, and shipping.

Result

In less than a week, the company became aware of offers worth several million euros that were waiting for approval from the customer base.

Traceability of the entire supply chain also made it possible to identify the company’s bottleneck and apply specific methodologies to increase company revenue .

In addition to the economic benefits, visibility of the entire supply chain made it possible to carry out targeted improvement actions on processes and reduce the delivery lead time by -179% and an OTIF (material delivered on time and in the requested quantity) of the 97% with the near elimination of standard delivery deviation.