This guest post by Ally Perreault, Product Manager at Infor, puts the focus on value selling with Infor CRM.
In our experience, we have found value selling to be about the following items:
- Developing long-term customer relationships
- Selling value and benefits
- Solving customer problems
- Providing great customer service
- Anticipating customer needs
Value selling is not about focusing primarily on new leads, competing on price, or feature-based selling. In its essence, value selling is about putting the customer at the heart of your business.
Why Companies Are Shifting Towards Value Selling
Studies show value selling pays because it is 50% easier to sell to existing customers rather than to new customers. In addition, 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of its current customers. Often, organizations have focused primarily on sales management needs overlooking how CRM can add value to a salesperson. With CRM adoption rates at less than 50% among salespeople, more and more organizations are identifying ways to add value for sales reps to utilize CRM.
How CRM & ERP Integration Enables a Consistent Customer Experience
How can a salesperson leverage value selling within CRM? There is no doubt that having a 360 degree view of your customer’s CRM and ERP information can only enrich a salesperson’s perspective in managing relationships with a customer.
It enables consistent customer experiences and interactions where all departments can get a complete view of customers across touch points. Access to the appropriate CRM and ERP data arms a salesperson with not only what sales and service activities are transpiring, but also answers the following questions:
- What products are at a particular warehouse to fulfill and order?
- Has the product been shipped to this customer?
- Is your customer’s account current?
- How long has it been since your customer was last paid?
At Infor, our CRM solution focuses on enhancing existing ERP integrations, as well as integrating with additional ERP systems. We continually innovate with customers on how to configure and display relevant CRM and ERP data within dashboards and widgets, effectively serving up only the data that is meaningful to them.
How to Derive Business Insight Through Data Science
For value selling to be successful, manufacturers and distribution companies must invest in customer intelligence with the right technology to collect, analyze, and share customer data. Infor CRM is taking value selling one step further by integrating with Sales Intelligence for CRM, Infor’s data science and predictive analytics product that utilizes your transactional data, data science algorithms and machine learning to tell you:
- Who will purchase your product and when
- What will they purchase
- Why will they make the purchase
This innovative product has given early adopters a game-changing, competitive edge in deriving business insight through data science.
A Client Case Study
One of Infor CRM’s long-time customers was looking for ways to improve cross-selling initiatives by having more meaningful and engaging interactions with their customers. The problems they faced were as follows:
- A large customer base to cover
- Too much customer and industry data for their sales reps to decipher
- Difficulty determining where the customer was in the selling cycle and what products to pitch to them
The results were a selling approach that was hit-or-miss, at best.
Through a collaborative partnership with Dynamic Science Labs (DSL), Infor’s data science and predictive analytics division, the early adopter co-innovated on Sales Intelligence for CRM as a proof of concept.
Of the thousands of customers this client had in their database, each customer was given Purchase Likelihood scores of 1-10, which helped to identify who was likely to purchase within the next month. For example, if a customer has a Purchase Likelihood score of 8, it means they have an 80% likelihood of purchasing within the next 30 days.
Accompanying the Purchase Likelihood score for each customer are Product Recommendations and the process of identifying and ranking which products the customer is most likely to buy. Within those Product Recommendations are the Rationale, also known as the reason why the customer is likely to buy this product.
Because of this process, the client now had a better idea of what actions to take with customers and what products to pitch. They quickly began segmenting their customers based on Purchase Likelihood scores and Product Recommendations. Imagine being able to focus sales teams on closing customers on specific products or emailing product white papers/webinar invites to customer who are in earlier stages.
According to Vibhu Walia, Sr. Director of DSL,
“We wanted to know not only what happened, but why it happened, what’s going to happen and what you should do about it.”
The preliminary results showed an increase in tens of millions of dollars in revenue per month, a 57% accuracy in closing clients, and an email conversion rate that increased three times. In addition, the client reported a significant increase in returned customer phone calls in response to sales reps leaving voicemails that were more relevant to the customer. The Sales Intelligence proof of concept proved to be so successful, the early adopter was unwilling to remove it, and it was fast tracked as a product to be integrated with Infor CRM.
In this article we’ve talked about what value selling is, why organizations are adopting value selling, and how value selling has been incorporated within Infor CRM.
For more details on Infor CRM and Sales Intelligence for CRM, register here for our upcoming webinar with Ultra Consultants on Wednesday, March 1 at 1pm CST.
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