Marketing and selling of products and services go through multiple stages, and these stages vary according to the nature of the business and the industry. Quote-to-Cash is a standardized marketing and selling approach that’s common across a host of businesses and industries worldwide. Being both an academic and a practical concept, quote-to-cash CRM solutions use cloud to streamline your existing set of marketing and selling processes, so that your audience and customers feel happy along with your employees.
While this process seems to be built around the transactional aspects of marketing and selling, it covers much more and holds importance as transactions too matter at the end of the day. We take a look at how the quote-to-cash (QTC) process by Salesforce allows all your business functions to make the work smoother, more holistic, exhaustive, enjoyable, quality-ingrained and speed-driven for both the employee and the customer.
The QTC process comprises involvement of functions such as sales, account management, order fulfilment, billing and accounts receivables functions. Stages include the configuration of the quote, proposal draft for the client, order placement, order processing, invoice generation, payment collection and post-sale analytics. Of course, all of these tasks are interdependent in a customer-centric manner, and are collectively best facilitated through the intervention of a CRM-on-cloud software, which, in this case, is the Salesforce Quote-to-Cash.
A good QTC solution on cloud such as Salesforce QTC also helps businesses create a unified platform to capture, process and update customer information on a real-time basis, thus empowering your employees too through increased opportunities for client engagement, infusing more speed and quality into the bigger process and embracing data-based decision-making habits. The opportunity to deliver a quote is often seen as the first concrete and measurable QTC process stage. It’s noteworthy here that the QTC process doesn’t end with the placement or the fulfilment of an order, but with the cash for the same being collected and allocated along with the post-sale analytics being performed in order to improve the process further and on an ongoing basis.
To begin with, the first step of the QTC process is often known as Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ). The sales employee starts building the quote for a client. Salesforce QTC takes guesswork out of quote configuration for salespersons and imparts agility to the front end of the process while ensuring quality and consistency. Integrated QTC software improves your chances of successful sales and collections as you are able to easily manage all the steps of the end-to-end process. Also, you deliver accurate information to clients at all stages with agility, minimize errors, and improve your data analysis and forecasting efforts to further improve the process.
According to research, about 2/3rd of all sales quotes go without a purchase. Your sales team can defy these odds by being thorough, accurate and timely with Salesforce QTC. The cloud helps you develop the right offer price and the associated structure comprising of discounts, grouped items, bundles, add-ons etc. It even facilitates client adjustments for order quantities for you, and lets you develop and present project quote to the sheer delight of both you and your client. With this cloud, your sales people need not memorize every single discount scenario across your SKU and product line, and are rather free to engage with the customer and build a thorough, long-lasting relationship with them.
Once the quote has been shared, the next step is to draft the proposal, followed by the agreement. Automated QTC enables you to create dynamic yet standardized proposals, cutting across thousands of distinct information and data points relevant to the stage. Next, you would need to consider how your sale moves from a proposal to an order. Again, Salesforce QTC takes care of the movement as executed contracts trigger actions on the Finance and Operations end. Next, you continue selling through order renewals and subscriptions, as also cross-selling, referrals and recommendations. QTC lets you create easy renewal quotes based on existing order and client data in the system. Same goes for subscription management, especially for a large stable of clients.
Last but not the least, you send the invoice to the client, collect payment and allocate cash as per the organizational procedures pre-defined and fed into the QTC system. You can also analyse QTC data and create cash and budget forecasts for the future, enabling you to improve your entire QTC process in a continuous and incremental manner and to add to the delight of your employees and clients.
All in all, Salesforce QTC guides your sales team while handling all your offerings and pricing options. You don’t have to rely on any other software and you get to increase your upsells and renewal rates. Salesforce.com is a premier CRM-on-cloud solutions provider that operates on a global scale and continues to wow its clientele through its QTC and several other cloud offerings.
ABSYZ is a leading Salesforce consulting and implementation partner that has extensive experience in streamlining QTC processes of myriad client organizations. Our offerings cover several clouds of Salesforce apart from QTC.
To know how ABSYZ can help you leverage the power of QTC on cloud, contact us.
