Over the past few years, the resellers have emerged as the holistic solution providers, rather than only product sellers. As they continue to expand their product and services portfolio, it also opens doors for new sales opportunities. But, what else follows is a cut throat competition, a dynamic market and high customer expectations. Consequently, resellers are struggling to sustain on razor thin margins, coupled with the challenges to increase efficiency and remain a differentiator from the herd.
Right from preparing a Sales Quote to shipping the product, there are several touch points in a typical sales process. If you are still relying on spreadsheets or stand alone tools, it is quite likely that:
- You are committing human errors at the touch points.
- You are missing out on leveraging new sales opportunities.
- You are losing your revenue and repeat business.
- You are not focusing on servicing your customers.
How do you plan to survive, let alone thrive in the VAR industry in such a scenario? Well, automation is the solution. Automation can consolidate all manual touch points; speed up your sales process; optimize your resources and ensure a complete visibility and control over the entire value chain.
Here are five automation tools that every reseller must have in his kitty.
1. E-commerce
An e-commerce store can build your brand visibility and open up new markets for you. It will act as a 24/7 powerful web interface for you and your customers because of its multi-vendor functionality features. The price book, inventory, quote, order fulfillment and shipment – all processes are automated. It will also generate upsell and cross sell suggestions to the buyers, thereby increasing chances to earn more revenue. The scope of human intervention is almost negligible, and entire process follows a methodical route, thereby reducing your overall costs. Additionally, you can pull out precanned reports on your transactions and traffic, to study consumer behaviour and also to monitor your processes.
2. Quoting Tool
Ms-Word, Ms-Excel – is that what your sales reps still use to generate quotes? Well, it’s about time you switch to a web based sales quoting tools . It will not only generate sophisticated and accurate quotes, but also improve the productivity of your sales team and shorten the sales cycle. Further, an automated quoting tool can be easily integrated with CRM, accounting and other business applications, in order to access data across different functions conveniently. The sales rep can fetch real time prices and availability from multiple distributors; and create customizable quotes quickly for the customers. In fact, you can even accept online payments from your customers through an electronic signature!
3. Catalog Aggregation
Thousands of existing products, new product additions, new features, constantly changing prices and multiple distributors – a sales rep can spend hours on his desk, trying to figure out the right product-price combination for the customer. But, not if he is using an aggregated Catalog , which can be mapped to all distributors and suppliers to fetch real time and tailor made information for every customer on his fingertips. It is also possible to build custom catalog, contract catalog management, bundles and standards in your aggregated Catalog to offer a versatile price list to the customers.
4. Mobile Quoting App
The mobile technology has picked up its pace in the VAR market too, and customers are literally expecting quoting solutions on the go. Equipping your sales reps with a mobile quoting applicationon their smart phones or tablets is similar to handing them over a digital briefcase. It will give them real time information anywhere, anytime; generate customized quotes for viewing and acceptance from customers via emails; and get on the spot approvals and payments. Do you already see a happier sales team and a shortened sales cycle?
5. Marketing
The advent of technology and emergence of big data has taken marketing to the new heights. It was only a matter of time, that the marketing process too gets automated for achieving better results and measure the real time ROI on your investments. An e-marketing module can serve as a one stop tool, which can manage and integrate all your marketing activity – promotional campaigns, SEO & SMO optimization, email marketing, multi-channel selling, landing page creation and web analytics.
With the above tools, resellers can reduce the number of manual processes; lower the upfront and hidden costs; deploy the sales force optimally; and focus on the relationships with the customers, suppliers and distributors. To sum it up, these tools will empower the resellers to sustain as well as excel profitably amidst the stiff competition in the market.
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