When some businesses think of the purpose of ERP systems, the functions that often come to mind are to help with streamline construction and manufacturing operations or improve inventory or stock management, just to enumerate a few.
However, an ERP system can also be a powerful tool for another business function – sales and marketing.
An ERP system is a treasure trove of data for the sales and marketing workforce to utilise. Instead of waiting for opportunities, businesses can turn to their data to create these opportunities. Below we’ll enumerate how
Converting leads to opportunities, and opportunities into sales
When it comes to lead management, it doesn’t get any more efficient than with an ERP system in place.
In a blog post by MYOB, they discussed how technologies like ERP systems can drive sales growth in different ways. Here are some of the points that they shared:
1. Decreases manual work
While sales are all about building connections with prospects and strengthening them with existing clients, people forget that there is also a lot of administrative work involved in the process.
By providing your staff with an ERP system that can automate most of these mundane and repetitive administrative tasks, you give them more time to focus on growing your business.
2. Imposes more consistent processes
Sales people often have their own way of closing deals and managing clients, however with an ERP system, you provide them with a solid, consistent backbone to their process.
The ERP system will provide structure to the way that they organise and keep their contacts, how they market and convert leads, and much more.
3. Ensures accurate pricing and stock knowledge
With business data such as stocks, purchase orders, invoices and price lists all whizzing through your ERP system in real-time, you’re assured that your sales people have the accurate information that they need when facing customer queries or promoting and marketing your product and services.
4. Allows for smooth collaboration
An ERP system provides one source of truth, one source of data for an entire organisation.
Because the workforce does not have to worry about having multiple sources of data or varying information on products, prices, orders, customers and clients, it allows for smoother collaboration.
There are also features that allow for easier communication among teammates and functions that streamline workflows to make sure that your business is running like a well-oiled machine.
An example of these collaboration-promoting features includes recording of communications and email exchanges between the staff and customers so that teammates can easily track or help with the sale.
5. Nurtures better leads
The customer relationship management (CRM) feature of ERP systems allows staff to nurture leads in a smarter, more efficient way.
An ERP system gives sales people a lot of control to customise their contact database. It provides them with the ability to segment according to customer or prospect information such as the current products they’re using, their historical purchases, and even highly specific details like a customer’s communication style and more.
Within this module, you can categorise contacts into leads and opportunities. From there you can create targeted marketing campaigns such as email blasts on specific products or create promos for a specific audience.
Centralising contact management
Aside from the ways that ERP systems help when it comes to lead management, it also allows you to maintain a centralised database.
Without a unified contact management system, sales staff will resort to their own system of keeping their contacts.
Sometimes because these contacts are in a personal database, businesses can lose these connections or it takes longer to have them turned over to other staff members.
In one of our previous articles on contact management, we also discuss the benefits of utilising your ERP systems as well as some best practices to keep your contact database in tip-top condition.
Benefits of using ERP systems for contact management
- Customisable contact groups and categories
- Smart and search filter options
- Quick and easy import and export functionality
- Expansive cloud storage
We expound more on these benefits here.
Want to know how to maximize your ERP system? Contact our friendly team so that we can help you. Check out the videos below how sales processes work within our MYOB and Sybiz products.
