Salesforce is a cloud-based customer platform that helps manufacturing companies to provide personalized and smart service to their customers. Salesforce allows the manufacturing industry to store all your customer data in one centralized location. With omnichannel support, service reps can engage customers in real-time using their preferred line of communication.
Salesforce connects manufacturers to customers quickly and enables seamless communication across sales and service. Manufacturing companies can achieve a 360-degree customer view with the help of Salesforce and can stay competitive in the market by engaging customers in real-time.
Manufacturing companies face several Salesforce implementation challenges because of its complex functionalities. In this blog post, we share the top 3 Salesforce implementation challenges that the manufacturing industry face.
Top 3 Salesforce Implementation Challenges in the Manufacturing industry
- Data Accuracy
- Custom pricing and configurations
- Proactive Process Compliance
Data Accuracy
Manufacturing companies need to maintain sales cycle records right from production to end-sales. How do you ensure that your employees enter the right sales records in your Salesforce CRM, how can you prevent employees from committing mistakes, and what is the guarantee that there are no errors in the recorded information?
Ensuring data accuracy is one of the biggest challenges that companies face when it comes to Salesforce implementation. In fact, poor data quality costs businesses around 700 billion dollars a year, or 30% of the average company’s revenue. This should explain to you the seriousness of the issue.
Collecting and storing data in Salesforce is not a one-time event. Data helps manufacturers to provide a better customer experience and increase customer satisfaction rates.
Validating every single data that your employees feed into Salesforce is a nightmare for many manufacturers, especially if they handle multiple databases across platforms.
Pricing and configurations
Providing custom pricing and configurations to your customers is tricky especially for new salespeople. What if your new employee miscalculates a quote on a deal – it can be disastrous Not just that, manufacturing companies must ensure their sales teams can quickly and precisely price products.
Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) helps salespeople to calculate the accurate pricing for a given product configuration. When employees provide the right input as per customer requests, Salesforce CPQ gives the exact quote. But the challenge is making your sales team understand how CPQ works.
Manufacturers allow CPQ users to calculate automatically based on their actions and changes in the quote calculating fieldset. But to provide to exact quote and to engage customers, sales reps end up being in charge of the calculation process.
It is wise to provide effective training to your sales rep and show them how to leverage Salesforce CPQ effectively. However, this training itself is a herculean task for manufacturers as you will have to factor in every possible CPQ use case.
Proactive Compliance
For effective decision-making, manufacturers need accurate data. Managers must ensure sales teams are keeping opportunities up-to-date and completing all the tasks correctly. Managers must find a way to make sure continual compliance with Salesforce CRM and the sales cycle process.
A recent Salesforce study found that the average customer’s contact database is composed of”
- 20% – useless records
- 74% – records need updates
- 25% – records are duplicates
Shocking, isn’t it?
Manufacturing companies must take process compliance seriously and find a way to enforce it effectively. Since the quality of data affects the entire company, you can set organization-wide data quality metrics to ensure data accuracy. The challenge is, will the employees stick to it and follow the metrics.
With this much need for data accuracy, leveraging an additional tool that is built to enable compliance is a must. A Digital Adoption Platform is a game-changing solution that supports your employees in performing correctly and also ensures absolute process compliance with Salesforce.
These are the top 3 Salesforce implementation challenges that the manufacturing industry faces. There is a simple and easy way to overcome all these challenges and achieve desired outcomes. That is invest in a powerful DAP like Apty.
Apty DAP can be your one-stop solution for challenges like employee onboarding & training, employee engagement, process compliance, Salesforce adoption, and more.
We have discussed the solutions to these top 3 Salesforce implementation challenges in a separate blog.
We recommend you read it – Top 3 Salesforce Implementation Solutions in Manufacturing Industry
