Cloudy Forecast, Smoother Experience for Businesses
Think back to how you were doing business five or ten years ago, perhaps before you’d even heard of the cloud: communicating and standardizing processes was a nightmare. Silos operated independently of one another with great frequency. Delays and bottlenecks made their presence felt at every opportunity.
What’s that? You’ve encountered these issues recently? You are not alone. The mere existence of the cloud is not enough to magically resolve all the issues facing modern businesses. However, practical and innovative new uses for it are being developed every day, aiming to one day create a consistently smooth business experience.
The term Quote-to-Cash is relatively new to the modern lexicon, but its practice is quite familiar: seeing through a business transaction from the generation of a quote, to the final revenue exchange. Recent cloud innovations have made this process more efficient than it has ever been.
For example, order configuration: by transferring business processes to the cloud, an easily accessible history of transactions is created. While an experience sales veteran can often suggest efficient pairings and additions within a product catalogue, they’re not always on hand. The cloud has made it possible to automate these recommendations, and keep customers comprised of their optimal buy consistently. The cloud is always learning – if you’ve ever enjoyed a product that Amazon.com recommended to you out of the blue, you already understand how useful this can be on a larger scale.
Sales representatives, the lifeblood of any thriving company, have been estimated to spend only 10% of their time in the field, actually making sales. What takes up the rest of their time? Administration – whether it’s negotiating approvals for a discount to close a deal, negotiating fine points of a contract, or piecing together supplies from multiple manufacturers.
This heavy lifting is crucial to completing these deals, but does it in fact need to be so time-intensive? The cloud says no. Using it, the connection between manufacturers is clear as day, making turning around large orders a breeze. Centralizing the key details of a deal gives visibility to everyone involved, reducing errors and easing communications around discounts and configurations. Deals get done faster, and as the saying goes: time is money. But just as importantly, time is options. Compacting the time necessary to complete a deal allows both customers and distributors more opportunities to get to know each other and build long term relationships: everybody wins.
Apttus solutions, which can be applied to any of the scenarios above were created from scratch on the Salesforce Platform, and as such they lean heavily on the wondrous utility of the cloud; you can learn more in our recent ultimate guide to Quote-to-Cash, but above all know that it’s all being done in the name of a less aggravating, faster way of doing business.
Disclaimer: This article was written by a guest contributor in his/her personal capacity. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of CloudWedge.com.
