Salesforce for Manufacturing -- Driving the Growth Factory

Rick is the CEO of a multinational garment manufacturer. Over the last few months, his company has been dealing with highly volatile demand for its products. This created a major problem for the manufacturer – it is unable to accurately determine the quantities of raw materials needed for production. Making things worse, frequent breakdowns in the company’s supply chains put considerable pressure on Rick.

Willy is the Chief Marketing Officer of a reputed consumer electronics company in the western United States. Recently, his company embarked on a massive expansion drive to add more than 450 dealers in six states. The expansion has resulted in a major problem -- Willy and his team are not able to communicate with the channel partners in a seamless, timely manner. This led to a 20% dip in sales through the company’s dealership network. Willy is in a fix.

Tom is the Chief Customer Relationship Manager of a world-renowned machine tools manufacturer, with operations in more than 35 countries. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in most of his company’s customers purchasing online. Tom received many complaints from the company’s customers, who were dissatisfied with the inability of the company to deliver hassle-free virtual buying experiences.

Do these stories sound familiar? How can manufacturing companies ensure smooth marketing and business operations? What does it take for these businesses to facilitate high levels of productivity? They need to use a robust CRM system. One of the most widely used CRM systems in the manufacturing world is Salesforce. Today, we will examine how Salesforce empowers manufacturers to enhance their efficiencies in a big way and meet their revenue goals.

Real-time Coordination with Channel Partners

One of the key challenges faced by most large manufacturing companies is ensuring effective channel partner management. Often, it becomes hard to communicate with dealers and distributors without delays, and this results in the inability to take the right decisions at the right time.

You can overcome this problem with a high degree of efficacy using Salesforce’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution. The PRM solution enables you to:

• Ensure seamless on-boarding of channel partners

• Get the full picture of channel sales activities

• Leverage the power of automation to reduce channel selling costs

Ensure Seamless On-Boarding of Channel Partners

Salesforce’s PRM solution helps you create a customized portal to meet the unique channel partner needs of your manufacturing business. The portal can be used by the channel partners to access relevant training materials and other information resources. The hassle-free sharing of information goes a long way in quickly onboarding new channel partners.

Get the Full Picture of Channel Sales Activities

Another key benefit of the channel partner portal is you can receive timely updates about the sales made by your dealers and distributors. The portal can be integrated with Points-of-Sale terminals, resulting in real-time access to sales data.

Harness Cutting-edge Process Automation Tools to Cut Costs

You can use Salesforce Automate, a business process automation powerhouse to fully automate your channel partner sales operations. Salesforce Automate comes with various applications that allow even non-technical users to create process flows with minimal effort.