Get to Know Sales Processes
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the lead-to-cash cycle.
- Explain the quote-to-order process.
- Describe quote patterns.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.
Review Enterprise Sales Management and Lead-to-Cash Cycle
In the competitive communications industry, sales teams use Enterprise Sales Management (ESM) within Salesforce to streamline B2B opportunities, quotes, and orders. Designed for large-scale enterprises, ESM optimizes the lead-to-cash cycle. How? It uses customer data from Salesforce and facilitates order capture for scenarios that involve multiple subscribers and locations.
And what’s the lead-to-cash cycle? It’s the end-to-end sales cycle that consists of the following six stages.
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Lead Generation: Initiate the process with marketing and sales teams to gather leads into Salesforce CRM. Sales teams manage and monitor leads and customer data as part of their routine tasks using Salesforce and the Customer 360 suite.
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Opportunity Creation: Convert those qualified leads into opportunities. ESM supports the sales team with built-in processes when dealing with a multi-subscriber or multi-location sales opportunity.
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Quote or Proposal: Generate and submit a quote as a proposal to the customer. Negotiations with an enterprise customer often form an important part of this stage.
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Order Submission: Convert a quote into an order and submit it for fulfillment.
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Delivery and Billing: After delivering the product or services, generate an invoice and send it to the customer. Once the customer pays, recognize the revenue.
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Post-Sales Service: Maintain customer satisfaction with continuous support, including customer service, technical help, and beyond.
ESM, when integrated with Enterprise Product Catalog, Industries Contract Lifecycle Management, and Industries Order Management, facilitates communication between additional billing or customer service systems. The primary role of ESM in the lead-to-cash cycle is to create enterprise quotes and enterprise orders.
Transform Enterprise Sales Management at Infiwave
In the Enterprise Sales Management Foundations module, you saw how Sophia Perez, sales manager at Infiwave, explored the benefits and capabilities of Enterprise Sales Management. With ESM, the team at Infiwave has reinvented its sales game.
Infiwave has a great relationship with a long-standing customer, Global Media. Linda from Global Media wants to purchase mobile phones for her employees across various locations.
Enter Arif Setiawan, a sales associate at Infiwave who guides B2B customers like Linda through their purchasing journey. In this module, follow along as Infiwave and Arif build an enterprise solution for Global Media.
Explore the ESM Quote-to-Order Process
Handling enterprise customers means juggling complex needs. Let’s examine the quote-to-order process triggered by an enterprise opportunity. It consists of five steps. Click each step to see what it’s about.
Thanks to ESM, Arif can seamlessly complete the quote-to-order process for his enterprise customers.
Define Quote Patterns
What makes ESM stand out is the ability to handle multiple locations and subscribers within a quote. In ESM quotes, both locations and subscribers are called quote members. These members are then organized into quote groups.
Groups are useful when you have to make the same offer to many members. Using groups allows ESM to offer three different approaches—or patterns—for quoting.
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Add a product and configure it, without adding it to any quote group or quote member: Use this approach when your customer wants to place an order but doesn’t have any subscribers or locations for that order yet. For instance, Arif adds a new mobile phone model to the ESM quote for Global Media, intended for centralized purchasing. He doesn’t allocate the product to any location or subscriber yet.
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Add a product to a quote member and configure the product: Use this approach when each quote member requires different products and configurations. For instance, for Global Media’s offices in different locations, Arif individually configures and adds different mobile phone models to each office in the ESM quote, addressing unique requirements.
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Add a product to a quote group and configure the product: Use this approach when a product is configured identically for all quote members within a quote group. Each quote member gets a product with the same configuration. For instance, Arif sets up a quote group for all Global Media sales departments worldwide, adding a standardized mobile phone model with identical configurations for uniformity across the group.
The approach you select depends on the organization’s process and the nature of the solution.
In this unit, you learned how you can use ESM to streamline the quote-to-order process for complex, multi-location opportunities. You can create and manage enterprise quotes and orders to ensure a smooth and effective sales experience.
In the next unit, follow along as Arif creates a communications enterprise solution for Global Media using ESM.