Meet Enterprise Sales Management

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe enterprise sales challenges in the communications industry.
Explain how an enterprise sales management system solves the challenges.
Discuss ways your organization can benefit from Industries Enterprise Sales Management (ESM).

Before You Start

Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following required content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.

Business Challenges

An enterprise sales management (ESM) is a software solution that supports sales processes in communications service providers (CSPs) with large and medium-sized enterprise or government customers. An ESM system is typically customized to facilitate the selling of complex products and services at the enterprise-level.

Sales and account teams who need to create quotes and orders for large and midsize organizations face challenges in the quoting and ordering process for several reasons.

Product complexity: Products and services can be complicated, with thousands of line items each.
Extensive sales processes: Building trust with enterprise customers over an extended sales process requires ongoing care and transparency.
Different geographies: Managing deals often involves multiple geographical locations.
Stages of negotiation: Responding quickly with accurate quotes and detailed information, even through multiple negotiation stages, isn’t easy.
Fierce competition: Companies must compete with other CSPs for the same sales in the demanding enterprise sales segment.

Without a solid ESM solution, these challenges can lead sales and account teams to missed opportunities, low morale, and burnout.

The Infiwave Sales Team

Meet Sophia Perez. She’s a sales manager at Infiwave, a CSP that sells communications equipment and services to businesses and consumers.

Sophia Perez, the sales manager at Infiwave.

Infiwave struggles with the complexity of enterprise sales, so Sophia is rightfully concerned. The sales team is stressed, numbers are down, and big deals are disappearing from the pipeline.

As a sales manager, Sophia works with several different team members.

Sales executives and account executives: They manage quotes, contracts, and proposals for complex customer solutions. These roles work over time to build relationships with their clients and gain deep knowledge of their business processes and requirements.
Sales support representatives: This role supports the sales process by ensuring accurate record keeping and sharing detailed product knowledge to help with customer interactions and sales strategies.
Approvals managers: They review proposals and contracts to ensure accuracy and readiness before submission to customers.
Sales agents: These are the dynamos who strive to give fast, accurate quotes for complex transactions. Their aim is to swiftly turn initial queries into finalized orders.

The Solution

To put things right, the Infiwave sales department has recently rolled out Salesforce Communications Cloud and with ESM. Now they’re positioned to streamline enterprise sales processes, improve customer response time, and ultimately beat the competition.

ESM extends Communications Cloud applications to enable Infiwave to deliver a unified and customizable selling experience. Industries Configure Price Quote (CPQ) is included with the ESM license. Taken together, ESM, CPQ and the underlying data models, business processes, user interface (UI) components, position Infiwave to transform its large-transaction sales.

ESM solution features include:

A configurable and customizable UI for creating and amending quotes in a centralized location
Unified transaction support across ESM for handling large multisite, multi-subscriber quotes and facilitating bulk uploads for subscriber and location lists
Shared catalog providing predefined product models for enterprise mobile, business internet, and VPN (virtual private network) products
Customizable and extendable guided flows that facilitate browsing products, configuring offers, and viewing quotes
Prebuilt, interactive sample templates allowing for the auto-generation of required documentation
Order automation and sample plans for internet and mobile, offering the flexibility to submit orders from an enterprise quote at once or as sub-orders over time

Impactful Business Change

With ESM, companies like Infiwave gain major benefits.

A streamlined quote-to-order process: Simplify the quote-to-order process to save time across departments and reduce manual errors.
Rapid quote generation: Upload multiple locations and subscribers through a CSV/XLS file for fast quoting.
Dynamic proposal updates: Update proposals when amending quotes with prebuilt templates.
Customization: Adapt the system to unique sales processes and requirements.
Automated workflows: Automate repetitive tasks and workflows to save time for focusing on strategic activities and relationship building.

In this unit, you learned about enterprise sales challenges and how ESM enables CSPs to define a unified and customized selling experience. Next, unpack the nuts and bolts of ESM to explore how it augments Communications Cloud to deliver industry-specific solutions.

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