ERP in sales
Sales functionality in an ERP solution is used to create quotations, up-sell and cross-sell to new and existing customers, create sales orders, and create sales invoices for customers. For commercial teams using an ERP in Sales, they will benefit from an integrated system across the business and supply chain to help offer a personalized service to customers.
Optimizing sales operations
Sales functionality within an ERP system review should include:
- Customer relationship and sales cycle management: guided processes from marketing campaign (e.g. tele sales, email), to prospect to customer, leads and opportunities.
- Sales orders: including mobility, order promising, easy look up within order screens for availability of products to promote and ship, delivery scheduling, batch reservations, integration with purchase orders, and ERP in sales kit preparation from BOM for fast order data entry.
- Sales agreements: management of customer contracts with details of specific products, quantities, timing, pricing, costs, discounts (including rebates), terms (including payment and delivery) and offers. Sales agreements must work in conjunction with trade agreement and trade allowance functionalities.
- Sales quote system: pricing simulations for discounting, bulk creation of sales quotations, plus automated workflows including customer approval and conversion to sales order.
- Discount management: Discount solutions, allowing sales teams to offer stacked, conditional or retrospective discounts, customer favorites (based on purchase history data or suggestions), or free product items depending on commercial criteria (both manual and automated).
- Returns management: guided workflows and integrations on customer returns of products including credit, physical returns and replacements. Integration with warehousing and financial teams is a must to ensure return orders operations are dealt smoothly.
- Commissions: ERP in Sales should allow sales managers to set up commissions criteria and rates solutions, by customer, costs, team and product; with ongoing tracking on performance based on rules and insights.
- Customer portal: in answer to modern supply chain and customer needs, organizations often like to offer frictionless ways of doing business with customers. A customer portal lets companies create an externally facing business-to-business (B2B) website for self-service sales order processing.
