Make the Most of Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud With Customer Self-Service

No matter what they are making, from building products to high-velocity consumer goods, manufacturers face many of the same challenges when it comes to managing business with run-rate customers. Siloed information causes a number of headaches for sales teams and makes it impossible to not only provide self-service options for customers but also maintain accurate forecasts.

This is especially applicable to managing your run-rate business. To succeed at run-rate manufacturing, you need complete visibility into revenue opportunities and leakage in order to forecast order volume over a significant period of time. Seamless visibility allows you to keep the pipeline running at optimum capacity to supply orders as they come in, which is essential for a seamless customer experience.

Synchronizing the order pipeline and supply chain requires a 360-degree customer view and real-time information. This is only reliably available by integrating Salesforce B2B Commerce for self-service with the information stored in Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud to provide a seamless experience with reduced risks of errors.

With integration, all is transparent:

– A self-service customer can view their sales agreement commitments and then shop against that sales agreement, which includes all their discounted pricing, and place an order.
– The sales rep that’s managing that run-rate business account can see when one of their self-service customers draws down against a sales agreement.

The result? A seamless, simplified customer experience that also provides the data for accurate forecasting.

The power of Manufacturing Cloud

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud takes the #1 CRM and tailors it to manufacturing businesses with features that support the many unique ways your business operates. It allows manufacturers to:

– Fine-tune virtual selling and hold sales teams accountable with key KPIs, performance objectives, and accurate sales forecasts.
– Rapidly respond to customer needs with fully connected customer service.
– Unify the run-rate business with sales agreements inside the CRM.
– Perform account-based sales forecasting.
– Set account manager targets for comprehensive business planning.
– Access Community Cloud for Manufacturing to enable collaboration around agreements, leads, and opportunities.
– Leverage the Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing AI to bring intelligence and insights to day-to-day operations.

Most importantly, we find that Manufacturing Cloud allows you to have a single source of truth and transparency to power your run-rate self-service business in Commerce Cloud.

Commerce Cloud for seamless self-service

Your B2B customers want the B2C buying experience they are familiar with as well as hyper-personalized service. You want to lower your cost-of-service and give sales reps more time to consultatively sell, not just take orders or support customer inquiries. You also want to provide accurate and risk-free self-service options. These options for run-rate businesses are especially complex.

By combining the power of Manufacturing Cloud with Commerce Cloud, you deliver a connected experience that provides cost-savings efficiencies and eliminates pricing risks.

Accelerating run-rate self-service

Digital self-service and connectivity across sales channels – partners, sales reps, and customer support – is the new normal. Transparency and accuracy are assured, and your business can move at today’s fast pace. This means your data has to be accessible and useable, so you can create an ecosystem that meets today’s demands and those of the future.

It’s about giving customers the self-service options they want and sales reps the tools they need to propel and grow the modern manufacturing enterprise.

Your run-rate customers want to buy online, give them the self-service tools to do it

We know 86% of B2B buyers prefer to buy online when they know what they plan to re-order. This includes all of your run-rate customers, who buy the same items on a regular basis. It’s time to connect all the dots in your organization to create a digital sales environment that offers transparency, accuracy, and customer-pleasing self-service.

At Shift7, we know manufacturing, we know the power of the Salesforce platform, and we’ve developed a B2B Commercial Excellence Accelerator that brings powerful Manufacturing Cloud features to B2B Commerce. We have digital experts with deep industrial knowledge and experience whose top priority is to help you achieve your business outcomes. Our results-oriented team and prescriptive approach can help you catch up with today’s trends and whatever the future holds. Reach out now and don’t risk getting left behind.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways:

– 93% of B2B buyers want to purchase online through a self-service portal
– Offering self-service options to run-rate customers is especially complex
– Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud and Commerce Cloud both offer great features that are much more powerful when they are working together
– Access to sales agreements and other customer data is required to offer a single source of truth for run-rate customers
– With real-time information and alerts, forecasting is made easier