When it comes to customer relationship management platforms (CRMs), there aren’t many popular industry-specific options for manufacturing companies.
When selecting a CRM, Manufacturers have a choice: settle for a system that doesn’t quite match your workflow and goals; spend a lot of time and effort customizing it; or use a company (like Unstoppable) to build something uniquely tailored to your needs.
If your company has a straightforward sales process, you’re okay with turnkey reporting options, and you’re not using the software to track complicated machinery or workflows, then an off-the-shelf option can work just fine.
But most of the time, manufacturers have more complicated sales processes than an off-the-shelf CRM is capable of handling well.
If you’re in the process of choosing a CRM, what follows is what you need to know to make the best possible choice for your company.
Why Manufacturing Sales Are Unique
Manufacturing sales involves tracking complicated products, with longer build processes and sales cycles and more paperwork than other industries. Overall, it’s a more complex sales process which requires a more complicated system to track well.
Because they’re so industry-agnostic, CRMs are usually built to serve the least-complicated customer. For instance, they track basic sales data such as the number of units sold, fixed rate or monthly costs per customer, a simple commission percentage for a sales person. For everything else, you’ll need to customize.
Some considerations when it comes to manufacturing sales:
Is your sales process over six months?
The sales cycle itself often involves a project management layer that should be considered when selecting or building a CRM.
Do you offer commissions to multiple people/teams involved in a sale?
Manufacturing sales are also highly customized. To track all the data involved in a single sale and relate it to the people involved, a CRM’s sales enablement features will need to be able to connect multiple divisions to a sale with advanced logic.
Do you need to track data about the product or building process?
Most CRMs have a difficult time tracking equipment, such as warranties and maintenance plans that are dependent on equipment options. And what about tracking the installation process? Most product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms aren’t designed to talk to CRMs, and vice versa. But if you’re using a PLM, it’s a necessary integration to know the most about each sale.
Why These Details Matter
To track necessary KPIs
If you lose granular details related to the sales cycle and product itself, you won’t be able to track all the KPIs you’re looking for. For instance, with such long sales cycles, it can be impossible to consistently forecast sales and revenue unless the reporting options are highly customized.
To safeguard against shortfalls
If a CRM doesn’t have built-in workflow and/or records management, it can be more difficult to connect the building process itself to the sale. You should be able to predict if you can successfully manufacture all the products that you have sold and what the lead time will be, without having to put the sale on backorder.
For transparency and time savings
Because building and sales processes are time-extensive with tons of moving parts and related documents, if you can’t track a project and sale in systems that share data, you end up with double entry nightmares and miscommunications.
Overall, data should flow freely between all applications used in your tech stack, which means each piece of software needs to operate using the same data sets.
Work With Us
We developed a custom CRM for one of the world’s largest elevator manufacturers that has led to $600,000 – $1,000,000 in additional annual sales by better adoption and monitoring of sales processes, capitalizing on upsell opportunities.
The project included:
- Integrating with the company’s pricing systems, existing customer databases, and HR database.
- A User-Interface that was intuitive and easy to adopt
- Supporting additional custom reports to provide the insights that management needed
Contact us for a personal consultation about your custom software needs.
