Manufacturers Start To View Crm As Lean Initiative
By Larry Caretsky

Manufacturers have started to apply the principles of Lean Manufacturing to the Sales and Marketing arena through the use of industry specific CRM technology. According to Larry Caretsky, President of Commence Corporation (www.commence.com/mfg./): Industrial organizations without a sales process often exhibit the following symptoms:

•Disconnected and manual approach to selling, slowing down the sales cycle.•Takes too long to find prospects, get quotes out the door, and close orders.•Irritated prospects, who want what they want when they want it, not when your salespeople can get to it.•Annoyed top sales employees. They want to sell, not figure out the best way to get prospects in the pipeline, quotes created, orders entered, and shipments delivered.•Abundant costly errors, evidenced by expedited orders and high volumes of returns.•Inadequate margin on too many quotes, resulting in deflated profitability.•Stagnant sales from what you thought were your most important customers.•Engineering and other departments are pulled into disarray when your sales team gets a request for proposal or learns about a bid opportunity.

Many industrial executives voice issues similar to these, yet the remedy seems to be incredibly difficult. Some industrial sales teams are extremely autonomous, and management struggles to avoid “big brother” accusations and micromanaging. Despite these legitimate concerns, it is possible for industrial distributors and manufacturers to successfully implement a

sales process.

The high level steps to implement a sales process culled from industry experts and smart industrial sales organizations are:1.Document your sales process;2.Design your implementation;3.Train your sales team;4.Support the implementation.

In an effort to help industrial distributors and manufacturers thrive, Commence Corporation presents Practices That Pay: Leveraging Information to Achieve Industrial Selling Results, a compendium of smart practices from the leading industrial sales and marketing experts and organizations that are growing in today’s challenging environment.

Commence offers industrial companies complete “Freedom Of Choice” to select the solutions and platform that best meets the business requirements of manufacturers and distributors. The comprehensive CRM Industrial application suite is available for use on premise or on-demand as a hosted service. Industrial leaders often build departmental CRM solutions with the award winning Commence Industrial CRM Framework. These choices are why so many industrial companies choose Commence as the solution for managing customer relationships. All Commence Industrial solutions support mobile or wireless connectivity and integration to back-office accounting and ERP systems.

Commence Corporationwww.commence.com/mfg/Larry CaretskyMarketing@commence.com732-380-9100