How RPA Supports your Sales Team - Part 2

In my previous blog post, I have shared examples of how robots can support sales teams with automated quotations, pricing and product configurations, and how they can handle sales back-office tasks, such as the processing and confirmation of orders. Next, I would like to go into more details in two additional areas: after-sales, where companies can make a difference in client satisfaction and profit margin, and reporting and data management, which can empower your team to perform better and make informed decisions.

After-sales activities

Although there is a lot of sales focus on the initial orders for a client, there is also great potential in after-sales activities. Proactive approaches in after-sales and servicing can increase both the client’s satisfaction and your revenue with the client. Most, if not all products require supplies to operate, spare parts replacement from time to time (depending on wear and tear of components) and have a recommended regular service maintenance. For many companies, due to their team’s capacity constraints, these services are left in the client’s responsibility, even though everything is available – client information, product technical documentation and supplies or spare parts. Robots can easily connect these pieces and help you scale up your after-sales activities.

One of our clients (selling professional appliances) deployed robots to automate this process. The robot would use their existing CRM data to generate a report of all clients for which service maintenance would be relevant in the upcoming two months. A personalized message with recommended services would then be sent to the client, including a link to schedule an appointment for maintenance. When clients make the appointment requests, the robot automatically processes them, checks the product information, the client information and plans technicians to execute the maintenance. If spare parts are needed and not available in the inventory, they are ordered. The client receives then a confirmation and all internal systems are updated. With such an approach, more revenue opportunities are created, service times are improved, and the technicians’ work is more predictable.

After-sales use case for service maintenance

Reporting & data management

An efficient sales team needs a robust structural support, reporting and analytics. These are administrative tasks, highly repetitive, but which, if done properly, can empower your team with the right information and ensure smooth operations for the rest of the company. Robots can generate all types of reports from countless systems and data sources (f.e., in retail – sales summary report per product and product type, in manufacturing - inventory reports to spot high/low stock items, or cross-industry - sales pipeline health, sales forecasting comparison, individual/team activities and goal progress).

Robots can also synchronize your CRM (f.e., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or SAP CRM) with other systems, streamlining your data across the company to your ERP (e.g., SAP, Oracle) or PLM software. However, sometimes you may need to work with external systems, such as vendor portals. In retail, you may have to register the products sold in a vendor portal in order to activate the warranty. In drop shipping business, you need to directly order the product to the supplier and possibly also organize the logistics. A simple use case I have had in this area was for a retail company, which had to register their sales deals also in the vendor portal, in order to take advantage of varying discount levels, based on monthly volumes sold.

Sales reporting use case

Robots take care of back-office sales tasks, provide your team with data and insights and automate quotations and after-sales activities. Free up the time of your sales team, so that they can spend more time with clients and focus on activities that directly drive performance and increase revenues, such as opportunity identification, negotiation preparation and client interaction.

If you would like to learn more about what RPA can do for your sales teams and dive deeper into the topic, watch our webinar “Wie Software-Roboter Ihr Sales-Team unterstützen” on demand.