UK needs to lean on sales processing

Sales order processing is “inefficient, wasteful and non-productive, with significant error rates” at more than half (59%) of manufacturing companies in the UK. Although 77% say they have tools to automate the processes for configuring products and generating proposals, only 53% believe they have improved the accuracy, quality and consistency of their proposals. Only 42% say they have reduced costs. These are the headline findings of a survey of marketing and sales directors of large international manufacturers (turnovers greater than £50 million), sponsored by advanced sales order processing software company Blue Martini. Respondents included EMI Records, Sharp Electronics, Kruger Tissue Group and YKK Europe. Other results show that 66% of these manufacturers face constantly changing customer requirements, requiring rework for many proposals – with 22% saying that 50—75% of their proposals’ content needs modification or complete redrafting. Beyond that, 68% say they have highly configurable or difficult-to-specify products, meaning complicated selling processes involving multiple stages, many people and an increasing number of product permutations. The result, they say, is the potential for orders going from sales to manufacturing with errors – and 22% admit to that still happening. “Many manufacturers have adopted lean manufacturing and production principles, but now must apply those same principles to their sales and marketing operations,” says Monte Zweben, founder and CEO of Blue Martini. “ Our customers have used intelligent selling systems to reduce proposal time from weeks down to hours, and have reduced service costs by 90%,” he claims. And he says that they enable manufacturers to optimise the processes involved all the way from leads to quotes, orders and service.