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Sales Life Cycle Management: Improving Existing Sales
- May 6, 2015
- Posted by: Admin
- Category: Blogs, Business Intelligence, Business Process Management, CRM
Sales life cycle management (SLCM) is fast becoming integral to a company’s B2B sales and marketing strategy. But what is sales life cycle management?
It’s defined as an operating procedure that uses the best practices of the industry to manage client communications. SLCM is specifically aimed at
- Retaining existing clients
- Winning competitive accounts
- Converting / making maximum sales
- Boosting brand loyalty and value.
It has been observed that highly successful marketing campaigns are the ones that adopt a proactive and personalized approach in reaching out to their customers. Cookie cutter sales pitches are fast being ditched in favor of marketing messages that are in sync with the product and service needs of the customers.
And that’s what sales life cycle management helps you do … reach out to your customers the right way. Do it:
- At right time
- For the right reason, and
- With the right message
In order to do so, the right SLCM solution will collate data from all possible sources within your organization, including ERP software, CRM platforms, and even order processing systems. This is then studied and analyzed to understand the pulse of your audience.
The solutions could also identify keywords, trends, and specific milestones that could be the perfect opportunity for you to build stronger relationships with your customers. Four examples of such milestones have been outlined below.
- Products that are Reaching End of Life:
As a product’s end of life approaches, your customers are going to start looking around for an alternative. This is the time for you to make an offer that’s relevant and lucrative to them. - Products that Don’t Have Service Agreements:
If your customer has bought a product without a service agreement, now would be a good time to swoop in and make a marketing pitch. You could point out the cost, the pain, and the hassle involved in getting a replacement if the product breaks or malfunctions. Not only are you likelier to get a sale, but the customer will also be grateful to you for securing his purchase. - Products with Expiring Warranties:
Warranties are always important for customers. If they’re close to the warranty expiration date, use this opportunity to be proactive. Reach out to them with a good offer on warranty extension that they won’t be able to refuse. - Upsell and Cross-Sell:
When a customer buys something, his relationship with you doesn’t end there. He is always going to be looking to augment his purchase or scale up in one way or the other. Use your database to identify potential buyers who might be interested.
These are just a few examples of how the sales life cycle holds many opportunities for enterprises. The right Sales life cycle management solution gives companies insight into their customers’ mind, helps them forge lasting relationships with existing customers and builds brand loyalty.
Client Says
We are implementing Plasma Ag Solutions across our network of locations. Plasma Ag provides several capabilities that stand out for our users such as Programs, Rebate management, and Inventory tracking. It is quite difficult to track margin information on crop protection products in our industry so our Owner Operators love the transparency the system provides. We utilize the system to professionalize our support to the network and it has become a bit success with all of them.
Several hundreds of our retail locations and joint ventures use Plasma Ag solutions as a part of their core operations. Plasma solutions provide very useful tools and deep insights to users – including tracking customer transactions and financial information. Their applications are tightly integrated with CRM, ERP, Accounting, and our other mission critical IT infrastructure and third-party systems. The dashboards provide rich analysis and insights that helps us adjust to the changing markets.
Plasma Ag solutions have been a tremendous asset to our operations. They offer powerful capabilities such as managing Retail programs, Products, Programs, local discounts, and wraps. Ability to track inventory at physical locations, calculating true and average costs, rebates and accruals on user-friendly and simple interfaces has helped us and our retail customers adopt Plasma Ag solutions quickly.
Our software, system and processes used to be an old struggling engine. Plasma team solved all that. With exceptional training and planning, their consultative executive team down to their support team executed the deployment with first-class speed and professionalism. Their platform not only removed all the pain points in my division, but also created a ripple effect benefiting my entire company.
It has been my experience that Plasma has the technical expertise, commitment, and work-ethic to deliver best-in-class solutions that allow business owners to fully realize business strategies and objectives. They work in a highly professional manner to ensure that the clients’ requirements and recommendations are fully realized. I would highly recommend Plasma for any web enablement initiative that you may be considering.
Plasma has been a smart choice for us as our online business partner. I don’t even consider our work with them outsourcing because Plasma management takes the time to truly understand our business and is able to direct its technology resources for the most efficient and quality output possible. I don’t think you can say that about many companies in their space.
Plasma has been a smart choice for us with our online requirements. I would recommend them to any company looking to better manage their online presence.
It has been my pleasure to work with the Plasma Team since August 2008. We have completed three major builds and multiple smaller projects in this time. I heartily recommend Plasma Comp to anyone needing a workable, practical and effective system solution. Plasma’s Q&A process was extremely thorough. They quickly understood what was needed and then worked the process with pointed and penetrating questions to ensure they had the entire picture of the finished product.
I think Plasma has come a long way in embracing our philosophy of becoming more agile, both leading and following in this area when necessary. The teams have been very open to change and have a great attitude. I have no complaints!
Plasma is a great vendor to work with. They took us from an email-based process to a fully designed, web-based workflow. They have dramatically changed how our devices are certified to be used on our network and they will save you time as well! One of the many processes in our current environment has saved us so much time; from four months down to a few days!
