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How Automation and Outsourcing Make Sales Order Processing Efficient

Businesses often feel helpless in their ability to service customers. Sales reps waste their time filling up order forms instead of servicing customers. Delay on sales front leads to delay on all other fronts and the entire sales order processing workflow takes a hit.

Despite the intent to grow, inefficient sales order processing makes capacity expansion a challenge.Sales order must be circulated within the company to give order updates to inventory, production, warehouse, shipping, and finance department so that the company is prepared to fulfill the order and receive payment.

Let us find out how sales process automation and outsourcing sales ordering infuse efficiency in your business operations.

How automation makes sales order processing efficiently

1. Maintain data accuracy across the organization

When order processing is manual, it not only takes more time to generate sales order, the process is subjected to errors with multiple data entries and re-entries across different departments. Automating sales processing and integrating it with different systems enables you to maintain data accuracy. It also gives you more control over data because the data is only accessible to relevant personnel.

Nearly 50% of successful businesses use marketing automation to measure performance and show ROI.

Ever wondered what data accuracy is? This detailed tutorial helps you learn from scratch.

2. Reduce order fulfillment time

Sales order management system allows all involved departments to view the sales order as soon as the sales team generates it. Multiple tasks like managing sales and purchase orders, creating shipments, and sending delivery updates can be accomplished through centralized sales order processing. This enables the company to reduce time in processing orders along with the ability to process multiple orders.

75% of marketing professionals feel sales order processing automation helps them save time.

In simpler terms, order fulfillment time can be described as the “total waiting time” as experienced by the client or customer. To check how to calculate it, take a look at this reference.

3. Auto-generate order forms

Process automation solutions give sales team access to customer account information making it easier for them to generate sales order. They can pull out specific pricing for each customer, add order quantity, and purchase history along with special instructions to auto-generate sales order form online. Similarly, an order form is auto-generated for customers’ record thus avoiding paperwork and the necessity to generate forms manually.

91% of marketing professionals felt that using an automation tool would help them process orders and serve customers better.

This article lists steps to optimize your order forms so that you can boost your sales.

4. Customer satisfaction

Sales performance management gives your sales team an opportunity to dedicate more time to growing orders than managing them through repetitive clerical tasks. The sales team can easily set re-order point for customers and get updates on the stock level while closing deals. Customers get quick answers to their order-related queries. They can track order status without calling customer service support or sales representatives thereby enhancing satisfaction and support efficiency.

Automation garners a lot of positive feedback on social media, according to this study.

If you were wondering how to measure customer satisfaction at the push of a button, this New Yorker feature explains very well how.

5. Process orders from anywhere

Customers may use different channels like agent visit, email, phone call, or online order portal to place an order. Sales personnel irrespective of their location can instantly generate sales order online. They circumnavigate the need to go to the office to generate the order. The process of order fulfillment begins as soon as the sales order is generated and concerned departments get down to their part of the job.

You can expect a sales productivity increase to the tune of 14.5% if you adopt marketing automation.

This exclusive Gartner report discusses what order processing automation can really do for a business.

6. Optimize sales order processing

Sales order automation allows sales reps to build workflows that direct them through qualification conversations, suggests ways to take the deal forward and automate tasks like filling order forms. Thereby, the process of taking orders, approving, scheduling, and fulfilling them becomes seamless.

What’s more, 80% of automation tool users found that their conversions increased by 77%.

This whitepaper studies how manual processing of orders causes challenges to businesses, and how using SAP might help overcome them. Regardless of which automation tool you choose to use, this whitepaper has some interesting insights.

7. Marketing automation for small business

Sales order processing aids your marketing efforts as well. With order process automation, marketers get real-time access to various sales parameters like order history, key customers, average order size, key products etc making it easier for them to analyze data to gain insights. It allows them to develop marketing strategies to engage customers better.

88% of marketing professionals felt automating sales reports and analysis gave them more time to focus on engaging with customers.

This exhaustive McKinsey report is a telling example of how automation is revolutionizing small businesses across the world.

8. Flexibility

Order process automation enables you to modify sales documents to incorporate unique customer requirements, complex pricing, and discount policies. It is flexible enough to integrate with other systems like inventory management, warehouse management, and accounting systems to streamline customer service functions.

There is a growth of almost 20% in machine learning, an area of automation that is bound to have far-reaching effects on automation and outsourcing of order processing, leading to the flexibility of operations.

There have been reports of automation causing dilemmas related to flexibility. This research paper weighs the pros and cons of automation with flexibility in mind.

Why you must outsource sales order processing

If you think automating will solve all your problems, you couldn’t be farther away from the truth. Most automation tools cost a lot of money, and you may need to hire people to manage these tools anyway. The best course of action for you would be to outsource your sales order automation requirements to an offshore agency.

Outsourcing sales ordering accentuates sales order processing benefits by bringing in added efficiency to the system. This is how outsourcing streamlines sales order processing.

1. End-to-end HR support

When you outsource sales process automation, you need not recruit, train or deploy customer support and fulfillment team. All your HR requirements are taken care of by outsourcing company that hires skilled and dedicated order processing team.

Read this Guardian article to know if the time is right to outsource HR.

2. Absorb employee attrition

Issues like temporary labor shortage, employee attrition do not affect your business when you outsource sales order processing. Your outsourcing business partner ensures that your customers do not get affected through the adequate backup of human resources.

This paper tells you how focusing on people helps prevent attrition.

3. Fast turnaround time

Outsourcing partner works round the clock to manage all your customers simultaneously. Multiple customer order management involves taking orders, attending customer calls, replying to customer emails, and efficiently processing orders by coordinating with different teams. This results in faster order to cash cycle and reduces cost per order.

Web-Based and Traditional Outsourcing is a book that explains the advantages of outsourcing, one of which is a faster turnaround time.

4. World class infrastructure

Outsourcing sales order processing gives you access to world-class infrastructure. Latest hardware, software and other resources are deployed to make sure that sales performance management becomes as efficient as possible.

Read this New York Times article to learn how India became an outsourcing giant.

5. Scalability

Outsourcing is capable of meeting any volatility in customer demand and accordingly scale up the operations. Your outsourcing partner ensures that your customers get seamless and uninterrupted services all the time.

Learn how to scale your business using outsourcing.

6. Efficient customer management

Outsourcing sales ordering ensures that your customers are managed efficiently. Customers can generate order forms, track order information and order history, track stock information to assess inventory levels, and track shipping details.Moreover, they get 24 X 7 online access to sales order management system giving them satisfaction in doing business with you.

This report studies how outsourcing helps customer relationship management.

7. Boost sales and marketing initiatives

Order processing automation allows you to integrate with marketing information systems. This allows for efficient utilization of key transactional data to plan and execute targeted marketing activities. Outsourcing sales and marketing ensures that you are able to generate leads, tap new markets, give quotations, and induce new customers in the business.

Harvard Business Review has some interesting insights about outsourcing marketing.

Outsource sales process automation