The Covid-19 era brought terrible news for most industries across the world. The manufacturing industry is one of the worst-hit of them all. The manufacturing sector went through it all with extended lockdowns, supply chain disruption, and diminished consumer demand. Call it a coincidence, but Salesforce launched the Manufacturing Cloud in 2019. The pandemic taught everyone about the imminent requirement of a digital overhaul for all industries. The manufacturing Cloud can transform the way business happens for the Manufacturing industry in particular. Read on to know and understand the best manufacturing cloud features.
The Manufacturing Industry Needs Digitisation
While the Salesforce platform has been around for a long time now and is considered the best CRM around the globe, the Manufacturing sector has remained largely untouched. Almost all other industries have used different Salesforce products and registered tremendous growth. This was the reason why Salesforce came up with a dedicated product for the global manufacturers. Many manufacturers still follow the traditional methods of inefficient and confusing storing data across spreadsheets. This method demands extra effort, but it also brings complexity and errors as the business grows. Another problem is the disconnect among various departments of the business. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the digital answer to all these problems.
Best Manufacturing Cloud Features for Manufactures
1. Streamlining all Business Processes
This is probably the best thing that the Salesforce CRM does. It brings all your business processes and departments and joins them. What it means is every department in your enterprise knows the other one. They can interact, share information and make the right decisions from circulating every kind of information around. Of course, you can decide on accessibility rights. You can easily make sure that specific data go to specific people who actually need it.
2. Salesforce Customer 360 Approach
Customer is the King in today’s market. The customer is savvy, has access to a lot of information, and is spoilt for choices. Thus, providing them with the right sales journey becomes crucial. Salesforce Customer 360 degree gives you a bird’s eye view of the customer. You have deep insight into the customer’s behavior. You get analytics based on various metrics that you can use to learn and improvise just the right campaign and content to target your customer at the right time. The marketing, sales, and service teams can have access to each other’s data making the system more accessible, faster, and customer friendly.
Salesforce CPQ, field service management, price management, and product service management are some of the powerful tools that came with the Manufacturing Cloud.
3. Marketing Cloud Sales Agreement
Manufacturers mostly follow the concept of the “Run-rate” model of business. The model works by giving the manufacturers an estimation or expectation of a minimum order value based on agreements. The Sales Agreement feature helps measure and monitor this. The feature allows the manufacturer to observe key metrics like actual and planned production, modification in the agreement or contract, price changes, costs, margins, etc. Every change in any of the agreements is reflected directly and is accessible by everyone giving the teams a holistic view and better decision-making ability.
4. Account Based Forecasting with Einstein Analytics
As discussed earlier, Salesforce collaborates with the sales, marketing, finance, and other business departments. With account-based forecasting, this collaboration of diverse business departments can leverage Einstein Analytics to not only keep an eye on the current state of the business. Still, it can also make close to accurate predictions for the future. You can update the data constantly as per the change in customer behavior and make your actual time prediction even more accurate.
5. Third Party ERP Integration
Salesforce allows seamless integration of third-party ERP Applications. Managing your stocks, accepting orders, dispatching the products, invoicing, and finally, customer service issues become more centralized. The ERP integration adds fuel to your ability to fine-tune your predictions. This is what makes Einstein Analytics even more powerful. You receive tons of data from the information that helps Einstein Analytics provide a very detailed picture of the actual sales and the revenue generated.
6. Marketing Cloud Lead Management
The Marketing Cloud allows the use of automation to track leads during the sales journey. The system triggers notifications of set user activities. The notification can help you identify the problem and open a window for improvement. You can rename the leads as buyers, leads, prospects, etc., to help your team better identify the type of lead a specific customer is and then create a personalized customer journey. Your sales team will have better insights and better conversion rates.
7. A.I and Security
We know how important data security is. Salesforce folks take it seriously, and thus, Salesforce arguably has the best data security structure for its customers. The security is no doubt robust but is also highly flexible and customizable. AI enables your Marketing cloud suit to be highly flexible and customizable. Features like Einstein Analytics can be easily customized as per your taste using a highly interactive dashboard and tools. The same is true for other tools too.
Conclusion
Salesforce has created the ultimate suite for the manufacturing industry. They will keep bringing more new powerful features to make this product even better. The Marketing Cloud will evolve as much as the markets. Covid-19 has given us the proper lesson about the benefits of going digital and the benefits of Salesforce CRM for business. If now is not the right time for the manufacturing industry to adopt digital ultimately, there will never be.
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