Initial situation
A global manufacturer and distributor of industrial parts with a worldwide engineering and supply chain service has digitized much of its customer dialog in recent months due to global contact restrictions and thus now receives numerous inquiries via informal email or a website contact form. Follow-up on quotes is also largely done through the exchange of emails. The documentation of orders received though these channels into the ERP system, as well as other first-level tasks, were handled by the sales reps, working from home during the Covid lockdown. Now, the sales reps have returned to field work and can no longer devote the necessary time to these simpler first level tasks. The additional amount of work cannot be handled entirely by the staff present at the company office.
Solution
SALES UNIT sets up a sales support team which, at its full capacity, can cover around 1,200 working hours per month. The team is trained in six subtasks such as manual data entry into the ERP system, documenting new customers in CRM, updating existing customer contact data or sending out standard quotations for specific product packages.
Over a period of 3 months, more and more work is shifted to this sales support team until it is fully integrated into the company’s work processes from the fourth month onwards, working at a full 10 people now. The team can directly enter data into the manufacturer’s systems, having limited access through an IT interface. In this way, the employees in the sales office and in the field are relieved of the repetitive but necessary secondary activities and can devote their
full working capacity to the demanding and high-quality tasks in acquiring new and supporting existing customers.