Uncover practical ways to tackle the toughest sales challenges in manufacturing. Learn how smart tools, AI, and streamlined processes help you move past roadblocks and close more business.

• Identify and Overcome Key Sales Barriers – Learn what’s really slowing down quoting, configuration, and conversions in manufacturing sales, and how to fix it.
• Leverage Smart Tech Like AI and CPQ – See how AI-powered tools and data-driven strategies streamline processes and boost productivity without extra complexity.
• Empower Your Sales Team for Real Change – Discover simple enablement techniques and training tips to help your team adopt new tools and approaches with confidence.

Speaker

Full Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the webinar. I’m Heather Richey. I am a senior strategic consultant here at PROS.
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If you haven’t worked with any of us before, what that means is I spend my day listening to prospects and customers, to understand their concerns, their dreams, their pain points, and then help come up with solutions for them to alleviate those pain points and to realize those dreams.

So today, we’re actually going to be talking about those pain points first, some solutions to alleviate those pain points, and that way and then ways that you could be successful, with future software implementations.

Before we get started, if you have any questions, comments, thoughts, please drop, any comments in the chat or any questions that you have for me in the questions section.

If it makes sense to answer them during the part that I’m talking about, I’ll go ahead and answer it then. Otherwise, we can have a whole q and a session at the end.

Alright. Let’s get started.

So some common pain points that I I hear and I I see, from the sales point of view are a lack of alignment between different departments.

Sales teams are struggling to adapt to shifting market demands, and their sales cycles are really complex and and super lengthy.

These are not all of the pain points that I I hear about or or see commonly, but these are probably the most common ones that I am hearing hearing today.

So we’ll get started with the lack of alignment between departments.

So I don’t know if anyone else has heard their company referenced, or referred to as a family. We’re all one big happy family.

I know I’ve heard that at other companies or, you know, with working with with customers and, you know, in my family I have a little brother.

I got this little image of, you know, two siblings that kind of look like me and my brother. Here, a lot of times we love one another. Everything’s great.

But sometimes we fight. I think that’s pretty common for siblings and that also can be common when you’re working across or within different teams in your company.

It can lead to a lot of stress, Things that, might be a tip that you have this issue at your company is, when you hear maybe your sales team talking about the pricing team or the pricing team talking about sales or operations.

If the way that any of these teams are talking about the other is, you know, super negative or you can just, you know, sense the frustration frustration between them, there might be a a lack of alignment between those departments.

You also can see this show up in situations where there are a lot of repetitive tasks that one team has to do for the other or, maybe there are some some timelines that are being missed or things are taking longer than you expect them to, when it comes to delivering information. Those are just a couple of flags that I would look out for to see if you have this problem.

The other thing that I hear a lot that sales teams are struggling with is adapting to shifting market demands. So I don’t know where everyone’s calling in from. I live in in DC. We’ve had some crazy weather recently.

I spend way too much of my time trying to figure out, like, what I’m supposed to to wear for the day, to be prepared for whatever weather’s coming. And more often than not, I get it wrong. I don’t have an umbrella when I need one or I’m like this person in the picture. I have my umbrella ready to go and it is definitely not raining.

Similarly, your your sales teams are really struggling to understand what’s going on in today’s market. There’s a lot of different changes occurring across a lot of different areas.

Some impact them, some don’t, some impact them to various levels of degrees.

It’s really difficult for them to sort through, sift through all of this information.

And, like, similar to the first the first pain point, you might see this show up as, you know, just the way that the sales team is talking, less so about other departments, but more about not understanding the way that they should be selling or not understanding why customers are reacting a certain way to pricing or why the margins are are a certain value.

There’s just a lot of confusion within their own process, and where and their understanding of where their sales fit within the broader market.

And the last pain point that we’ll be talking about today are complex and lengthy sales cycles. So I wanna make it clear I should have put, like, an asterisk. I don’t believe that complex product means that you need to have a complex process, but I have heard this before.

A lot of manufacturers have products that are are very complex.

A lot of them are configured or maybe they’re an engineer to order situation.

And so I’ve I’ve heard customers say that because they have such complex products then they must have a complex product process. It’s just you you have to have that if you’re going to have complex in your product. And I’m going to show you in a little bit how I I believe that is not true and ways that you can actually reduce some of this complexity, in your process, not your your products.

Alright. So, we’ve gotten through the the hard part. We’ve gotten through the pain points. It’s It’s been a little negative. Let’s talk now about some ways that we can have, we can solve for those pain points.

Alright. So taking a look at the very first one, the lack of alignment between departments.

We think about the salesperson.

And in their quoting process, in their sales process, who are they who are they interacting with the most?

Typically, they are interacting with pricing. They need they need to call pricing to get their their prices, to get information about why a price is a certain way, or certain value.

Maybe they’re calling because they don’t believe that the band or envelope that they’ve been given is is valid and they want to price outside of that.

There’s a lot of reasons that sales could contact pricing, but the point is that they are they are definitely calling them or messaging them whatever, means they wanna use to communicate.

They also might be calling your operations or production, team for things like that engineer to order situation. So they’re trying to make sure that the thing that their their customers wanna buy is is possible to make, is a valid combination. They haven’t forgotten anything.

They have the ability to actually create that item.

They also might be contacting operations to make sure that something is in stock or is available to be manufactured within a certain amount of time, so that they’re not selling something that, you know, you might have five available now, but they need twenty of them and you’re not gonna be able to produce that for, another couple of weeks, and that’s just not acceptable to their customers. So they’re reaching out to operations or production, to just better understand the availability of certain items that they are trying to sell.

A lot of these calls are for information that is readily available. The sales team just doesn’t have it. They don’t have access to maybe, wherever it’s stored or just the the calculations themselves.

So I know when I get asked a bunch of questions that someone can easily look up, I get really frustrated. Pricing is frustrated. Operations is frustrated. Sales is definitely frustrated.

And the other person who’s frustrated is your customer because they can sense this this feeling of frustration amongst the team. Sales is also probably not able to pay attention to them as much because they’re dealing with all of these other other departments.

So we are going to reduce time spending, or reduce our time spent contacting other departments so that way we can really focus on the customer. So what does that look like? How do we solve this this problem?

So I already mentioned that there are a lot of this information is available in other places that your sales team maybe just doesn’t have access to. So step one is giving them access. You don’t wanna just give them rogue access to your whole pricing, pricing suite. There’s only certain information they need. So what you’re seeing here is our PROS Smart CPQ where as a salesperson, I’ve gone gone and added a couple of products, and I can see right away, you know, what the list price is, what, you know, the total calculation is based off of the quantity that I’ve put in.

I also can see things like what the band is that I’m allowed to negotiate within. So I know for this one product, this microwave, I can see that the ideal place for me to be pricing is with within two hundred and thirty nine dollars and two hundred and forty nine dollars. So I don’t need to call pricing to get this information about, you know, wait, where am I allowed to negotiate? Is this acceptable? Is this not acceptable? I have it all right here.

Additionally, you can choose to display information like, maybe cost, margin, any sort of rebates, anything like that to your to your sales team if it’s something that they need to make a decision.

And similarly, for any situation where you’re trying to understand your sales team are trying to understand, like, inventory levels, what the lead time is, if they need to put in a request to the engineering team, that can all be done within this one page. And the point is that we wanna make sure that the information sales needs is immediately available to them. And if there’s anything that they need to request or or ask for, it’s all within this one system. So there’s a streamlined process that’s going to allow them to communicate easily, and also not have to communicate in situations where they just need information. It’s right there for them.

This is really important because your sales team are not pricers. That’s what your pricing team is for. And they’re not in charge of operations or productions. That’s what operation productions is for. Your sales team is there to sell. They should be spending their time assessing this information, coming up with their their value sell, their stories, their, you know, reasons for why their customers should be buying these products and at at these prices.

Allowing them to focus on those strengths that they have will allow them to be more successful.

So if we think back to these other, you know, the other groups that sales is dealing with, if we do reduce that time that they are spent contacting other departments, everyone’s cloud goes away. Everyone’s gonna be in a better mood. Pricing operations is no longer getting bombarded with tasks or questions about what, you know, what sales needs. That information is just available. Instead, they’re having more meaningful conversations about, you know, certain information that sales has questions about or wants to negotiate.

And each group is really allowed to to shine in the in the skills that they were hired to, to do in these specific roles.

And so when we think about that pain point about the the lack of alignment between the departments, I really think the solution is to focus on allowing those different departments, specifically sales in this this case, to let their let their strength shine, let them focus on the things that they are best at by removing all of the other, other hurdles.

Alright. So now let’s talk through the second pain point which is adapting to shifting market demands.

So similar to the last pain point, or the solution for the last pain point, we really want to reduce the time that that people are spent gathering new information. So this isn’t just what the the price is, it’s what’s the impact of the price because of various changes in the market.

So I’ve already shown this screen before where the salesperson was able to see that Floor Target Expert range that, that came from pricing.

If they can have confidence that the information that is shown here in in, in this widget is not only the correct information from pricing, but that it’s also including all of the latest information that is available. So what are the new tariffs that are, in place now? How has the market reacted to a certain event that has occurred?

Is, you know, are you pulling inventory or, considerations about, location, like, geography?

Are you pulling all of that into the the price that is being recommended here?

And so using a tool like, any of like, like, a price optimization where you’re able to pull in all that information to make sure that the price that’s recommended is is a a valid price not only for today, but for, you know, now after an event has occurred or after certain changes have happened within within the market.

Making sure that you have a system that is is dynamic and is going to be constantly changing and updating based off of those those market conditions that are constantly updating is going to be really critical for your sales team to no longer have to worry about whether or not certain certain, information has been accounted for. If they can feel confident that they have the latest information from pricing, that it that pricing includes all of these these latest updates, then they can feel confident that they just now need to understand really what decisions they wanna make based off of this information and not whether or not it’s been updated.

And so instead of having to, you know, worry about making sure those changes are there, they can focus on decision making.

And so when it comes to this second pinpoint of adapting to shifting market conditions, I’ve already said it. The main solution is to allow your teams to kind of, you know, reduce the noise, reduce all of the other new information coming at them, trying to determine whether or not it’s it’s valuable, and allow them to focus on decision making and have that more dynamic automated process to come up with the latest pricing.

Alright. So then our third pain point is a complex and lengthy sales cycle.

So I’d already already mentioned that. I’ve heard before from from other customers that, once you have complex products that they need a complex process, and and I don’t believe that’s true.

You can have complexity in your products and still have a streamlined process that allows your your team to easily add, configure, update those products, without having unnecessary complexity.

So if we think about who’s involved, the other people involved in a sales process, you know, we’ve already talked about sales. They’re there in the middle. We’ve already talked about pricing on the left and operations on the right.

Through our first pain point, we were able to to reduce those, those points of friction, but also by automating the information between pricing and sales, operations and sales, we already have made the process a lot easier. Sales doesn’t need already has two groups they don’t need to call. They already have that that information.

So now when it comes to engineering and legal, these are two additional areas where we can focus on reducing, complexity within within the sales cycle.

I like to to think about finding those different places that you want to have really critical decision making or you need to have really critical decision making and automate everything else.

So if we think about the complex products, if you’re going through and building out a configuration, here, if you’ve, seen any of our demos, is one of the screens to, you know, build out a configured product. And I’ve highlighted over on the right this optimize button.

There are ways that you can take your your complex configurations.

And if there are things that you want your salespeople to do more often, like to sell, a certain type of of configuration or maybe there’s something that they’re hearing a lot from their customers. In this case, in this optimized button, they’re able to optimize the price, air quality, or efficiency of the the product that they’re they’re configuring.

So it’s possible that, you know, of course, customers are going to wanna know what what the cheapest option is. But they also wanna know what’s the one that’s that has the best air quality in the situation or what’s the one that’s that’s most efficient.

These are these can be common, requests from your customers that you can build in these optimized features that or workflows that allow your sales team to listen to their customers here. Hey. I want the most efficient option for, for this product. They go to optimize. They click apply under efficiency, and then they automatically have that item filled out. They don’t need to go and, you know, individually select the different items and try and remember or figure out which one leads to the most efficient product.

They can click this one button and it’s automatically done for them. So we’re already taking something that could otherwise be a more complex process a complex request and streamlining it and simplifying it down to one or two clicks.

Additionally, we’ve already talked a little bit about the engineer to order situation. But if there are cases where there are requests that you need to put in to the engineering team, We don’t need to have a a separate system or separate process for that. We actually can just build that into this process here. So if there needs to be a request to the engineering team, you can add the request here, and this can then trigger various workflows that would involve the engineering team because they’re needed in this situation, but not involve the engineering team when there there isn’t a request for an engineer to order item or update.

And, additionally, we can streamline approval processes. So we hear a lot, in this role, customers talking about their approval approval process. A lot of times, they will, they’ll go and they’ll just, like, update or just approve all of the items because they can’t go and individually select, select and review each of the different quotes that they have.

Or maybe they’re not they feel like they’re not able to review them to the level that they want to because so many of them are just, you know, they’re priced within the target. It’s a good price, but they still have to review them.

That’s one of those situations where if you can define the bounds that you are okay with having items auto approved, having quotes auto approved. That can be predefined within the system. So that way, it’s only these exceptions that I’ve called out here. I have priced this this one item below the floor.

If I had not done that, if it was just a, if I priced it maybe at Target or above the floor, this would have been an auto approved situation. But because I have priced it below the floor, it has now triggered the approval process. You can see that where it says, approval, sales manager review. So it’s no longer auto approved.

And in the approval section, we’re actually making it easier, not just for sales, to understand what’s triggering this approval so they can make any changes, if they wanna avoid that. But also so your approvers can come in and see, okay. I know I need to review this quote. I’m gonna go to approval section and what why do I need to review this?

Why is this coming to to my desk? Oh, it’s because this one item is priced below the floor.

Or, additionally, on the the right side right hand side, it could be there are, there’s it is such a large deal that just because of the the size of it, that’s requiring approval. Or, like, I already mentioned about the engineers, because I put an engineer to order request, it’s now triggering an approval by them. So these are different ways that we can still keep the situations where you need to review something, still allowing those workflows to exist, but in a more systematized and streamlined way to make it easier for for both parties, for sales and for the team that needs to review them. But also reducing the amount of work that your approvers need to do by auto approving those quotes that don’t require this level of approval.

So when it comes to various ways that you can streamline these, you know, complex and lengthy lengthy sales cycles, I really think that, the biggest way that you can can streamline that process is by finding as many ways to reduce the the redundant work that you are currently doing today and to instead focus on those exception exception items that require a different workflow.

And so when it comes to complex lengthy sales cycles, it’s really all about exception centered approvals.

So we’ve talked through the common pain points. We’ve talked through the solutions. I’m just checking real quick. I don’t see any questions yet. So just a reminder, if you have any questions, please throw those in the chat, or in the question section for me to, to answer.

So you figured out which pain points apply to you. You have, come up with solutions, that can help you alleviate those pain points. But how do you make sure that you are successful with those, with those implementations, with those solutions, you know, later on?

So prior to being in this role at PROS, I actually was part of the implementation team. So I was implementation consultant, and I was also an architect here at PROS. So, I have experienced both, you know, on the presale side listening to to customers and helping them find solutions, but also on the implementation side. So I’ve I’ve seen many successful implementations.

And in my opinion, there are two main main factors that drive successful implementations.

So the first one is you need to have a successful team.

And, specifically, when I’m talking about a successful team, these are not like the normal people that you would bring in on on your side, like, like the project manager and your various, you know, technology teams or your experts.

These are really the champions for your sales team that you’re gonna bring in to not only provide feedback on the tool, and help kind of shape what it would look like, but who also are gonna go back to their desk and talk to their, you know, fellow salespeople and really, you know, champion the the news the new solution.

There are two main types of people that I think you need for for this to be successful.

The first one’s a cheerleader. This is the person who is very energetic.

They love a new thing.

They are loud, excited.

They’re gonna be the ones who are going to be very vocal in the meetings about what is needed in the solution.

They’re probably also the ones who are talking to all of their peers to understand what their peers need in the new solution.

And then they’re also the ones who, after they have, either seen a demo of what’s been implemented or they, maybe they’ve done user testing themselves, they go back and they won’t stop talking about how amazing this new solution is. They’re very excited about it.

Look how great our lives are gonna are going to be. The cheerleader is really critical to a successful team.

Equally as critical is the skeptic.

The skeptic is the person who is also probably very loud, but for the complete opposite reasons. They hate change. They are not excited about whatever new new thing is coming their way.

Typically in the industry for a very long time, so they’ve seen a bunch of different changes occur, which means they know at their company what has been successful successful and what hasn’t. That insight is critical to a a really successful implementation.

They’re also the person that needs to be won over. If you don’t have a skeptic as part of the the team, it can be very difficult to convince them that this this product is going to help them, this solution is going to help them.

And then they’ll of course, they’re usually very loud. They’re going to be very negative about it in the future.

It can then be harder to get other people on board, to to using the new the new solution. So having the skeptic involved very early on is is so critical along with the cheerleader. Again, I think they’re they’re equal parts in a successful team, because if they can provide their insight, they can provide their knowledge, and, you know, we can really win them over with the solution, then you will have a much easier time with adoption.

And the last thing that I think is really critical, to to, a successful implementation, a successful delivery is ownership. So I don’t know if you saw the the symbol that I was using for the successful, delivery, but it was, you know, all the hands together. Because once we once you go live with a new solution, you are going to have people very usually very excited about this new thing that they have, new the new ways that they can, you know, that that they can work.

And they are then pretty much immediately going to have new ideas. It’s so common the moment you you go live, someone has some some exciting new idea that they want implemented.

The ability for your team to not only easily use the tool but also be able to easily update it is critical.

It keeps people engaged. It it keeps people interested in finding not only the ways that the tool has already been implemented to improve their their process, improve their their sales, but what are new things that it can do. It keeps people, you know, engaged and constantly innovating. So that way you don’t need to wait until you have a huge pain point. Your team is just constantly having fewer and fewer pain points and working towards a more seamless streamlined sales process.

I think it’s really critical that these teams are your whole sales team is engaged and that they are able to make the changes that are needed for them when they when they understand that this this change is needed or when they come up with this idea without having to involve other other product teams or, you know, other vendors or anything like that. They can have ownership of the tool that they’re using so that way they can, you know, feel empowered to to keep improving.

Alright. So we’ve gone through some common pinpoints, as well as the some of the solutions. I wanna make it clear. Some of the solutions that can help alleviate those pinpoints as well as ways that that I’ve seen in my experience, on the implementation side that Teams can be successful.

Now going to open it up to any questions. I’ll just check to see yeah. We don’t have any questions yet in the chat.

So if you have any, please put them, in that question section so that we can go through them.

Alright. It looks like we have a quiet group today. So if there are no questions that wanna be asked during the session now, and you come up with any later, please reach out. Again, my name is Heather Richey.

I believe my contact information is within the webinar. And if not, we will provide that. But please reach out with any questions you have, and I will either answer them or put you in contact with the person who, who can answer them. But thank you for attending today’s webinar, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

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