Aligning Sales, Services and Finance
Take any company – in any sector – and it is quite likely that important departments function independent of timely input from each other, though closely interrelated functionally. To streamline work processes and improve productivity, the Finance and Sales departments should be coordinated. If each has well-established processes in place and sticks to these, the required alignment and achievement of common goals will not happen. This drift is accelerated when these departments use standalone solutions for CRM and accounting. To get these disconnected systems into sync is a time-consuming task and the organization itself may be willing to let the drift continue rather than making a one-time effort towards alignment. In a professional services organization, the services team gets caught in the crossfire. Sales department sets over-optimistic targets and Finance strictly monitors and controls each dollar earned and spent.
Customers are also affected by the divide. The finance department may not know the status of a sale or outcome of a customer meeting and may chase debts/issue invoices inappropriately. The service department may not be aware of issues raised by customers to other departments. Customers reporting issues may not receive good service if the departments are uncoordinated. In such situations, the company is damaging its customer relationships, operating inefficiently, impacting cash flow and jeopardizing future bookings.
One Solution for All
The solution to this issue is ensuring that all the departments in the organization work together towards a common goal. The customer's needs, issues and most importantly cash flow cannot take a backseat because of a lack of internal coordination.
All the affected departments must work together towards resolving this problem. They must ensure that all the major processes are aligned and that personnel are aware of the overall scheme of things. Organizations can get the much-needed sync by switching to a common cloud platform for the sales, services and finance departments. By working from connected CRM that shares the same data as the financial application and professional services automation tool, errors and discrepancies that inevitably occur when separate systems are used can be eliminated. Manual efforts are dramatically minimized, hence reducing the work of the sales team and the risk of making mistakes. A common platform is also ideal for monitoring whether a customer is credit worthy. The sales team can consult the credit background before selecting prospects or deciding what discounts or deals to agree with customers. They can view the status of the credits and also help with collections. In this way, all the three departments, sales, services and finance, complement each other.
Collaborative Tools
Organizations can also benefit from the collaborative tools available with cloud platforms like Force.com from Salesforce.com. Built in business collaboration tools like Chatter provide a stream of business alerts and conversation, which dramatically helps to improve intra-organizational communication. This real-time collaboration is very important for all the departments of the organization to have visibility about every aspect of the business relevant to them in real-time
Questions and Answers
Article Tags:
professional services automation
,crm
,financial application
,collaborative tools
,sales
,finance
,services
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