Let’s address the reality right away: any sales forecast is only a prediction. This is certainly true with office technology dealers. Even those who put time and effort into predicting sales patterns are going to have situations where the forecast proves true and where it proves to be false. So, if a sales forecast is inherently unreliable, is forecasting even worth it? If so, what is the best way to go about it?  

In the office technology channel, these predictions, or sales forecasts as they are referred to, are deemed necessary, and are, in fact, highly valuable if done well. 

Aviso.com describes sales forecasting as “the process of predicting how much revenue a company, team, or person will generate within a specific time frame.” In other words, using sales data that is currently available, teams can forecast future profits, which can lead to valuable insights and result in better management and ultimately higher revenue. 

This fact shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: the more information that is available to inform a sales forecast, the more accurate and useful the forecast will be. Dealerships should strive to exploit all possible sources of data to inform their forecasts and develop a pipeline management strategy. 

Gone are the days when a simple spreadsheet was an adequate tool to keep track of sales data. Many parameters can and should be measured, but they must be formatted in a way that supports analysis. Numbers do not mean anything until they are interpreted through the lens of optimizing your business! 

What are some of the metrics that can and should be collected? A good place to start is to outline the steps of your sales process. As a sale moves through the pipeline, here are a few things to consider: 

• Source of leads – Where did this opportunity come from? Customer referral? A service technician? Something else? This data can help sales and marketing find and press your most effective sources for more sales. 

• The ongoing status of each lead – What actions have been taken? Is this lead being worked on, is it a closed sale? A simple set of Lead Statuses can help clarify how far along opportunities are, and completed statuses like Lost, Sale and Discarded can help bin these completed opportunities for data analysis. 
• Expected deal closure dates – Just as the name suggests, when does the sales rep think this opportunity will result in a closed deal?  
• Competitive equipment information – What sort of equipment are we, as a company, trying to displace? Knowing the competition can help the sales team recommend the best replacement solution.  
• Potential revenue and gross profit value – How much does the company and sales rep stand to make if this lead results in a closed deal?  
• Probability of success for each individual sale – Quantifying a probability that each lead will result in a closed deal is an extremely useful metric for understanding your forecast vs your pipeline as well as helping to bring the most likely to close opportunities into focus.  

The SalesChain platform is designed specifically for the office technology industry and provides simple, intuitive ways to record and track all the above details and more! 

Using tools that gather data on every deal in a central location is essential for forecasting and financial reporting. Here at SalesChain we often say that quality data is actionable data! SalesChain’s forecasting and business intelligence tools aim not only to display useful financial and pipeline information but also to let users act on it. 

• Easily insert notes and tasks in bulk into accounts associated with deals. 
• Assign those tasks to the proper sales representative.  

• Perform a search for deals lost in the last 30 days and assign a follow up task.  
• Set calendar and email reminders for competitive equipment lease expirations. 
• Create custom dashboards, to lay out forecast data in a readily accessible format. 
• Easily cross reference and compare sales representative’s activity, leasing activity, and service activity. 
• Generate detailed audit reports to inform team meetings and management decisions. 

When evaluating which software product to adopt for your office technology business, consider the value of an industry-specific platform.  There are numerous advantages to devising and running your sales workflow with a quoting tool that is designed exclusively for the capital equipment machines and services industry. What is it that makes this type of quoting tool so unique? Here are four reasons to consider.

Today’s office environments leverage many different tools and services to maximize business efficiency. For office technology companies, these include many different choices beyond mainframe copiers and printers, such as IT products, IT services, print products, print services, document management and scanning services, and maintenance and supply services. Dealers are looking to be a one-stop-shop for these services for their clients, both to help them streamline their operations and to encourage a continued partnership with repeat business for the dealer. This is especially true for their smaller customers, who don’t have the infrastructure, employees, or time to manage these other services.

Having the capacity to offer bundled solutions to their clients gives a competitive edge in this increasingly complex market. SalesChain software allows dealers to sell different types of products individually or as a bundle, using bi-directional integrations to tools such as ConnectWise, e-Automate, and Etilize. As dealerships expand into these diverse offerings, sales teams need more product and service-specific details.  SalesChain’s order breakdown CPQ tool allows different sales teams within dealerships to tailor-make blended solutions packages for their clients and allows managers to better track progress and trends.

Industry-specific software has been gaining popularity in recent years. Why is that?

While the ubiquity of widely adopted software from big companies means that it can be implemented across many industries and fit into wide standards, it also means that custom work may have to be done to make it fit the mold of your business. Smaller businesses don’t always have the resources to manage this level of customization, as it often takes a full-time resource.

As an industry-specific software provider, we at SalesChain have done a lot of thinking about what makes sticking with just one vertical so valuable. Over and over, we’ve concluded that it is the nuances that come with the industry that make our product great.

So, what exactly makes a copier-centric CRM so unique?

Integrations to industry standard platforms are essential in modern software, more so now than ever before. With the overall goal of complete digital transformation becoming more prevalent, some companies prioritize having the largest number of integrations while failing to have the very precise integrations that a specific industry might need.

Pre-packaged software products are built to communicate well with “outside” software to fill the gaps in their own functionality, however, these are still ultimately disconnected products. Your company needs integrations that interface with the day-to-day functions of your organization and address your user base.

The SalesChain platform is built with your industry in mind, including integrations to common marketing and ERP tools. For example, SalesChain’s integration to ECI e-Automate allows sales representatives to create sales orders in e-Auto with the push of a button rather than requiring that a staff member allocate time to manual data entry.

It Saves Your Team Time

A bottleneck anywhere in the sales cycle slows down your entire team. If employees are waiting for necessary documents to be generated, a deal cannot move forward. For example, errors may occur at the stage of document design. Often, businesses employ their development team to create document templates. They must use their time to coordinate with the sales representatives using the documents to handle revisions, updates, and corrections. Automation of docgen within a software platform can help to alleviate this slowdown. A quality automated document generation system speeds up multiple processes, including designing, editing, generating, and importing documents. This frees up valuable human resources and reduces the need for co-opting the development team to generate and troubleshoot the process. – Windward Studios

It Reduces Errors and Omissions

Any opportunity to automate processes that require multiple manual data entry steps inherently reduces human error. The same is true for sales document generation. When an intuitive system is available within the sales platform to create quality documents easily, employees learn faster and can produce documents of consistently higher quality.

It Creates Consistency in Your Branding

Part of successful company branding is creating and using a consistent look and feel in all business communications. This is true not only for marketing materials but for all your company’s electronic and hard-copy documentation as well. Using a quality document generation system allows employees to create output that is highly customizable to a particular client while maintaining a consistent corporate look.

It Leads to Happier Customers

Investing in any infrastructure improvement that speeds up the sales process is well worth considering. Opportunities to streamline document generation certainly would be included in this category. “Your customers deserve documentation that is easy-to-read and well-organized.”  – Windward Studios

Companies routinely run their business operations using a variety of sophisticated, industry-specific software programs, designed to streamline workflow and avoid costly manual data entry errors. It is common to rely on more than one such program, which often creates compatibility issues between products. The solution to this challenge is system integration.

System integration is designed to facilitate communication between different software systems by creating electronic connections between applications that are required to sync together to pool and analyze data. The goal is to create one unified platform. All the sub-systems (or integrations) are associated and function together, and may include IT systems, services, and software. Integrations are built on APIs (application programming interfaces) facilitating the flow of information between cloud-based or on-premises business applications.