How To Effectively Implement Lead to Cash in your CRM

Salesforce is a powerful tool, allowing you to engage with customers and manage all aspects of your business from one integrated platform. It’s also an ideal way to quickly convert leads to cash-paying customers with functions that accelerate quotes and allow for deals to be closed quickly.

Salesforce accelerates B2B transactions by reducing the time to create, approve and generate quotes. That speed leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction and immediate conversions of leads to customers.

How Salesforce Drives Leads to Cash

Salesforce’s digital platform provides exceptional customer experiences. Consider the typical B2B sales process. A lead connects to your website and asks for a quote. That quote email is sent to a sales professional, who then develops a quote manually, checks with a supervisor, who approves the quote, gets back to the salesperson, who sends the quote to the lead.

That process can take days to complete. In the meantime, the potential customer could easily have gotten information from multiple other vendors and, likely, made a deal.

With Salesforce, the process takes minutes, not days. Salesforce allows for end-to-end management of the customer engagement lifecycle.

Here’s how it works.

When a lead queries the platform, Salesforce automatically combines leads management, quote generation, ordering, invoice, and payment collection into a seamless customer experience. The data around the transaction remains in one platform, not shifting from your website to your sales CRM to your finance ERP and back to the customer via an email system.

Salesforce takes that lead’s query and immediately starts the quoting process. The Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) system generates and approves the quote in mere minutes and sends that quote to the customer. When the customer accepts the terms of the quote, Salesforce Billing generates an invoice immediately and initiates the collection of payment.

By acting as a single source of information and data, Salesforce closes the deal faster and allows for a smoother handoff from sales and marketing to accounts receivable, finance, and the general ledger.

Solving Critical Business Issues

Too many B2B commerce transactions suffer from limited financial processes within their ERP solutions. For companies with poor accounts receivable and collections processes that don’t pack a punch, Salesforce is the right choice.

Salesforce creates a customer-centric accounts receivable workflow, with customizable solutions that transform how finance and sales meet.

Finance officials often need to work out of multiple systems, too, managing data, reentering information, and navigating workarounds. With Salesforce, companies can accelerate and streamline their payment processing, collections, allocations, and reporting processes, including setting up auto-pay solutions that pay invoices in full automatically.

In short, Salesforce jumpstarts your finance processes and solves key B2B challenges from the moment a quote is requested.

Salesforce Closes the Gap

All too many companies lose business because their systems are siloed. When sales and finance are not integrated into one platform, there is a much greater risk of losing sales opportunities. When customers today need to wait days, or worse, before getting a quote, it results in poor sales forecasting, lost sales, poor customer relations, and frustration.

Instead, an integrated sales, billing, and collection process gives your customers a far better experience at each stage. It allows customers to get quotes immediately, make a decision, and move to invoice (and therefore payment collection) sooner. Fulfillment processes begin sooner and delivery times shrink.

For finance departments running legacy billing systems, the automated invoicing features reduce time, lower the risk of manual entry mistakes and improve collection procedures. With integrated systems, there is end-to-end continuity from sales and marketing through to quoting and ordering, billing, account invoicing, collections, and payment management.

Analytics improves, too, with better data interaction for general ledger closing, financial reporting, sales projections, and month-end closing procedures.

Salesforce makes it easy for you to integrate your back-office systems, connecting your CRM, ERP, and finance systems smoothly. Or you can use the Salesforce Revenue Cloud to integrate billing and CPQ in one online platform.

If you need help extending your Salesforce CRM platform to process invoices, payments, and/or integrate with your ERP back-office systems, we can help. Please contact us.

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