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okay so welcome to this morning's webinar the subtlest webinar is quoting and sales pipelines in b2b wholesale distribution manufacturing businesses that's a bit of a mouthful but actually it's fairly important to recognize that actually managing pipelines in wholesale and distribution businesses is sometimes much more complex than it might be in a service industry or selling something like software there's this complexities in quoting and different kinds of pipelines but also one of the key aspects of running a wholesale and distribution businesses in some scenarios you might need to spend a fair while in your sales pipeline and in other scenarios you just need to get through the job quickly and efficiently doing volume of quotations and volumes of sales orders so we're just going to really focus on those different types of pipelines and the different types of quotations that we would use in those sales models so first of all just to introduce myself I'm Android ROM and I'm the CEO of prospect soft we're just going to cover today our we're gonna have a look at the typical sales models and pipelines that you find in a b2b wholesale and distribution business we're gonna look at we actually look at the software and see how you can record your progress through those different types of pipeline and how that can be used for reporting we'll just very quickly touch on the process of actually setting up those different pipelines just so you can see kind of how easy it is to do that and as we go through looking at those pipelines will also look at producing the actual quotations that you might send out an email so you might send out during that sales process so let's start with those sales models and it's always true that whenever you look at a model you're looking at a slightly oversimplified categorization of different types of things and so I'm going to do that job and oversimplify what's a fairly complex topic but it will help us to kind of see how these different types of sales inquiries need to be handled in the CRM and how the sales team need to manage them differently so one categorization I've got is complex sales pipelines and then somewhat unimaginative Lee I've got medium complexity and then either low complexity or quick sales orders in sales process and in terms of examples of what might make a complex pipeline in a distribution business any kind of process that involves you as a distributor or wholesaler actually doing perhaps the fitment of the equipment of distribution or distributing or having to that equipment somewhere so if you're selling some kind of machinery like lifts or maybe even big coffee machines or something like that then there might be requirement you have an installation project as well or specification so if you're supplying components to somebody who's making something else so building products to a building contractor so selling tiles or lighting equipment or something like that we're happy to specify the products to go into a project those would give you a fairly complex sales process but they're also lots of other types of sales process and sales models that would also give you a complex a pipeline and another example of that which is often overlooked when we look at sales pipelines is the process of signing up a new potential retailer or disappear so if you're selling products that might actually be relatively straightforward products to sell you could still have a complex sales process of actually signing up a retailer so if you've got a branded products and you wanted to have good retailers that been set up with a good shop window or storefront or display box or something and you have to kind of go through a process of qualifying that retailer and organizing all of those things then you would have a complex sales process of signing up a potential retailer or distributor and those complex sales models whatever they actually cover tend to involve things like price negotiation perhaps multiple quotes or multiple iterations of that quotation and multiple documents and conversations as well as obviously different stages during that sales process in what I've classified here is a medium complexity sales model you might have things like an existing customer reordering from you so they've already got an account they're already a distributor of yours or their audio customer and they're reordering but they still need to go through a process of a confirmatory quote to confirm the prices perhaps a little bit of negotiation or where you've got a new or an existing customer asking for a comparative price quotes so you know perhaps trying to buy a laptop or something and trying to get a price from you and from another distributor you know you want to go through a process of managing those sales enquiries making sure they followed up doing a quotation for the customer but you don't necessarily want as complex or sales processes you might have doing a fitment or a specification job and doing lots and lots of different quotations and different stages and obviously in a lot of distribution businesses you also get fairly quick sales as well so this would be characterized as an existing customer reordering without possibly even without the need for a quote they just want to ring you up tell you what they need and place that order verbally over the phone and so those orders are possibly phone email fax if anybody still does that I perhaps added that just for amusement or even when they're sending you a CSV or an Excel order just for you to process through to your inventory management system and another example of fist I won't go into here but another example would be an existing customer or a new customer placing on an on account or a castle via an e-commerce site where again they know what they buy they've chosen the products they know the prices and they're just trying to place an order so that would be a very quick turnaround and another example of something that doesn't require much of a sales process so in terms of what you would need a CRM system to do for a distribution business that's running these kind of sales models and I should reiterate at this stage that any one business can have a number of these different sales models so and you could certainly have a complex sales process for signing up a new retailer and then a very simple process for just a restocking the goods of that retailer or signing up a new pub to sell your beer and then restocking the beer of that pub you could also have a complex sales process if your business was selling cranes where you have to build the crane fit them etc and then you could have a simple sales process for selling the parts or the service packs or the lubricants or whatever so a lot of business would have more than one of these scenarios but if you're managing a complex sale through a CRM system you would need a sales lead with multiple stages and perhaps the ability to do multiple quote versions multiple options of quotes or multiple iterations and during that sales pipeline there salespeople would be involved in multiple follow-ups and taking that sale through multiple stages for a medium complexity sale where perhaps talking about one quote there might be just one version of that or maybe a couple of versions perhaps but a much simpler pipeline that runs over a much shorter duration with less steps and the final two are a quick scenario we'd really be looking for just the customer brings you up you perhaps give them the prices over the phone effectively of verbal quote and then you just process that order there and then perhaps taking a purchase order number or or maybe not even taking a purchase order number and and effectively taking that order immediately without needing to follow it up and call the customer back tomorrow to confirm that they want the goods or whatever so hopefully everybody could see their business and one or two of their sales processes in one of these three categories and obviously if you've got sort of more complex scenarios or different scenarios to this then we can perhaps discuss with you your sales pipelines and which model would be most appropriate to use but let's let's take those different sales models let's flip over to the CRM and actually see these in action and I'm actually going to show these in reverse order so I'll start with a quickest one as being the kind of simplest example to show you first and then I'll build up the complexity as we move into how we would manage the medium and then the more complex sales so here is our CRM system and I've just logged in and this is my dashboard and if I've got a number of sales going on I'd be able to see my pipeline and things like that Paul kind of see that building up as we go through first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to imagine that Michele Drury one of my existing customers has rung me up and Michelle wants to just place a quick order for some products that she's bought for me before and I could search for Michele actually I could see no Michele is my previous searches so nice and quickly I could just click on Michele and open it up but just to show you the searching at search for Michele and here we've got Michele jury and some other things that we've previously done that Michele have come up here so let's say from Michele's record and here we see Michele we can see some activity some notes previous documents that we've sent conversations you had with Michele we're going to go ahead and take a sales order for my shop so I'm going to create a sales order I can choose the currency I can use template orders and we'll kind of come back to that in a little bit and here we are going to send so we're going to add some products this so I've got some very much to put us here product a and product B and I see what we'll have ten of those and also products C on here just to show you a different format of product so this point it comes in a pack and so one pack is ten items so there we go we've put a sales order together I could also have gone into a full-screen search and load up all of the different products and put one of those three of those etc in I can also go through I think that Michelle is purchased recently and just reorder the same things that she's bought in the past so a few different ways to put a quick quotation or quick sales order together I'm not going to do an example of this but actually I did mention that perhaps if the customer sent you an email with an attached Excel or CSV you could actually just drag and drop that onto this screen and then it will automatically populate the sales order with the products that are the quantities that michelle has asked for in the excel file she sent as but lots of different ways that I can build a quick order and then what I'm happy with that I can tell Michelle yeah the total out is is a thousand towards and then I can just confirm that order and if I was connected up to Unleashed or 0 or something then that order would be posted straight through and waiting for my warehouse guys to ship it out so that's really the very simplest sale we could do there was literally no process there other than just entering the products giving the prices over phone and confirming the order and I should say that a couple of people have asked me in in the past what happens if I get through that process the customers not quite ready to place them all and they want to come back to me late this afternoon will rather than confirming it I could just save this for later and I could come back to it but let's go now back to Michele and let's imagine our second scenario moving up that complexity scale of just doing Michele a quick quotation she wants some prices for some existing some products that she knows about we're not going to do a complex sale here there's no installation no fitment no complex a negotiation that's going to go on but I do want to give Michelle a quotation I do want to follow it up tomorrow to make sure that she places her order so I'm going to go ahead and create a quote for Michele I can new batteries for instance I could be anything I don't have to give it a description I can leave that blank and I'm just going to go ahead and create this quotation and again let's put a couple of products on here and for those you I have two of those so we go created our quotation and as I say this is a simple sales process so you can see the top of the screen unlike the last Queen there's a little bit of a a tool of the top here that just shows you the status that you currently answer in the kind in the states of quotas of doing a quotation and then we'll be waiting for confirmation often we've sent the quote to the customer and then hopefully we'll get our order confirmed tomorrow and we follow it up so we've put our products together I'm going to do a really quick email here and I'm going to choose a template I'm going to do a basic quote email and it's got to populate my email with a quotation table tip Michelle or mrs. Joey thanks for your inquiry here's my quotation I'm gonna send that to the customer I'm going to - awaiting confirmation I could do other things like reserve the stock so if I knew that we were low on stock I can click on the information here and see the stock levels for these things if I knew I low on stock and I was expecting this customer to buy tomorrow and he asked custom ask me to reserve it for them I could reserve some stock for them but I'm just going to set that for awaiting confirmation and I'm actually going to ask John to follow this up tomorrow please call tomorrow and chase this quotation perhaps I'm going to be out tomorrow or maybe John is Michelle's favorite Account Manager and there we go we've got a setup for today so now we've got a quotation that we sent to the customer and we've got a follow-up and we can see the status this is in and if I ran some more pipeline reporting I would see that I've got a quotation for 600 pounds in awaiting confirmation in this sales pipeline if I just go to the details page here you can also see the notes of that have been typed in here and I can see that was a quotation sent with a bit of information I can go in and have a look at that quotation as well if I wanted to ultimately when John calls the customer back tomorrow or later today John can change the status of this to cancelled if maybe the quotation has been canceled because Michelle's decided she doesn't want it or she's got to buy from somewhere else or I could change the status to order then actually confirm this sales order so you can see that without too much Bulava I've been able to create a quotation send it to the customer set a follow-up so we can actually chase up this quotation and I can track it through a basic pipeline let's just do the more complex example and then we'll kind of come back and have a look at how some of this is configured and how flexible these different pipelines are because although this is an example pipeline even as a quotation I cut after three stages or four stages or five stages if I wanted to and I can call them different things as I need to so let's just go back to Michele now and let's do our last example and in our last example I'm going to manage a more complex sales process where rather than diving straight in and doing a quotation perhaps I need to qualify the inquiry understand what the customer is looking for talk to them about their requirements before long before I can even do a quotation for the customer and potentially when I do the quotation and I might want to give the customer two different quotes with different options or different phases or whatever that might be so let's go ahead and create a new sales lead now and I'm going to call it's just a project example just because I can't be more imaginative than that and I'm going to give this a type of so this is a fitment project and it's a new business pipeline and at the moment the inquiries aren't qualified so let's create and so now I've got a sales lead I haven't got a quotation that moment because I don't know what I'm creating the custom for and you can see that there's quite a lot of stages in this pipeline and I can go through perhaps and say right I'll call Michelle tomorrow follow up and find out the requirements and perhaps when I speak to Michelle tomorrow I can add some more notes Michelle is interested in a new machine and installation whatever that might be and you can see that you can start to build up the notes of the sale I can also look at perhaps there's a location that we're going to do the fitment and I can put the address in obviously that's their default address but I could go and change the address I can do multiple quotes documents etc so let's go ahead and just do a quote so again there could be multiple quotes here so let's do option 1 here and again I can template these I haven't got any template set up but I could set up multiple templates and then I just get these templates in a drop-down to make it nice and easy to produce my quotes quickly or I could search for a previous similar project that we've done and copy in the lines from that previous project to start by quote off a nice and quickly but I'm just going to go through and create to my quote in the normal fashion and again you'd probably be putting on different products installation fitment time that kind of thing but I'm just gonna put a few simple products on here just to give you the idea and now that I've done this quotation for this project obviously I could do as I did before and just send a simple email quote but perhaps in a more complex cell I'm gonna have to send a more complex document with more detail in it about how that project is going to happen all the things that we're going to need to do in the different stages so I'm going to create a new document for this quotation and I might have different template setup like project proposal obviously simple quote perhaps a stay but it works so I'm going to do a project proposal here and you can see my template there and if I create this document it'll actually create the document fill in the details of my quotation and generate that document for me and then over Microsoft words that I can start beginning to edit that more complex document and put the details into my documents so we've got a nice cover page we've got some background that I'm going to need to fill in the objectives how the solution is going to be delivered etc etc clearly being more careful than that maybe put the stages for my project livery and then also include the details of the pricing estimates and maybe a signature page and that kind of thing so I typically spend a little while making a nice document there with all the detail in for Michele and maybe I get somebody else to check that or or I just come back and double-check it myself but eventually I'm going to want to send that to the customer so now I'm going to do an email and pace perhaps or just do a basic email or I can do a quotation cover email and if I go to add attachments to that I can choose that document we've already produced that proposal document I can attach it as a PDF and there we go I've got my email all set up ready to go with the PDF of that more complex Word document all set up but I can now send that to Michelle so there you can start to see how the more complex sales is on sale is unraveling and we've got one quote against this sales lead I could actually go ahead and create another quote so I could create an option to and send that to Michelle with different details on or maybe do a new iteration of this existing quotation and send her another iteration of that but if we go back to the details of this I can perhaps also change the status and say it's now qualified and my percentage likelihood of closing this deal is say 75% it's looking pretty good and I'm expecting to close it sometime towards the end of July and obviously I can then perhaps come back a little bit later on revisit this I can then when I reload it I'll see some of the other notes and conversations that we've had from Michelle I'll be able to move on to the next status assign it to somebody else perhaps obviously I probably wouldn't change the type but I could do that if the type of cell changes but I can maybe move it on to in negotiation so we're now in negotiation with Michelle you you and so you can see the sort of different sales inquiries and if I go to some of the reports you can see all the different outstanding sales inquiries we've got and you can see that we can report on the status of those a weighted value based on how likely they are to close and how big the quote is that we've done or how big the estimated value is before we've done a quote and I can do a lot of different reporting and if you're interested in the reporting we've got some other webinars coming up on reporting and the details of doing pipeline reports and different types of sales analysis so let's just briefly return to our presentation so those are the three different categories of sales pipelines in quotations and in terms of what we've seen in the CRM for the more complex pipelines we've seen much more complex sales pipelines that are fully customizable I kind of ran out of time and didn't get the chance to show you the details of those different setting up the different statuses but it's quite easy to flex those different stages and you can do multiple quotations within one sales pipeline or Sales Lead in the medium complexity where perhaps doing simpler quotation pipelines so we've still got a pipeline we've still got a follow up process but less screens involved less feels to setup and just a quicker process for our sales team to generate it quote fairly quickly set the follow-up and track that for a simple pipeline and for the very simplest sales that we might make we've got fast order entry for the very quickest types of sale where I just want to put my order in confirm the prices over the phone and then confirm that through to my inventory management system or my ERP whatever system I'm using okay thank you very much for your time and attention this morning if you do have any questions you can either ask them now on the panel or you can send us questions afterwards if there's any questions that get asked will I can see there aren't any questions been asked so far in the webinar if there are any more questions who are asked at the end you can feel free to email us and we'll e-mail you back or we'll follow up on any questions that appear on the panel towards the end this webinar I'm if you'd like some more information we've got our YouTube channel and you can just go to sue to YouTube and search for a prospect 365 to find the DS of that channel we've got our prospect Academy and you can also chat to us with our online chat or visit our LinkedIn webinar group to keep up to date with our webinars you can also find all the upcoming webinars at prospects Ofcom forward slash webinars we've got lots more coming up on some related topics to help you manage your sales pipelines and reporting as you take this forward thank you very much for time