Contactless sales needed for industrial products: EY report (Ld)
New Delhi, June 11 (IANS) With social distancing becoming a norm and coronavirus fears likely to stay long after the pandemic subsides, an EY report has suggested that companies should take up contactless sales operations and customer engagement for industrial products.
The report said that contactless sales operations include rethinking the customer journey along with the sales journey including hand offs with other functions and even other organisations.
“While making changes internally may be the first priority, changing business models on working with financiers or contractors or mechanics as the case may be needs a cultural shift on learning to working with ‘partners’ rather than ‘vendors’ and ‘dealers’,” it said.
It also said that the contactless model needs to identify and onboard distributors and dealers up front to actually achieve change. There is a need to map existing fulfilment centres for delivery while the contact centres act as coordination centres for enquiry and deciding on the other commercial agreements, it said.
According to the report, owing to COVID-19, what has now changed is that not just awareness but all aspects of the sales process including negotiation, transaction, channel engagement and internal reviews have started to migrate to digital in the industrial products space. Before COVID-19, organisations had already started to move to digital platforms in the lead generation and customer awareness space, however, relationship management, actual sales closure and sales reviews were still largely done in person
Ashish Nanda, Partner and India Leader- Supply Chain and Operations, EY India, said: “Indian industrial products companies face a multitude of challenges in the ‘now’, ‘next’, and ‘beyond’ phase including limited face-to-face customer engagement activities such as trade fairs, reprioritization of spends from physical engagement mediums, transition of various workstreams onto digital platforms, among others.”
“As companies enter into the next and beyond phase, an integrated platform with a digitally enabled agile sales force will become a critical criterion for not just consumer engagement and sales conversion but also dealer engagement and internal sales team reviews,” he said
Nanda added that this is the right time to take decisions and act on digital initiatives which can truly change existing operating models and therefore, enhance the organisation’s resilience to withstand any future disruption.
According to the report, the trend is now accelerated towards industrial consumerism, with more erstwhile industrial organisations learning from other industries on how to engage with customers digitally, and also how to manage their own operations digitally.
Interestingly, along with being the need of the hour, this will also lead to greater process efficiencies, increased returns and lower costs, said the report, adding that the best organisations will however not just stop there but use the opportunities to rethink their operating models now having digital platforms at the centre.
–IANS
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