Thinking

Improving your L2C process

Written by Matt Cheung | March 07 2016

Lead to Cash (L2C) is a core process that every organisation needs to excel at. Providing your customers with a high quality experience that is able to generate revenue is a critical success factor.

If your organisation has multiple departments and you sell a wide range of products, sales processes can be extremely varied. It can be difficult to decipher what mechanisms of your processes working well, and those that aren’t.

Clarasys specialise in making the lead to cash process as seamless as possible. Our proven approach to L2C analysis ensures we maximise your sales effectiveness by promoting best internal practice.

Review Your Company Vision

We know that every business requires a unique approach. That’s why our first step is to fully understand what your company vision is. Effectiveness of sales can only be measured against what it is you are trying to achieve. For example, if you are trying to diversify your customer base from UK SMEs to Global FTSE 250, your sales focus will be on acquisition rather than upselling or cross-selling. Your sales approach will need to be adaptable to overcome any potential cultural barriers if you sell to different locations.

Understand Your Products

What is it you are trying to sell? Each product is different and will require an individual approach dependent on what you are trying to sell and to whom. It’s a common misconception that best practice naturally means to standardise everything. We will look to understand your internal processes and identify conventions where possible to help us define best practice.

Picture a stationery company. They will have numerous sales processes for their product range. For repeat purchase or low value items, such as paper or pens, they will have a sales process that’s totally different when selling a printer. We will recognise and harness best practice that allows your Sales Team to perform as effectively as possible.

Formal and Informal Process Analysis

Accurate and realistic processes are critical factors of selling effectively. By working closely with your internal stakeholders we can understand their day-to-day issues and what they believe the causes may be. Following this we will review the complete end-to-end marketing, sales and billing process to assess the capabilities of your current process.

System Assessment

Regardless of the situation, rekeying information or having a duplicate records is not good practice. We’ll assess your system capabilities to see how they can positively impact your sales process going forward. Consolidating product sales conducted from multiple systems into

just one is a significant opportunity to improve the efficiency of your sales process.

Defining Your Best Practice

At this stage, we need you! We’ll present our findings, the things you do well and areas for improvement. We’ll co-ordinate appropriate sessions to help define what best practice looks like so that together we can leverage both system and process capabilities to sell effectively.

Best practice should never be defined externally. What works for one company will not work for another, as all organisations are unique. We use our experience to help shape the sort of things that have worked in similar situations, but we’ll never ‘force’ a best practice template upon your business.

Develop Roadmap

Upon defining what best practice looks like for your organisation, we’ll prioritise the issues we have identified and create a coherent plan for resolving them:

  • The effort required to complete it
  • The value it will produce
  • The problems caused by not completing it
  • Any dependent activities that will be affected, either for better or for worse

We insist that you’re heavily involved throughout the roadmap development as it’s crucial you have ownership going forwards. We provide you with the tools to tackle any issues but ultimately we want to have the knowledge and be self-sufficient.