It seems quite simple but in practice, the whole process is time-consuming and typically not transparent. Finding the right product in the catalog, email exchange, offer creating, takes hours or sometimes days of work. Nevertheless, many companies still used this approach and it might work well, but only with a limited customer base and on very complex product range – typically custom made. Standardized products, or standardized configuration process allows to automate it in more than 80%.
If the company have 5-10 regular requests, the sales managers can spend several hours working with them, and the rest of the time to look for new customers. What if we are talking about 100-200 regular requests (not orders) weekly? With a bigger customer database, sales manager will no longer be able to work effectively and many of customer might wait days to receive an answer, and most of the time will be spent on processing all request. This begs the natural question of how much time manager will spend on finding new clients?
Time-consuming process is not only on the company’s side, but also on the customers. Very often, they must spend a lot of time collecting the information to find the right product from catalogs, calculate price and coordinate them by emails or phone. Furthermore, experiencing difficulties they may choose another vendor, thereby losing the loyalty.