Integrating marketing, CRM, project management, and financial books in the Lead to Cash Process

What is Lead-to-Cash process and why is it important?

Lead-to-cash is a business process that blends numerous systems and automates them to create an efficient and integrated business process. Simply put, it encompasses the company process chain from initial client interaction to order fulfillment, service delivery, and invoicing. From lead generation to cash flow, optimizing your business processes helps to promote better business models and transformations.  It is essentially encompasses and integrates the sales management, delivery management, and revenue booking process of a company.

Customer demands and expectations are shifting, requiring firms to make changes to their processes, technology, and working methods. Businesses frequently struggle to maintain consistency, transparency, and efficiency when it comes to managing databases, technological advancements, and systems that differ between departments. With end-to-end business software solutions like Lead to Cash, combining sales and marketing, operations, accounting and other cores can be quite advantageous.

Purposes of Lead to Cash:

1. It allows your company to track every lead and identify a possible business opportunity with them.
2. It assists your company to secure an order and ensure its fulfilment.
3. It aids your customer to confirm delivery and raise invoice.
4. It helps track receipt and record the customer payments.
5. It successfully improves your end users' or customers' overall experience.

1. Lead to opportunity

Following the identification of new leads who may be interested in your products/services, analytical methods are used to evaluate the lead's potential. Based on the lead score, the lead is qualified, converted into an opportunity and assigned to a salesperson who will manage the potential customer's relationship.  Following are the key activities in this sub-process:

• Lead qualification
• Lead nurturing
• Opportunity confirmation

2. Opportunity to Order

The salesperson evaluates the opportunity and pitches a product/service offering to the prospect.  If the prospect is interested further, the salesperson provides a quote. Negotiations may begin after the quote has been sent, and continue until a final agreement has been achieved. The opportunity becomes a contract when the estimate is accepted, and then the sales order is validated and approved.  The following are are the key steps in this process:

• Solution development and presentation
• Negotiation
• Order booking

3. Order to Cash

The commencement of the project is determined by the placement of an order or signing of a contract, which is followed by activity planning, resource allocation, management of purchase orders of raw material, and the creation of an activity reporting system (timesheet). Throughout the project's execution, it will be important to keep an eye on the margins, the progress of the activities, the adherence to deadlines, and all other events that could result in financial deviations from the budgeted amount, as well as the ability to take appropriate corrective action. After the project is completed, suitable customer care tools will be required to aid and support the customer in order to assure an ever-increasing level of satisfaction, which is a necessary condition for the triggering of new economic opportunities with that client.  Even if the order is booked and is fulfilled, an invoice must be generated.  More importantly, payment from the customer must be received and recorded in the books.  All these steps must be systemized.

The key parts of order-to-cash sub-process are:

• Order processing
• Order fulfillment or delivery
• Invoicing and payment collection

Relevant Zoho apps:

1. Zoho CRM - is a sales CRM software that integrates sales, marketing, and customer service into one platform. It serves as a central hub for all of your sales, marketing, and customer service activities, as well as a platform for streamlining your processes, policies, and personnel.
2. Zoho Campaigns - This is an email marketing software and helps engage with the lead segment using automated email schedules.  Create responsive web pages, customize messages, deliver emails to inboxes, set up automatic workflows, and connect with new customers using Zoho Campaigns.
3. Zoho Projects - is a cloud-based project management software that helps you plan your projects, track work efficiently, and collaborate with your team, wherever they are. It is in outstanding application for project management.
4. Zoho Books - is an end-to-end accounting system that manages money across whole organization for organizations of all sizes. Accounts payable and receivable, time tracking, payroll, transaction management, inventory control, and banking are just a few of the financial activities that the system automates.

How we help?

Sliver Business Services helps startups and scaleups in developing business systems. We typically serve small and medium-sized businesses, groups, and non-profit organizations implement a comprehensive, integrated business suite in alignment with their long-term IT Strategy and enable processes that execute with minimum friction.

At Sliver, we use Zoho applications to achieve the fastest implementation time for a Lead-to-Cash system, which is 50% faster than the industry average. Our full-service consulting and professional services help map out a company's particular implementation requirements, whether it's a small business, an enterprise, or something in between.  We integrate sales, marketing, and product and service departments on one platform improving drastically the customer experience. 

For more information visit us at https://www.sliverusa.com/systems-for-startups.  You can also email us at info@sliverusa.com or call us at +1 331.888.2627.