Too often automotive suppliers consider Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Planning at opposite ends of their Sales spectrum. It is all too easy to categorise CRM as a customer, outfacing activity and consider Sales Planning as an administrative, internal task. However, this is a simplified, legacy-tainted view that ignores the transformation possible with digital tools and a new, efficient way of working.

CRM is often discounted by Sales teams at automotive component manufacturers who question the need of a “relationship database” in an industry with well-established customers and customer relations.

However, state-of-the-art CRM platforms are so much more. A digital Sales Management solution built on a CRM platform gives you complete visibility into all activities with your customers (customer 360), allows you to identify new market opportunities, plan and track your new business acquisitions and manage all aspects of the commercial performance of your customer contracts. It becomes your single source of truth for all global customer interactions and data, available in real-time, anytime, anywhere.

Sales Planning for many automotive suppliers has developed into such an ugly monster that they cannot imagine a way to escape. The complexity of global automotive business is only increasing and the efforts to find, maintain, check and iterate planning information are too huge for a once-per-year activity. Organisations that try to digitalise without fundamentally re-thinking the process also are doomed to failure.

A digital Sales Management solution already delivers the complete transparency into your Sales pipeline and the forecasting of your running business. As Sales teams efficiently work in the solution on a daily basis, tracking their customer interactions, collaborating on their new business opportunities, managing their contracted business, updating their pricing … they inherently produce a continuously updated, real-time Sales Plan that is available 24/7, 365 days per year.

Xotigo has developed an industry best-practice approach to digitally transform automotive supplier Sales processes. Built on the no.1 CRM platform, Salesforce®, the Xotigo Sales Management suite is a single solution to cover the complete Sales lifecycle – delivering true customer 360 with the full power of Sales Planning in all dimensions.