There was a point in the past when sales was based almost entirely on personal relationships, but as time goes on that era fades into memory.  Don’t get me wrong, personal connection is a powerful dynamic in commerce, but as businesses grow and change, evolving in scale and scope, that type of customer acquisition can become almost impossible.  For this reason, experts from a wide array of fields ranging from data science to software engineering have brought their talents to bear on the age-old challenge businesses have always and will always face; how do they consistently acquire new customers.  Sales may seem at a glance like a field of soft skills and intuition, but in reality, it can be simplified and broken down into a practice of logistics like just about anything else in the business.  Sales processes vary quite drastically depending on the area of commerce and the size and notoriety of the business, but one characteristic is shared among them all; converted sales start with good leads.  The modern sales process, regardless of field, is generally built around the development of viable leads with high conversion rates, so the application of logistical processes such as categorization and analysis lend themselves very well to optimizing the process.  Whether you sell software-as-a-service or physical merchandise, applying a logistical approach will almost certainly benefit your sales force and increase your sales numbers.  When business processes benefit from a logistical, quantitative approach, it’s safe to assume there is a tool somewhere out there to facilitate the process, and that rings true for sales as well.  In this article, I’ll be introducing the application of business logistics solutions to sales and customer service processes.  In the future, I’ll be doing some in-depth pieces on the various tools available, but for now, let’s keep it simple with an overview.  

Around the turn of the century as business along with just about everything else became digitized, Microsoft saw an opening in the business world.  The internet had at the time revolutionized the way that we connected, but there were no real easily applicable solutions for private or closed networks.  To fill that gap, Microsoft developed and released Sharepoint.  Microsoft Sharepoint is a software that enables its users to create, administrate, and use custom intranet and cloud structures with relative ease.  These networks allow institution members to share and access information relevant to their work efficiently.  Sharepoint boasts a few major benefits over other network solutions, the first of which is its powerful scalability.  Whether your institution is a 20 employee strong small business or a ten-thousand strong multinational corporation, Sharepoint can rather easily be scaled to fit your exact needs.  Another major benefit of Sharepoint is that it synergizes and connects seamlessly with the rest of Microsoft’s business solutions (such as Office 365 and MS teams) which have become the industry standard in professional business software.

 Sharepoint can be used as a tool to maximize the effectiveness of your sales force through its ability to aggregate information and connect employees’ efforts to one central hub, and Infowise has come up with a few solutions to improve its capabilities even further through our Ultimate Forms Sharepoint expansion.  Ultimate Forms is a solution that adds completely customizable and integrated forms that allow various kinds of information to be entered and shared within the Sharepoint network.  These forms bring a higher level of usability to Sharepoint, allowing your team to create forms for use cases specific to your business.  For example, your sales team could easily make a form to track the origin of leads based on a survey administered to customers after checkout, or a form to track customer holdouts and reasons why sales aren’t being converted at close.  This ability to apply customizable and easy-to-use forms makes Sharepoint an effective tool for not only sales but just about all other facets of business as well.  From HR to Accounting, Ultimate Forms transforms the already incredibly useful Sharepoint into a complete top to bottom business solution.  I urge you to check out some of our many webinars on Ultimate Forms or to give the software a try using the many live demos available on the site.  In the near future I’ll do an in-depth breakdown on Ultimate Forms and sales, including the integration of salesforce with our software, but until then if you have any questions, I welcome you to reach out to us here at Infowise. 

Until next time.