Generative AI for sales: The power and the potential
Generative AI for sales promises to revolutionize B2B sales by accelerating and fine-tuning customer engagement for better outcomes.
The globalization of the supply chain, race to electrification, and the need to balance cost efficiency with high-quality products is changing the way automotive suppliers sell to and engage with their customers. These trends are bringing major changes to automotive supplier sales.
For years, achieving sales excellence meant developing deep, strategic relationships with one or two OEMs while managing the “design to engineer” process from start to finish. Managing these relationships effectively and navigating these complex sales processes for internal combustion engines (ICE) depends on collaboration and a deep understanding of your customers.
Today, achieving sales excellence requires that sales reps continue managing those strategic relationships along with new relationships and processes related to electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing.
Plus, automotive suppliers need to become even more efficient to reduce the cost of sales. The execution of an efficient end-to-end customer journey, from RFP to order delivery and program management, that delivers on promises made to ICE and EV divisions is critical to growing a loyal, profitable customer base.
The quest for a seamless customer journey
Becoming a strategic partner to automakers today requires suppliers to optimize the end-to-end customer journey. This means being efficient, proactive, and effective at delivering against customer expectations at each step.
- Proposal stage: Foster collaboration between research & development, manufacturing, quality, and sales to respond to an RFP quickly and accurately based on appropriate terms and conditions.
- Program planning and development: Ensure schedule and forecast are kept up to date, supply status and specifications are communicated to OEMs, and adjustments and/or updates are proactively communicated to key stakeholders and dealt with.
- Project management and reporting: Manage the profitability of the project by ensuring supply meets customer demand, costs are monitored, and sales targets hit. Proactively communicate (both internally and to customers) on program progress, KPIs, and milestones.
Creating this seamless customer journey isn’t easy. Disparate data and processes, combined with siloed teams working in different systems make it hard for various internal stakeholders to collaborate.
Moreover, without visibility into a single view of customer, sales, and supply chain data, automotive suppliers are forced to react to changing customer and market needs, causing delays and increasing the potential for oversights that impact customer experience.
4 keys to automotive supplier sales success
To overcome these challenges and map a path forward to becoming a proactive, trusted partner to customers, automotive suppliers should embrace the following key strategies.
1. Integrate business processes to streamline sales
Sales processes require collaboration and inputs from various functions across the enterprise. To improve efficiency and equip the sales team with the right information at the right time, sales processes and technologies should be integrated with other business processes — from invoicing and pricing to supply chain.
An integrated approach provides automotive suppliers with a holistic, contextual view of their customers and access to the right data at the right time to make the best decisions. This helps sales improve forecasting accuracy, maximize demand, and better deliver against their customer’s expectations.
2. Drive meaningful customer interactions with 360-degree visibility
By taking an integrated approach, automotive suppliers have an opportunity to uncover both back- and front-office customer insights to enrich all touchpoints of the customer journey. With a clear understanding of account history, who within the account has engaged when, and critical account KPIs, sales can improve buyer interactions and drive advocacy with meaningful engagement throughout the customer journey.
3. Enable cross-functional collaboration for more competitive RFPs
The issuance of an RFP is typically the first stage of the sales process. RFP response teams span sales, R&D, manufacturing, and quality and require each group work closely together to construct a competitive bid. Automotive suppliers need to enable these groups with collaboration tools that create a holistic understanding of the prospect and the data needed to inform the proposal response.
Breaking down barriers created by siloed systems enables the response team to deliver these bids more efficiently and effectively.
4. Focus on high-value activities
Organizations should reduce time spent on manual, low-value activities by automating these tasks throughout the automotive supplier sales process and leveraging generative AI to surface value information at the right moment.
For example, automatically embedding key customer information within opportunity details and surfacing this information at the right time can boost sales efficiency and effectiveness. Automotive suppliers who embrace opportunities to leverage automation and AI will help their teams be more strategic with their time, lower the cost of sales, and deliver better CX.
Supplier sales for today’s automotive industry
The new era of automotive means suppliers need to be more effective at every step of the sales process, while also reducing the cost to deliver these experiences. Integrated business processes and data is the foundation to achieving sales excellence.
By building on this integrated foundation with collaboration tools, sales automation, and access to deep customer insights at the right time, automotive suppliers are set up for a successful, efficient sales process that results in profitable business and loyal customers.
