The ultimate goal as a chemical manufacturer is to be able to digitize all of your marketing and provide guided selling resources that create the prime product mix, price, and quote for each and every prospect while also properly forecasting future margin and revenue. Making the selling and buying process easier makes it 62 percent more likely you’ll be the one to win the deal with your contract partners or wholesalers. Does your sales cycle operate with that kind of success? If not, chances are you’ve still got a way to go.

For too long chemical manufacturers have relied on ERP systems with overly customized add-ons or macro-intensive spreadsheets to attempt and reach that goal. The problem is that these solutions aren’t built with the customer’s (in this case, the partner or wholesaler’s) experience in mind. In fact, partners or wholesalers end up turning away from buying your compound or aggregate because doing business is simply too complicated. Chemical manufacturers, as a whole, are far away from the dream state with their customer management setups.

To achieve the nirvana-like state of customer management in chemical manufacturing, it takes an immense amount of collaboration between every line of business. In this article, we’ll review four of those lines of business and their priorities as it relates to the customer lifecycle and CRM technology: product marketing, field sales, sales ops/IT, and finance.

Product Marketing

It all starts with a product, in this case, a chemical compound, solution, or aggregate. And your product marketing team is all about improving those products and making them more relevant in the marketplace. Their priorities revolve around anything they can get into future forecasting—they want to hear what’s going on in the field, what the market needs are, and what the competitors are doing.

Adopting a single CRM org will yield tremendous results for the product marketing team because of three words: reports and dashboards. Need we say more? The dynamic reporting functionality in the Salesforce platform makes it easy to…

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