At what point do you really focus your resources on your customer ? Do you devote countless hours and investments on the point up until they place an order ? Or do you look at the process differently, and think about a customer’s contribution to your order and sold pipeline in a unique way?
One of the things you can do to reconsider how your business works and how you optimize your processes is to think about one of the crucial setups of your business as a whole – the order to cash process. Reconsidering that process and figuring out ways to use technology to streamline and maximize it can be a way to really push your business to the next level of success. But in order to get there, you have to make sure you understand what we’re talking about.
Order to cash basically is taking what happens at the moment a customer places an order, and understanding the activity and the data that happens at this point. Of course, there’s a nod to all the work that goes into the process before this order placement even happens – there is sales and marketing, among others. But this order to cash process looks at the point of the sale and then takes it beyond that. As you analyze all the points along the order to cash process, you then are able to really dig deep and figure out if there are things that are ‘sticking’ points along the way, or if there are efficiencies that you aren’t taking advantage of. And one of the key ways to improve all those processes, of course, is by using technology.
The order to cash process can be analyzed in terms of eight key steps, and what happens at those steps. Ready to learn more ? This graphic can help.
Further details can be found here. Do leave your learnings in the comments section…
Note – Infographic added with the author’s consent