Sales control may seem simple, but its impact demonstrates its importance for business. After all, it provides data and insights that guide decisions crucial to the company's success.
Everything from purchasing supplies and monitoring inventory to marketing repositioning is an example of what's involved. Therefore, it's easy to understand how much attention is needed to ensure business competitiveness.
Given this context, this content presents the key points for understanding the concept of sales control and applying it accurately in practice. Check out the best tips and much more!
Sales control is the process of recording and monitoring a company's commercial transactions. It works through spreadsheets, software, or integrated systems that automate the strategic management of orders, inventory, and revenue. Its goal is to organize sales, avoid errors, optimize performance, and increase business profitability.
One example is issuing an invoice to the buyer, as it serves to prove the transaction, write off the stock of what was sold, justify the financial transaction, and collect and record taxes.
More than that, it's useful in management because it provides access to data that allows us to envision future possibilities based on what has already happened. Consequently, it positions itself as a measure that allows for more informed decision-making, increasing the likelihood of success and competitive advantage.
In addition to the operational impact — on purchases, fulfillment of accounting, fiscal and tax obligations, etc. —, maintaining control of sales accurate is important to improve business performance and optimize decision-making.
This is because their interconnected activities favor the strategy. One example is pricing, which depends on good purchase negotiations while also considering taxes and other factors. costs to determine the final value. In this sense, everything starts by measuring what was sold based on the historical data.
Furthermore, budgetary and financial oversight becomes more accurate, with all transactions providing a complete picture of the flow of inflows, outflows, payments, and other movements. This makes it possible to identify ways to reduce expenses or identify corporate opportunities.
The human aspect also benefits, as the consumer journey and service can be personalized, increasing customer satisfaction while expanding results.
Implementing a well-organized, functional, agile, and accurate sales control process requires a few steps. See below!
To perform sales control, you need to understand the process well. Therefore, the first step is to map the flow, identifying each phase and aligning them with the corresponding stage of the customer journey.
It's important to understand that this is an organizational exercise in which marketing, sales, logistics, operations, and finance must all be involved to ensure this flowchart is complete. After all, all of these areas are present from the moment the consumer becomes aware of the brand to the moment they receive the product.
From there, it's time to define how to proceed using a descriptive checklist. The idea is to create a standard to optimize actions for agility and quality. More than just the main activities, it's important to address the tasks that need to be recorded and monitored in a single procedural guide.
For the established procedural standard to flow smoothly, resources and resources must be organized, facilitating sales control. This starts with categorizing your business's products so that records can be kept in an orderly fashion.
In practice, this involves adopting a structure in which each item is assigned to a group by similarity and individualizing the registration through codes, following the system indicated by tax legislation.
Recording and controlling processes is an important step in achieving proper sales control. Spreadsheets can be used in small businesses to monitor sales. stocks, for example, they do not allow integration with tax systems.
In this case, ERPs are ideal because they cover all the activities necessary to manage commercial transactions, from sending a quote to the interested party to delivery and settlement of payments.
The consumer journey has much to gain from using a CRM that automates marketing actions and connects contact channels, creating a complete technological framework. This solution focuses on relationships, working with the management so that all information is collected.
The use of management tools, such as ERPs and CRMs, is indicative of something important: the importance of integrating information for proper sales control. This is because such a measure depends on the correlation of these elements to deliver a complete history.
However, accuracy is only possible if all data and movements are recorded. This ensures team performance is prioritized to ensure the procedure is carried out correctly. One tip is to address the positive effects of this step during employee training.
KPIs — Key Performance Indicators — are very useful for measuring results and understanding the development of commercial activities.
Therefore, adequate sales control depends on its use. In reports, metrics such as conversion rate, average ticket, and inventory turnover are essential data for making business decisions.
Sales control is a crucial activity for a company's successful management. Besides serving as a source of relevant information for management, this measure allows for the development of better customer service strategies, boosting results that allow the business to grow.
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