Michael Scofield's miraculous escape in the TV series Prison Break wouldn’t have been possible without his friends. Similarly, a manufacturing firm cannot scale up without aligned sales and production teams.

A gap between them results in inefficient resource utilization, inaccurate forecasting, rising operational costs, and loss of competitive advantage.

And it’s the RevOps and its functional model that plays the unifying role by syncing them with the organizational goals, tearing down technology silos, and streamlining workflows. 

What causes sales-production disconnect in manufacturing

Production-sales forecast mismatch

A study conducted by Gartner revealed that only 45% of sales leaders have confidence in their forecast accuracy. 📢

Thus, what your sales team deems feasible to achieve may not be in line with production team deliverables and vice versa. This can result in resource strain, declining cost, and time efficiencies.

The reasons for this could be, inaccurate data analysis, communication gaps, market-related changes, and rigid strategizing.

Disjointed workflows

Workflows help your company to enhance efficiency, manage risks, share responsibilities, and foster innovation.

However, undefined roles and responsibilities, overly complex processes, lack of training, misaligned goals, and mutual agreements can result in siloed operations.

Technology gaps and data Silos

The sales team leverages marketing automation, CRM, and sales enablement to manage and close deals. Some popular tools used are Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach, etc.

Likewise, the production team depends on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) Tools, and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). They make use of Oracle NetSuite, SAP, Rockwell Automation, etc.

This mismatch in the tech stack used to achieve respective departmental goals can result in technology gaps and data silos.

Operational inefficiencies

Let’s say your sales team’s communication about demand generation is inaccurate or unclear. This can easily result in increased lead time, inefficient use of technology, inadequate scheduling, overproduction, and high holding costs.

Lack of unified Strategy

The two departments have different metrics to quantify their successes. What does it mean?

While the sales team prioritizes customer satisfaction and quick fulfillment of demands, the production folks care more about efficiency and cost reduction. This hampers cross-functional synergy, leading to reactive decision-making, irregular updates, differences in priorities, and employee frustration.

Role of RevOps in Manufacturing for aligning Sales & Production

RevOps can help you bridge the gap between sales and production by bringing together people, processes, systems, and data to generate revenue.

Here are some ways how it can be accomplished:

Collaborative forecasting

Forecasting should not be a one-way traffic, rather all stakeholders should be involved. Apart from the sales team, the production, marketing, and supply chain teams should be involved as well for reliable consensus-based forecasting.

As far as sales forecasting goes, Gartner recommends that the sales operations leaders must not be confined to merely publishing regular forecasts, rather they must track and communicate accuracy over time. A periodic roll-up of the forecasts compared to their actual totals is the way to go.

Machine learning, data mining, and predictive analytics should be used for accurate forecasting. And with reliable forecasts, your lead management improves as well. For instance, you can leverage predictive analytics with Pardot for improved conversions.

Lastly, if you are still using spreadsheets, then use CRM platforms instead for forecasting. As per Salesforce, sales forecasting has far better accuracy when you use a CRM instead of a spreadsheet.

Using KPIs to revamp strategy

The sales team should do a proper analysis of metrics like lead response time, acquisition cost, sales cycle length, average deal size, etc. to set a benchmark for the production team.

Similarly, the production team should communicate about their capacity and constraints through an analysis of the inventory turnover ratio, labor efficiency, on-time delivery rate, lead time, etc.

Joint analysis with a customer-centric approach and feedback loops must be done to stay on the same page.

Here’s a useful resource for a better understanding of KPIs and improving your strategy making.

Kanad & Shreyansh on AI in RevOps, key KPIs, and insights for a better strategy.

Leveraging technology

As you saw earlier, the data and technology silos can arise as the two teams use different tech stacks for their respective tasks. 

To address this issue, project management tools like ClickUp, Trello, and Jira should be used to give both teams clarity regarding, goals, deadlines, production levels, etc.

source: ClickUp

Tools like Tableau & Power BI can create shared dashboards to break data silos.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) should be harnessed to make the employees aware of the cross-functional roles and responsibilities.

Collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams can be used for real-time communication.

A centralized data repository must be created using Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, DocuWare, and SharePoint for better resource management.

Source: ZoomInfo

Supporting scalable operations

For scalable operations, a holistic approach should be followed to unite technology, processes, employees, and strategizing. Here, the role of RevOps increases multifold. After all, it’s all about unifying departments and ensuring that the decisions taken by them individually will support the broader organizational goals.

However, one challenge could be convincing the top leadership to adopt RevOps. For this, pilot projects should be conducted to showcase their tangible benefits.

It facilitates a clearer picture of the customer journey to cross-functional teams and breaks down complex sales and production cycles to find common ground at various touch points.

Salesforce recommends merging your sales forecasting, CRM tools, and product catalog into a single platform integrated with your ERP system for a customer-centric approach.

Furthermore, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) can be leveraged to reduce variability in procedures, figure out operational inefficiencies, and streamline workflows.

Syncing RevOps with interdepartmental goals

Develop integrated performance metrics for sales and production to sync RevOps with interdepartmental goals. 

As a collaborative technology solution, CRM integration can be utilized to break the silos. For instance, it will enable the sales team to provide accurate delivery estimates after gauging through real-time production data. 

Similarly, the customer service team will be able to assess customer data to figure out product preferences and deliver customized products by bringing the sales and production teams together.

Cross-functional teams from the two departments should have common representatives to facilitate collaboration and mutual accountability. Training sessions can be conducted to impart the best RevOps practices for achieving common goals.

Involving stakeholders

A communication gap, lack of accountability, and transparency are inevitable if the stakeholders are undermined. Thus the cross-functional team should have joint planning, training, and workshop sessions.

The shared KPIs should reflect the interests of both departments and must be based on a combination of sales team promises and production team reality.

A feedback loop should be incorporated for expressing and resolving roadblocks. For instance, the sales team can provide inputs based on their interaction with prospects. Similarly, the production team can convey their constraints.

Last but not least, it's important to enjoy each other’s success. Strategies, KPIs, and tech stacks can help only when there’s empathy in the work culture.

It's a wrap

Sales and production are like siblings 🥊🥊 who aren’t always on the same page. This can be counter-productive for your organizational goals and work culture. Thus the role of RevOps in manufacturing to align sales & production becomes pivotal.

This is exactly where our RevOps experts will step in to harmonize both departments’ KPIs, data, technologies, workflows, etc, to enhance your operational efficiency for scalability.