Identifying unrealized market potential using Robotic Process Automation

Business leaders are well acquainted with RPA and are aware of the several benefits that automation could bring. From cutting down costs to improving customer satisfaction, RPA simplifies business processes and optimizes them. The widespread adoption of RPA is further solidified by Gartner’s prediction, which states that by 2022, 90% of large businesses across the world would have adopted RPA. Gartner also predicted that organizations would triple the capacity of their existing RPA portfolios. Those who do not jump into the RPA bandwagon would lose out on several benefits and one of them being RPA’s ability to help businesses identify and work on their unrealized market potential. What is market potential and how does RPA play a role in realizing it? Let’s take a look.

Exploring Market Potential with RPA

Before we begin with how RPA enables businesses to realize their market potential, let us discuss what market potential is. Market potential is defined as the entire size of the market for a product or service at a specific time, and it is usually measured in terms of sales value or sales volume. Analyzing the marketing potential is often done after careful analysis of the competition, the potential customer base, and the existing environmental conditions. For those businesses that are already aware of the market potential of their products, RPA could be used to automate and expedite their processes. However, for those who are still not aware of their market potential, RPA can help analyze sales reports and detect the market situation. RPA is definitely one of the best tools that can be employed for sales analytics.

Statistics reveal that the average sales reps spend only a little more than a third of their working hours on selling, as the rest of their valuable time is occupied by mundane administrative tasks. By embracing process automation, they can improve their productivity while gaining useful insights that can help them position their products and services better. For example, the SDR bot collects data from leads and can also answer basic questions, thereby allowing the sales representatives to focus on higher-impact work. Similarly, when it comes to sales analytics, RPA, and more specifically ‘Cognitive Automation’ could be employed instead of manually going through sales reports and analyzing them. Cognition automation helps increase business agility by executing large amounts of unstructured data and complex processes. Using cognitive automation, businesses can analyze the sales performance of a product at a specific region and gain access to future sales and cross-selling opportunities and the current attrition risk. This, in turn, would give them an insight into the market potential. RPA thus simplifies the process of manually analyzing sales reports to gauge the market potential by automating the entire process.

Also, RPA helps compare the ROIs in the ongoing initiative with that of those in the pipeline. With a strong RPA strategy, businesses can differentiate profitable initiatives from those that are not and invest in them instead of investing in less profitable ones. Furthermore, invisible silos in the organization whose ongoing processes could be automated could help deliver the unrealized value. However, considering a situation wherein the product/service cost ratio is low, businesses might have to consider diverting their investments towards the new initiatives. Thus RPA helps decision-makers to base their decisions upon information that has been carefully analyzed.

The Bottom Line

As discussed during this blogpost, analyzing extensive amounts of sales data manually requires intense effort. Automated analytics solves this problem by providing businesses with real-time insights. These insights maximize sales opportunities and help businesses to focus on the products/services that exhibit great market potential. In addition to helping businesses identify unrealized market potential, automated analytics also improves productivity, optimizes workloads, improves better client relationships, and enables clear reporting. Any way you slice it, RPA has grown to become a term that is synonymous with business growth!

Source: Aspire Systems

Next: Case Study: Aspire helped a leading content management company