Get over the Winter business blues – Part 2
By Matt Ranger, Head of Sales EMEA
As mentioned in the last blog in this series, the economic outlook in the UK has been pretty grim so far this year. While the latest news predicts an unexpectedly strong performance by the UK services sector in January, which could mean the country narrowly skirts a triple-dip recession, there is certainly no reason for businesses to heave a sigh of relief. Just as the winter weather continues to be gloomy, the economic situation remains worrying and British SMEs need to make every effort to protect and create profits.
My colleague’s previous blog flagged up three ways of achieving this:
- Retain existing customers – by offering excellent service, so your chances of upselling and cross-selling increase and you avoid the cost of acquiring new customers
- Raise business productivity – if you refine your business processes, surely your productivity will increase
- Reduce operating costs – well, if you increase productivity and efficiency, then surely operating costs will decrease naturally.
In this article, I look at goal two: increasing business productivity, especially from my Sales team.
One of the best ways to boost productivity is to make individual employees more efficient. In Sales, if I utilise business tools to streamline operations, I can then free up sales reps to spend more time on activities that generate revenue, like selling!
So how can I, and you, do that? With Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Too many SMEs still have not implemented a dedicated CRM platform that captures, tracks and manages all their customer interactions and other key pieces of information in one central database. An advanced CRM system would cut down the time individual staff spend on admin and repetitive manual tasks, freeing them up to devote more time to acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers; in short, activities that increase revenues and make sure we hit our sales targets.
For many SME’s across the EMEA region, too much customer information sits in file folders, record books, notes and spreadsheets. As a result, salespeople and service reps find themselves either spending too much time looking for information or attending a sales meeting or responding to a service call without the information they require, leading to missed revenue opportunities and, as identified in part one of this blog, unhappy customers who are likely to move to your competitor!
In addition, as Head of Sales, there is only one thing as frustrating as missing a sales opportunity and that is the lack of visibility of my pipeline. So I weigh up the pros and cons, do I want my sales representatives spending hours each week preparing pipeline reports or out on the road closing deals. And then for me personally, where do I focus my time, on collating and summarising the information and reports provided by the sales reps or managing our key account customers and ensuring they are happy and satisfied.
Luckily I have access to Sales Force Automation, a key component of any good CRM platform and this cuts-out a lot of this unproductive and often redundant work and frees up my sales people to spend more time talking to customers, while I can still gain a comprehensive view of my pipeline through customised dashboards. And as the dashboards are in ‘real-time’, I can make strategy adjustments and respond to key customers instantly – even on the move on my iPad!
Plus, it’s not just myself and my team that can benefit from a well-designed CRM system. A similar range of functions can help service teams to be more responsive and marketers to easily segment and profile customers for more accurate personalised communications (which hopefully will provide my team with quality leads). All of this means less wasted time and resource, resulting in higher productivity across all departments, not just sales, for any organisation. And when economic times are tough, maximizing productivity is essential!
