Insights for Running Better Business

Modern businesses depend on constant coordination between teams, customers, projects, communications, and operational processes.

As organizations grow, managing these moving parts manually becomes increasingly difficult. Information becomes fragmented, tasks get delayed, communication gaps appear, and operational inefficiencies begin to impact both productivity and customer experience.

Workflow automation helps businesses reduce this operational friction by connecting processes, improving visibility, and streamlining day-to-day activities across the organization.

Without a formalized Sales Process in place, sales reps are left to their instincts, supported by what worked for them in the past. Each sales rep follows their own steps, and gradually tweaks as required. When things go smoothly this works fine, however when things don’t, issues can arise. This also isn’t very effective when considering bringing new sales team members on board and getting them up and running in a timely manner.

When a business wants to grow it needs to be able to scale up: find more leads, support more customers, and onboard new employees. Trying to grow without being prepared to do so can be a one-step-forward-two-steps-back mistake.

One of the keys to being able to scale up is the Sales Process, yet many business never take the time to map and strategize around it.

When a business starts and it only has a few customers it’s simple enough to rely on your memory, your inbox, and handwritten notes to keep track of any progress you are having with your leads or customers. As the business grows so does the need to keep any update organized and easy to find. 

In the first part of this series, we went over how to set up a company up to intake data, and then actually executing it. But now that all this data is coming in, what can be done with it?Living in the world of Big Data means there’s more information that can be looked up in a lifetime on almost any topic, and customers are no exception.

Are you still guessing where your sales process is? If you do, stay put as help is on the way! By and large, over the years sales, analytical features in business software were predominantly available only to larger companies as part of rather expensive, enterprise level, solutions so, by de facto, out of reach for smaller and medium companies.

We supposedly live in the era of Big Data, yet businesses everywhere aren’t able to get the most out of the data they have to improve their customer relations or make better-informed marketing decisions. That could be because there is too much data which hasn’t been organized properly, irrelevant data that doesn’t translate into results, or the results take too long to formulate due to a lack of automation.

SMBs are evolving and they’re looking to technology to improve efficiency and to supplement their core competitive advantages. The global labor market is rapidly changing with remote work becoming the new normal, a process that was further accelerated by the global effect of COVID-19, and it is driving businesses towards adoption of new digital technologies.

In Part 1, we discussed tips for remote employees to become more efficient. But all of those efforts can be lost if the company and the management team aren’t adapting together and putting everyone in a position to succeed.