Why Business Automation?
By now, you should be familiar with the basic sales process. To recap, the basic sales process:
- A good salesperson identifies leads (or marketing supplies leads) and “works” them. Typically “working” is contacting via phone, email, social interaction, in-person or all of these. Consistently working many leads through this process can literally mean hundreds, if not thousands, of individual activities.
- Once a lead becomes a potential deal, or what’s called an “opportunity” (you’ve discovered they’re interested and you may be the right fit for their needs), then working this opportunity becomes another process, to which there are many stages.
- The opportunity is guided through the sales pipeline, and ultimately ends with “closing the deal”. Following this is account maintenance, which involves encouraging repeat purchases via after sales services or marketing activities.
Your time is better spent growing your business, rather than managing your business!
Once a business starts selling or even prospecting, you need to track who you met (leads) and what happened in the meeting. You need to plan what to do next and when to follow up. Having all this information in a place that you can access from anywhere and anytime helps you to plan and make better decisions. It also enables easy sharing among your colleagues and encourages collaboration, which is especially important among sales teams.
Once a lead turns into a customer, you will likely need to give them a quotation, and if that goes through you need to bill them. Keeping track of all the quotes and bills is not that easy, especially if your business starts growing rapidly. It is easy to lose track and control if you are only working with memory, paperwork and Excel spreadsheets.
Here’s a scenario for you:
Your company sells and services electrical systems. You have 100 customers. They all need to be billed every month on different dates. You also provide customer support, getting around 10 complaints every day. Each complaint has different people working on solutions, from fixing to testing.
You also need to field phone calls from customers asking after the status of their issue. During the call, you’re trying to figure out if this customer’s contract is still valid, whether they are entitled to service. Even worse, you might not be able to find out if this person is even a customer of yours.
Besides this, there are many other things that you need to keep track of, like when is the warranty expiring for each customer, sending alerts on payment due, goods delivered, managing appointments and reminders, assigning tasks to team members, generating various reports, and so on…
If you are doing this day in and day out, when will you find the time to grow your business?
This is what a Business Automation Solution like Second CRM is for.
A properly implemented Business Automation Solution can provide a wide range of automated sales, marketing, customer support and backend operation features. These not only free employees from routine tasks, but also provide valuable information that helps target the customers who drive the most profits.
When do you start planning to implement Business Automation?
For a business with just a few employees, a single-user desktop application – such as MS Excel or Outlook – may be all that’s needed to keep track of your business. But there comes a point in an organization’s development when sharing business information across teams or departments makes more sense strategically and also offers greater efficiency as your customer base expands.
Though there is no fixed rule, but we’ve repeatedly seen that the magic number for any company is somewhere between 6-9 employees. That’s the time when business operations start getting more complex. This is the point where a lack of internal processes and inefficient manual activities tends to hurt business growth.
With a good Business Automation Solution, you can spend less time managing your business and more time growing and making it profitable.
We would love to hear from you.