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As technology systems become more and more integrated, it may be time to review exactly what your current technology is doing for you rather than what it can do for technology sales teams.
We have a saying, “if it’s not making you money, it should be called furniture!” This means that any item of capital equipment must be critical to generating revenue for your business. This should be the only prerequisite for acquiring new technology.
Most people know the old adage that “time is money”, but the reasons for upgrading your technology must be based on sound principles and you may want to perform the following exercise before making any decisions:
- Set your current costs as low as possible
- Identify the business focus for the next fiscal year (Business Plan)
- Make sure your marketing plan is in place
- Seek to invest in the necessary technology to achieve your sales objectives as specified in your Business Plan.
Current Costs
Securing a budget for a given department or business plan can be a much sweeter “pill to swallow” if you’ve been able to save costs in other areas. Before you begin any changes, it’s a good idea to make sure your existing costs are minimal. Identifying savings on your phone bill, for example, should be a relatively easy exercise.
However, regardless of the size of the business or the financing required, any required expense must be justified, not only in terms of whether you can afford it, but also in terms of the additional financial reward to be gained.
Business plan
The attempt to secure a larger market share cannot be achieved without a solid business plan. If you determine what you want to achieve, the acquisition of new technology will be much easier and more logical.
Marketing plan
In order to achieve the goals set out in your business plan, you must have a method of getting your message across to prospective customers. The tools required to carry out your marketing plan should be the focus of your budget prioritization.
There’s no point in replacing a server if you intend to spend the next twelve months growing a telesales campaign or recruiting new salespeople.
To start from scratch, your marketing activities will likely consist of the following:
- Email marketing and newsletters
- Flyers, brochures and advertising
- Website development (ensuring customer attraction)
- Structured and consistent public relations
The above activities will/should be focused on current and potential customers you have registered.
technology budget
To efficiently manage your marketing activities, a CRM database must be used as GoldMine, Salesforce, Act! etc. They’re not just address books; These packages can help you structure your business processes so you can standardize repetitive tasks like sending letters and automating tasks for new clients. For example, if you have a process where a series of documents are sent to a new prospect over a period of time, CRM packages can automate these tasks, freeing up marketing and sales departments to focus on servicing to new customers, while technology can take care of “donkey work”.
CRM implementation may mean you need to review your server and/or some of its work stations. Depending on how your workforce is deployed, for example in the field, you may need to consider a CRM solution that can operate over the Internet (for example, in any browser at an Internet cafe) so that your team can also access information through your laptops, wirelessly Therefore, you may need to consider upgrading to allow wireless access to your internal network and external access to WiFi hotspots, depending on how you want to structure access to your CRM software.
As for laptops and remote workers, if your business model allows team members to work from home or away from the office, they can stay connected through VoIP. This means that phone calls from your office phone system can be transferred over the Internet to extensions connected to the laptop/PC.
According to Cisco, working from home can deliver efficiency gains of at least 20 percent for small businesses; however, the main concern of a homeworker is to remain part of the team. That’s where VoIP comes in, as each remote worker’s laptop or home PC can be configured as an extension of the main office phone system. As long as they are connected to the Internet, they can connect, as a live extension, as if they were sitting at a desk in the office. This means that all incoming and outgoing calls are routed through the company’s call provider and, as with internal extension-to-extension calls, are free.
Using the same broadband connection, the ability to use video conference technology It will also benefit companies, as employees can interact with colleagues or clients “face to face”. Video conferencing users have increased 200% since 2005 and with prices starting from as little as £50.00 for a webcam, entry level costs are minimal.
Depending on the sophistication of your telephone system, you may already have the ability to connect to a CRM database over your network, which makes dialing customers with a click of the mouse simple (check with your current provider/maintainer). That is computer telephony integration (or CTI) and uses a common program called TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface). These two items, while inexpensive, can pave the way for integrating your entire communications infrastructure.
Once your salespeople are on the phone, the next phase is to make sure they’re really giving their prospects the right information and presenting your business in their preferred format.
call recording it is one of the most effective tools available. Consider this; all members of staff involved in any form of telephone contact with the customer can be recorded and evaluated.
This has three distinct advantages. First, you can train each member of staff in handling customer contact, and second, each member of staff can hear how they sound and can be helped to understand specific areas for improvement. The third advantage is dispute resolution. As all your calls are recorded, customer inquiries or complaints can be handled easily and efficiently for everyone’s benefit.
Raising the bar! Now that you have your team(s) working efficiently over the phone, the next process to establish is how many phone calls each salesperson is making. With automated progressive dialing; wasted time can be eliminated by organizing data, creating call lists, skipping records, etc. Valuable time is maximized by making calls. Calls are automatically assigned to users and management information about their performance is provided. These software packages work best in conjunction with CRM databases and can be purchased by a single user rather than by site. If you only have a few high phone users, you can budget accordingly.
Depending on your market, if heavy mobile phone users are part of your business demographic, then a simple software package and GSM modem can provide your business with SMS text messaging from your desktop PC. Uses for this marketing medium are popping up all the time, for example the local restaurant with a promotion or real estate agents promoting new directions. The scope is as wide as your imagination.
Now that your business is up and running and your sales teams are firing on all cylinders, now there’s the question of how many calls you’re getting for customer support and new business inquiries.
If you begin to view your activities in terms of “flow” of communications, marketing and sales create an increase in outflow that has a balancing inflow. This simply needs to be handled.
While the description contact center conjures up visions of queues of staff wearing headsets, the reality is that we all run a contact center of one sort or another. The difference is how we handle it. Depending on the volume, the simplest structure is to ensure that the staff answering the calls can handle inquiries quickly and efficiently. This will involve structuring call groups and skill-based routing (making sure people capable of handling queries do exactly that!) A variety of features are available ranging from detailed information displayed on users’ PCs to reports indicating the phone numbers of missed calls that have not been returned.
The scale of contact center work depends on the importance of the calls you need to handle and not necessarily the number.
As your customer attraction activities increase, there is now an additional facility that can be extremely beneficial to both customers and businesses called webchat. This functionality allows customers, when they visit your website, to post a query message, just like MSN. You can communicate online or the browser may ask you to call back.
In addition to web chat, Email Management It is increasingly popular, that is, emails that have been directed to a general mailbox, to be handled by a group of people in a similar way to receiving a phone call addressed to a hunt group. This means each staff member handles a fair share of emails.
To bring these facilities together into a single process, Contact Center software can funnel all of the above activities into a single solution, combining phone calls, web chat, and email to create your inbound communications flow handled by your designated team of staff.
The key to prioritizing your budget for the new fiscal year is to only spend money on items that will make money so you can benefit from technology.
Some interesting statistics:
Voice recording and evaluation software
- Maximize the return on investment in productivity and staff training 100%+
Integrated CRM databases
- Productivity increase 41%+ – ROI 16% – 1000%
automatic dialing
- Increase from 20 minutes to 45 minutes of talk time per hour 100%
contact center software
- Return on investment up to 300%
The above statistical claims are made by manufacturers when their products are used in isolation; the overall increase in productivity will be significantly greater if they are used together. This may help justify an investigation into the feasibility of such a structure for your business.