Is the software you’ve partnered with limiting the value you can offer your clients?

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By Drew Arthur

Especially when working with small and medium businesses, most of the value you deliver comes in the form of advice and consulting based on your experience and domain expertise. As you know, this advice is especially useful when contextualised to the reality of the client in question, and directly addresses their needs.

Your information is only as good as the platform you’ve aligned with

To achieve this context, you probably rely on information you already have access to. Unfortunately, depending on the software you’ve chosen to align yourself with, you probably only have access to a very small slice (i.e.: just accounting information) of your client’s whole picture and can do very little to change that. Making it worse, such information is often retrospective, and can require one to trawl through reams of data to extract any meaningful insights.

As a result, your recommendations can be compromised. After all, your advice is only ever as good as the information it’s based on.

You shouldn’t be held back from delivering top value

However, with the significant innovations being made in the space every day, you shouldn’t have to ‘manage’ without vital information, nor should you have to compromise the value you have to offer.

In fact, what you can do as part of your consulting is to help your clients seek out and implement an all-encompassing business management solution that not only captures and reports on all the information you need, but also helps you deliver more meaningful advice as a result.

Specifically, you should seek out a solution that:

  • Provides end-to-end visibility of a company’s information (including Accounting, Inventory Management, Marketing, and Sales functions);
  • Can be customised to suit the specific needs of your clients’ businesses;
  • Delivers information in real-time; and
  • Is capable of reporting by exclusion, meaning that you only have to review data that falls outside pre-defined parameters – that’s far fewer reports to read!

As a result, you’ll be able to:

  1. Truly leverage your experience and domain expertise to provide more informed advice to your clients;
  2. Use client-specific insights to underpin your advice;
  3. Increase the value you provide to your clients on an ongoing basis;
  4. Embed your services as a key input to your clients’ decision making processes;
  5. Drive further ongoing revenue opportunities from your existing client base; and
  6. Create a compelling value proposition for new clients.

How HARMONiQ can help

We built HARMONiQ to help you make the most of what you offer your clients. That’s why it:

  • Incorporates key business functions– financials, commercials, Business Intelligence, inventory management, customer relationship management, and marketing – all within a single, seamlessly integrated platform so that you have all the information you need to provide well informed and relevant advice and recommendations;
  • Has the smallest implementation footprint and fastest customisation times in the industry, so you can begin delivering this value almost immediately;
  • Supports you in leveraging your domain expertise and own IP to provide valuable insights and advice to your clients; and
  • Has sophisticated BI capabilities allowing you to elevate the level of your analysis.

I hope these thoughts will help you as you look for opportunities to delivery even further value for your clients and give you some ideas about what you should be looking at to help you do so even more successfully. If you are facing any of the issues I’ve written about above and would like to discuss, please call me on 02 9542 2000.

Alternatively, tell me your thoughts about this blog by leaving a comment below.

Partner with us.

Find out how partnering with HARMONiQ can help you successfully differentiate your business in the market.

Download our Partner Programme Overview now!

 Come meet us at CeBIT 2015

We’re very excited to be officially launching HARMONiQ Business Tuning Software at this year’s CeBIT conference – and you’re invited to attend!

HARMONiQ-at-CeBIT-2015

 

Stronger control for a more effective, efficient sales process

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By Drew Arthur

In working with a number of growing businesses, it has come to my attention recently that many business leaders struggle with establishing and maintaining control over the sales processes of their business. Without control, the sales team are left to their own devices and often, this seems to play out in a number of ways:

  • Important opportunities are missed because sales people don’t follow procedures, or these procedures are poorly defined.
  • Deals are not followed up on time, or at all, because of inefficiencies in the sales team.
  • Heavy discounts are offered in order to ‘win’ deals at any cost, but without oversight of how this impacts the business overall.

Clearly, not having sufficient control of their sales processes is far beyond a mere annoyance – it’s losing these businesses thousands of dollars and making a significant dent to their bottom line!

Given the nature and the size of the businesses facing these issues, it occurred to me that there may be many others in a similar situation. So, let me share with you what I shared with those businesses I worked with.

The key to implementing stronger controls is leveraging intelligent technology

As a business leader, you’re very busy. Implementing stronger controls sounds like a great idea, but you definitely don’t have the time to constantly dive into the details and make sure your sales people are on track. The good news is you don’t have to.

What you do have to do is leverage the right business management solution for your business. Specifically, it should help you:

  • Leverage automation and manage by exception

Your business management solution should be one that is capable of smart, automated reporting and doesn’t require you to sift through hundreds of pages of reports. You should be able to tell it what to look for and let it be the watch dog.

For example, if you want to keep an eye on the heavily discounted deals impacting your profit margins, you shouldn’t have to wait until your customers are being invoiced. You should be able to set up a report to alert you every time the profit margin on a quote drops below the minimum percentage and stop the quote from going out at all.

  • Integrate your solutions into your business

You may ask, “But my sales people don’t always update the system accurately – how can a business management solution get around that?”

A strong business management solution should be part of your process, integrating seamlessly with your existing systems. For example, in order to have the quotation and profit margin visibility I described above, your quotations should be created within your business management solution and tracked against the specific customer in your CRM. In this set up, updating the system is part of the process.

  • Set it and forget it

By setting a few simple rules and reminders in your business management system you should be able to increase your revenue considerably – and the best thing is you should never have to think about them again. For example, you should set up a rule for each salesperson to receive an alert 5 days before the expiration date of each quotation they’ve sent out, reminding them to follow up with the customer. You won’t believe what a difference this can make!

  • Make continuous improvements

If your sales activities are tracked in detail in system, your reports will be full of insights to help you make small improvements that can boost your team’s sales performance greatly over time. It’ll also be easy to identify which salespeople are performing well and which ones may need a little more help from you.

I hope these thoughts will help you when you work towards gaining better control of your sales process. If you are dealing with any of the issues I’ve written about above and would like to discuss, please call me on 02 9542 2000.

If you’ve got some thoughts on my blog, please leave your comments below.

Drew Arthur is the Managing Director of Micronet Systems, and is focused on helping business leaders overcome inefficient sales, inventory and customer relationship management practices by leveraging cutting edge technology. If you want to gain better control of the sales processes in your business, click here to see how HARMONiQ Business Tuning Software can make a difference to your business, or click here to get in touch.