customer relationship management

Increase Productivity with These 2 Important Principles

Increasing sales is the number one priority in nearly all kinds of businesses. However, in order to increase productivity, they also tend to put a lot of stress to their workforce, especially when they require everyone in the team firing on all cylinders 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week.

People on top – the management – are often caught in a dilemma between increasing the company’s productivity and preventing a high attrition rate caused by too much wear and tear to their workforce or being forced to take desperate measures to accomplish their goal.

Is it really possible for companies to increase revenue without increasing the amount of work? Is there a better solution to hiring more people working for less pay, or laying off half of the employees and let the other half do twice the amount of work?

Principles to Live By

Economists and business experts have looked into this and found out a recognizable pattern that holds true in almost every aspect of life. Two of the most important principles that apply to productivity in work, business, and management are known as the 80/20 Rule and the Parkinson’s Law. These two will serve as the overarching principle throughout the discussion in increasing productivity in sales.

Principle #1
PRIORITIZE
The 80/20 rule

Management consultant, Joseph M. Juran believes that quality work deserves more attention than menial tasks because they have the greatest impact in the overall output. He borrowed this idea from Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto who noticed that only 20% of the population makes 80% of the money.

Using the same principle at work, this means that out of all the work we do, only 20%of it produces most of the results we see. Hence, you will need 80% of your effort in 20% of all your tasks that deliver most of the results in order to achieve maximum efficiency.

To put things in perspective, imagine that you have two lumberjacks and both of them need to fell ten trees for that day. One of them came right at it and started chipping off small bits for hours with a dull axe head while the other one sat down and spent an hour sharpening his.

In terms of multiple tasks per day, this means that if you have ten tasks, you need to find the first two that have the greatest impact to your productivity and concentrate on them first. This applies not only in sales, but in almost any kind of work.

Principle #2
SIMPLIFY
The Parkinson’s Law

Another principle that was found to have a great impact to productivity came from a British author and historian, C. Northcote Parkinson – known for his adage, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Essentially, what he meant is that in most cases people are just using up their time doing things that could have otherwise been accomplished in a short period of time if they have simplified the task.

He also believes that, “expansion means complexity; and complexity decays.” People can do a lot of things at a given time but achieve so little because most of it is just ‘fake work’, or things that don’t necessarily contribute to productivity and are only meant to fill the time.

Unlike the first principle, this is actually something you want to break away from. But knowing, as they say, is half the battle. You need to discern what is ‘real work’ – which is the first step to being more productive – and what are those that are just ‘time-wasters.’

Its Implication to Sales Productivity

These principles can be applied in sales for increased productivity. But first, here are some common ‘time-wasters’ companies and sales reps need to be aware of.

Whenever possible refrain from these activities:

taking calls or responding to emails in the middle of a highly cognitive task (tasks that require focus and concentration)
chatting with co-workers while doing work at the same time
spending too much time on low-quality leads
doing tasks manually and repetitively
starting from scratch every single time
going back and forth from one task to another (task-switching)
frequent meetings and seminars
‘majoring on minors’

Most of the things mentioned above can be done more efficiently if we block our time and focus only on the task at hand. Studies have shown that task-switching (others call it multi-tasking which is more appropriately said about CPUs than the human brain) is actually counterproductive to work and can have financial and psychological consequences.

Most of the tasks in the office can now be accomplished much faster and with less effort using technology. Millennials, generally speaking, have no problem adapting to modern technology since they live and breathe technology by the time they were born. And this is why they are the most sought after employees in today’s highly competitive atmosphere.

Best Practices to Increase Productivity in Sales

Now that we have a clear understanding about the underlying principles that govern productivity, let’s look at how we can apply it to sales. Here are some of the best practices employed by sales team to boost productivity and the company’s revenue.

Plan and prioritize. This may sound simple until you realize you can’t prioritize everything. You need to take a step back and reflect which part of your job needed more time and concentration and which ones can be done on autopilot.

List down all your tasks and rate them according to importance, urgency, and repercussions if not met within that day. In this example, we have arranged the task from A to E; A being the greatest and E being the least.

Example:

A. Following up on prospects and customers

B. Sorting out and evaluating leads

C. Identifying problems and customer needs

D. Creating possible solutions

E. Clerical work

You may also need to trim down your list or delegate tasks, especially the ones which are not directly related to your line of work or expertise. If your focus is lead conversion and you have a marketing department which specializes in qualifying leads for sales, let them do the job for you.

Read: Time Management Skills for Increased Productivity

Set your goal high. Remember Parkinson’s Law about work? If you plan on using 40 hours to accomplish a certain amount of tasks, you are bound to think that you have plenty of time to spare so you end up using most of it on trivial matters.

But if you set the bar higher for yourself, and restrict yourself by finishing the task earlier than expected instead, you’ll realize you can actually do more, and, in the context of sales productivity, convert more leads than what the company sets for you at a certain period of time.

By having a self-imposed deadline, you are challenging yourself to be more efficient and clear your list of useless, unproductive tasks that gets in your way.

Utilize technology to your advantage. Most of the tasks that were done by a small team of employees can now be accomplished by single person with the right tools and skill sets at his disposal.

This rids the company a significant amount of time-consuming and repetitive tasks and instead focuses on things that really matter like creating a system to better improve customer service, and help sales and marketing teams achieve more without sacrificing quality time.

One great example being used by accomplished sales and marketing teams is CRM app which features customer acquisition tools, sales and marketing automation and sales funnel for collecting customer information, tracking down customer activity, conducting automated and semi-automated follow-ups.

Read: How Technology Is Changing Sales Forever

Increased productivity doesn’t always mean increasing the amount of work or workforce of a certain company. Technology and human ingenuity have already gone a long way to cut down the amount of work and time spent on task.

Perhaps you need a modern approach to increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing team in your small business. If so, having good CRM with the right features and easy-to-use interface could be your best option.

Small Business Dream is a sales and marketing app aimed at increasing productivity by simplifying tasks and unlocking the power of sales and marketing automation for your workforce. Learn how at www.smallbizdream.com.

Sales & Marketing Automation and CRM: Their Differences and Similarities

What is the difference between Sales and Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? And which one is more useful for your business? I’m sure it’s making your head spin.

In the beginning there was much more of a distinction between the two. It was generally believed that CRM was more about customer service and possibly upselling or reselling new and existing customers, while Sales and Marketing Automation were about the sales cycle and how to prospect and initially sell to new customers or clients.

CRMs were hard to learn and quite expensive, most small business owners didn’t bother looking at them.

Sales Automation and Marketing Automation tools were often better priced but seemed to lack power or could only handle ONE or TWO of the necessary functions requiring you to purchase multiple tools and figure out how to transfer info between them to make them work together.

Here’s a rundown showing the differences between the two so you have a better idea what they are, what function they serve, and how you can incorporate them into your business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Profile
Searchable notes and account data on each customer
Sales History that amalgamates up to departments and the entire company
Tracking of all customer communications
Customer service tools
Customer support tools
Customer retention tools
Sales campaign tracking and data utilization

Sales Automation and/or Marketing Automation

Contact Management
Calendars
To-do Lists
Email Automation
Sales lead assignment and categorization
Sales Funnel
Surveys
Customer Records
Salesperson tracking and goal and target feedback

Although they seem similar, their purpose is quite different. Sometimes it’s hard to tell apart which of the two you are currently using. They could be used interchangeably but there’s also an overlap, or they could be used as complementary tools.

How about Today?

The great news is, there are many tools today that blur the differences even more which can be used as a substitute especially for a small business (under $3,000,000/year in sales). For example, you can get software such as Click funnels for $100 a month to handle just the online funnels aspect for you.

No longer do you have to pay thousands of dollars to have these tools. They can actually be quite affordable. In fact, there are some companies that integrate both the sales automation with customer management like Salesforce, Hub spot, or Marketo. But for a vast number of small businesses and small shops they are still too pricey. For example Hubspot starts at $200 a month for the very basic package.

Small Business Dream combines the power of Hubspot, Marketo, and Salesforce for just $99 a month and can be customized to fit the needs of every small business owner. With their suite of tools you’ll get:

• Contact Management
• Automatic email follow-up
• Calendar integration
• Survey Engine
• Social Media semi-automation tools
• Twitter functionalities
• Sales Funnel
• Business Card Scanning and Transcription service
• Mobile app
• Web App

Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our suite of tools

Getting Your Real Estate Business Ahead in a Crazy Market

Getting (and keeping) your real estate business ahead of the pack in an insane market can be a massive and daunting task. All aspects of your marketing game need to be ‘on point’, because the competition for your potential client’s hard earned dollar is fierce.

Gone are the days when all you had to do was make sure that your face was on the side of every bus, and underneath the butts and backs of those waiting for them. This is a brand new era.

Escalated real estate values mean that you’re going to have to put in ‘extra time’ and effort to getting your name and your reputation in front of those looking for your services. And there’s no better way to do that than by staying top of mind using the tools that were built for just this reason.

Let’s start with the most basic of those tools (actually, the two most basic); your website, and your blog. These are a no-brainers, so if you’re not utilizing both to their fullest potential, you’re totally missing out. Adding a newsletter component is a given, in order to stay in touch on even a very basic level, but what about staying in touch on the fly?

I mean, how often do you look to your cell phone for information before you sit down at a desktop or laptop computer? Yup. I’m talking about mobile marketing tools for your real estate business. It’s like ramping up your newsletter campaign, keeping your customers in the loop by way of mobile. It’s marketing at the touch of a button.

Even though you’re ‘marketing at the touch of a button’, you still want to be sending valuable, timely information to your client list. Sending useful information, rather than random ‘marketing’ will keep you at the head of the pack. Using a suite of tools like Small Business Dream allows you to make the task almost as simple as tying your shoes.

Partner with a related business, in order to spread your marketing efforts. Partnering with a business that has real estate “interests” is a creative way of getting your own business to those who might not otherwise know about you, and the type of partnership possibilities are vast and numerous. From furniture stores to flooring to art, the possibilities are endless. Use your customer relationship management tool to promote that partnership to the advantage of your customers, by sending out ‘deals’ and specials that your customers (and likely their friends and acquaintances) will utilize! It’s win-win!

To know more on how you can outpace the competition in the real estate business, check my post on how you can “growth hack” your real estate sales.

Or, you can start right away by using our Small Business Dream Suite of tools at www.smallbizdream.com.

How An Obscure Restaurant Became A Massively PROFITABLE Downtown Vancouver Sensation

It all started in Vancouver a few years ago. A restaurant owner opened a Japanese-style Korean barbecue franchise from Japan location in Vancouver.

The small business restaurant owner selected the location, a space that was way too big in the eyes of all the restaurant owners and professionals in Vancouver, and a place where time after time, restaurants had failed to succeed in the very same space.

You see, the space was much too big for such an obscure chain restaurant doing food and drinks that “normal” Vancouver people may not be able to relate to. Or so the “experts” said.

The location was bad, impossible to see, and too far back from the road, almost subterranean. Parking all around the area was also v e r y expensive.

You see, it just couldn’t work. Unless the small business owner had some kind of a secret weapon.

You could almost hear the little train saying, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”.

Now a secret weapon the small business owner surely did have! So secret that they could hide it right in plain sight and have no other restaurant owners copy them.

It was so simple that most restaurant owners would actually argue that is not only unnecessary, but possibly even not to be tolerated by restaurant patrons.

Genius, yes. But … frowned upon? Maybe?

The secret weapon was not really a hard thing to do, but it would take some time, some training, some effort, and a possibly even have a small cost.

You see, it would be hard according to most restaurant owners, as someone would have to be made responsible to do it right. One of your already overworked restaurant staff, who has no time at all when it is busy, may have to add a step to their job.

Of course as a restaurant or small business owner, this is always difficult, as you wouldn’t want to put your staff out with a work task they might not like or feel comfortable with. Or worse yet, pay some money to outsource it. You see it just won’t work, so most restaurants never even bother.

Let’s also not forget the fact that almost nobody in the restaurant industry uses this very simple secret weapon, so it must be a bad idea. You as a entrepreneur, restaurant and small business owner should probably stop reason as the Secret Weapon is something really simple and silly and you likely won’t’ like it or believe it.

So just what is the Secret Weapon?

Sorry, not so fast.

This obscure restaurant, did the hard work of setting up this Secret Weapon for only about the first 3 months of their existence.

Then they reaped the rewards of its awesome power for YEARS to come…

They were busy, well, actually lined up almost constantly for the following two years and even to this day, just by utilizing OVER and OVER this very simple secret weapon they took the time and care to set up.

It likely cost them less than $350 to set up. It likely costs them under $100 a month to maintain.

They have now opened another location in Vancouver, and they implemented the same secret weapon they started building in location 1 for location 2. Now the 2nd location has been packed since opening day.

Ok, enough of the suspense. What is the Secret Weapon this restaurant has so successfully employed?

DATA! Yep, simple data.

Well, I guess it’s not just data, it is data that they collected, and now utilize almost once a week.

So let’s take a look at how they implemented and utilized this secret weapon called “data”.

They collected their data in an old school fashion, and we suggest this is always at least one of your data collection components to all of our clients.

Yes we know there are iPads, and Surfaces, and tablets, and iPhones and Android devices and all this smart technology, but sometimes OLD SCHOOL is better for many of your restaurant guests.

YES you should have a QR code that sits on a tent card on the table and offers people to join your mailing list by filling in a simple survey from their smart phone, and some will. You could also do Coasters! Coasters are just like business cards that can be pondered at the table and even taken home.

YES you should have a very short url to redirect to your same survey/data collection landing page for those who prefer this way.

YES you could suggest they just give their twitter name, name and email address by twitter.

YES you should ask them to follow you on Facebook.

BUT…

This company didn’t do ANY of those things for the first 3 months.

They simply gave out a small 1/8 of a page mini survey/feedback paper to each person at the table with the bill.

They offered that all who joined the newsletter would be in a monthly draw for a $100 gift certificate.

They started with just a random pen left at the table to fill in this overly photocopied UGLY piece of paper, that wasn’t even cut straight (darn hard to get good help in a restaurant!).

Then they ‘upped their game’ and gave out a golf pencil that was branded with the restaurant name. Customers were even encouraged to take it home if they liked.

Then the magic happened.

They actually did something with the information!

Someone was responsible to actually entered a into a CRM type sales automation system like Small Business Dream

They likely used the simplest one around, or who knows, maybe they simply used Outlook.

All that matters is, they took action. They made it someone’s job to enter this data nightly, or who knows, maybe the paid a subcontractor to do it. And yep, I’m sure many of the surveys had hard to read email addresses, and I’d bet the bounce rate was out of this world. By the third month, I bet ½ or more were duplicates so they were wasting time. But they kept entering.

Right from the first week of collecting this data, they sent out the first email. Showing off specials during certain times of day, or that Monday was all day Happy Hour with $9.99 pitchers of beer at the time, ALL day Monday. Within weeks Mondays were packed and pretty soon, every day was full to capacity.

They didn’t sweat that many of the emails couldn’t be used because they were illegible. They didn’t worry that their survey paper looked awful. They didn’t worry that their staff didn’t feel comfortable handing out the survey. They didn’t worry that their pencils were taken home more often than not. They just continued to TWEAK their secret weapon! They continued to u s e their secret weapon and they continued to be full to capacity, night after night.

They opened another location, rinse and repeat. Imagine if they had an even more robust secret weapon. One that would have taken away some of the cost and time by giving patrons options like mentioned above:

An iPad at the bar or front desk to have people join the mailing list while they waited for a table.
Taking the survey by QR code
Taking the survey by simple URL
Taking the survey by submitting a direct message on Twitter, or a mention on twitter.

They continue to be a booming success, month after month, year after year, while restaurants in better locations, with better themes and menus with better parking, continued to fail. Not one of the failures employed the ‘secret weapon’.

Now the story gets better! This great Korean Barbecue Japanese restaurant went a step further.

They started a loyalty program with an actual member card. Customers got points for eating there, and they could then redeem the points to get $25 OFF their meals once they had enough points.

Again, back in the day, the waiter/waitress had to take your card, disappear into the back, likely login to some system that allowed them to track your purchase, and how many points you had, and notify you manually when you had enough.

They continued to evolve, they continued to add power to their secret weapon.

The loyalty program became connected up to their POS (point of sale terminal). The customer receipt now told you where you were at for your point balance each visit. The customer could email in a picture of their receipt if they forgot their card, and it was someone’s job to match it up and credit the customer. Goodness me, what a terrible thing to make a staff member do when they are so busy!

By now I think you are starting to see that this company had a bigger secret weapon than just their data, they had the determination to make it happen instead of making excuses for why it may be too hard, or that the staff may not like it.

Then they upgraded their secret weapon again!

They invested in a simple mobile app.

This now allowed people to join them for the purpose of getting updates as an app, and of course we all know a mobile app sends out push notifications instantly vs. the email mailing list that can take some time to send once it gets large. This allowed their message to be received in real time, and not end up in a spam folder, or ignored by a millennial who only looks at their email once a week, if that.

Then they upgraded the weapon again. The entire loyalty program was now contained in the mobile application! You could literally redeem your points for something free in front of the waitress and it was brought to you. Now instead of waiting till you had $25 built up, you could redeem for even a $5 item. The patrons responded, and continue to respond, packed full night after night, and even have a very healthy lunch crowd.

With Small Business Dream you can dramatically increase your sales. Build your sales funnels, email marketing campaigns, automated, and semi-automated social media follow-up campaigns and much more with the most flexible tool on the planet. Sign up today!