Businesses and consumers across the world have benefited from countless web-enabled innovations that make living and working easier every day and this statement has never been truer than over the last few weeks. From waking up and checking your smartphone for incoming emails and diaries to asking Alexa or Google Home what headlines have hit the news for that day. We now live in an age of unprecedented technological change. Reality has been given a digital makeover through modern software, and the average person can now predict and control how the future looks with the existing technology they already have.
However, even though new solutions are created and delivered to the public faster than ever, there’s not always a need to invest time, energy and revenue into these new solutions when you can take advantage of the existing technology that you already have access to. From specialized software that gives you a competitive advantage to artificial intelligence that contributes to a more dynamic way of growing your success; it’s easy to future-proof your business with existing technology when you know how.
1. Specialist software
Specialist software can help even the smallest of businesses to maintain a competitive edge, whether it’s free social media monitoring software for the marketing team like Hootsuite, Followerwonk or review sites such as G2 and Capterra. It could be that you have a subscription to specialist software platforms that you aren’t using. Maybe it’s subscription software supporting your internal teams. You might even have sales-i but aren’t taking advantage of the system or using it to its fullest potential.
Almost every department within a business will have a piece of software they rely on to do their job properly; it’s just taking advantage of those tools and making sure they are used to their full potential. Take sales-i for example, users can access the software anywhere at any time to retrieve customer information providing them with actionable insights into their customer's business. Users can drill down and identify accounts that are at risk by reviewing customer health and contacting those companies to further understand the reasons why. Alternatively, they can be searching for new gaps of opportunity with customers who are purchasing certain products, but not complementary items: a great example being brake discs and brake pads.
2. Cloud computing
Expensive IT servers and bulky hardware have been replaced with flexible and efficient cloud computing that reduces the upfront cost of running a business as well as improving security, reliability, capability, customer experience and communication within a team.
Whether you use Gmail, Dropbox, OneDrive, or another server to help run your business, you already have the right tools to work from anywhere whilst still engaging with your colleagues and customers. From sending confidential contracts to interactive presentations, having a cloud computing system to support your business, both during a lockdown and when transitioning back to normality will ensure a smooth and flexible process.
As a sales-i customer, you can benefit from Microsoft Azure, to give you a better user experience, higher security, more functionality, the ability to build, retain and improve machine learning with Artificial Intelligence, and the most advanced version of software features within sales-i technology.
With sales-i’s core purpose being an analytics platform designed to identify every customer’s purchasing behaviour, it was important that Microsoft Azure could complement, support and enhance future product development, whilst supporting customer growth by allowing them to work in the most streamlined and efficient way.
3. Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has come a long way in recent years. We are all now capable of analyzing data and reaching conclusions without the need for human input. Megan Barradell, Product Manager here at sales-i, says that AI “gives you the ability to neatly digest and analyze each piece of data to guide users in making actionable and smart business decisions. It takes away the time-consuming human element of having to manipulate and understand big data by investigating a wide range of internal and external sources of information and associating figures that wouldn’t naturally be in your typical line of vision.”
Megan continues by adding “During this global pandemic, it may not be at the forefront of your mind to use AI, but by doing so, you are more likely to come out of this stronger than ever before. Not only will the AI within sales-i help to identify the risks and growth within your business, but it will instantly drill into important statistics to allow management to identify, track and focus on changes in customer behavior, product sales or revenue figures. Whilst companies are fighting to stay afloat, sales-i users could already be ahead of their competition.”
4. Automation
Today, almost everything can be automated; with Gartner expecting over 75% of businesses to have more than four technologies for automation within their processes.
By using automation for mundane, repetitive, or data-led tasks, users can be freed up for more high-value work. Not only are you more productive by saving hours of valuable time, but it makes your life simpler and easier as the operational and repetitive tasks become less of a burden, as the system completes it all for you. By using all of the automated reporting functions within sales-i, your sales team will have more time to sell, rather than wading through retrospective sales reports. It can even be as simple as automatically finding the quickest route to your customer meeting – all the extra tasks that add unnecessary minutes to a salesperson's day are eliminated with sales-i.
Whatever the technology, businesses need to make sure they are taking advantage of the existing systems they have in place because the reality is, the business world runs faster with technology, and avoiding usage means you aren’t benefiting from any return on investment from your existing subscriptions.
As a sales-i customer, you have access to hundreds of free online training, which include the sales-i Training Academy, weekly webinar sessions and one-to-one learning with an expert, as well as practical ‘how-to’ guides that you can save and implement today to get the most out of your investment. Whether you’re overlooking your existing technology tools due to a lack of knowledge or training opportunities, or even turnover in staff, all of these barriers can be resolved with the support of sales-i.
For more information on how to get the most out of sales-i, why not join almost 10,000 attendees in our weekly webinars?
So, with all that being said, answer this one question – are you using all the tools you already have at your disposal? If not, then now is the time to start.
