Hire the best business development executives, have a marketable product, catch up on trends- you’ve heard it all before. Even with the best product or service and a business roadmap to back it up, promoting a product to your intended audience takes considerable effort.
As a field that relies heavily on creating impactful interactions and a nurture cycle to keep customers interested in your product or service, cultivating a sales pipeline is the key to sustaining future growth. That being said, the longer you rely on manual processes to track sales numbers, the harder it is to close gaps between actual and estimated figures. Performance-based incentives and commissions made off deals are subjected to disputes, which results in standoffs and a gradual disinterest in work.
The fact is efficiency hinges on making the best use of the interpersonal skills on deck. You should know what to put your workforce on and what should be left to smart machines. By freeing your staff up to focus on the humanized aspects of work, their leadership, critical thinking and decision-making ability won’t go in vain. And with automated resource management, it gets easier to track these skills and steer work in the right direction.
Here are the ways automated resource management is beneficial:
1. Absolute and customizable visibility
Taking stock of the sales data is the first of many steps in creating the sales pipeline. After all, you can’t improve the pipeline with conditional information. Slotting people and sales analytics is easier with Saviom’s resource management software. It eliminates the uncertainty linked to skills available down the line.
Given how difficult it is to guarantee timely work completion with last-minute resource insufficiencies, it is beneficial to have an automation deck that notifies you of employee profiles and their future hours of work against demand estimates. Consequently, you can reserve them in advance and assign them to human-centric work such as account and deal management, customer success and demonstrations. In turn, your resource pool is informed of their schedules and can give you further updates on their individual availability, skill upgrades or leave requests put in.
2. Reduced dwell on administrative tasks
Laborious processes eat up precious time and cause you to mismanage an otherwise competent talent pool. Worse, it can impact your budget. Assigning a highly-skilled staff member to lowly or menial work is not only a wastage of true potential but also increases costs. Alternately, assigning a low-skilled person unprepared to take over a client account decreases work value. An oft-mentioned upside to computerized resource management is that it removes the drudgery of routine record-keeping, ensuring your staff work with accurate data processed by a smart machine. The quality of potential utility also goes up when time is spent productively.
Mechanized resource management lets you track the criticality and utilization of your existing workforce capacity. It lets you apply advanced search facilities to tap into in-demand skills. An extended bonus to this assessment is that competencies can be tracked and deemed relevant or outdated in line with sales opportunities being explored. You can then determine resourcing treatments to take and reach managerial decisions such as sending intimations of layoffs, shutting down a business unit with consistent poor performance, transferring and redistributing the pool, or even set up a new process with the inclusion of better workers.
3. Demand prediction success
Business leaders are now taking the initiative to stay foresighted. For one, more competitors are penetrating the market you operate in, and will come out with their angle to pitch their product. Forgoing the forecasting process not only risks profitable accounts falling through the cracks but can also result in your clients being poached by the competition.
Forecasting demand generates scenarios and anticipate work capacity suitable for the work. It lets you take charge of the future course of action and gives you insights into the pipeline, resource, financial and operational performance. You can then use your experiential judgment to determine the benefits and financial gains per opportunity. An automation platform contains a client database that lists the status of both actions taken and that of accounts, i.e. existing, dormant, new and to-be-explored clients. It lets you compare expected and actual sales in order to track the number of forecasted demands for a particular time frame. This lets your staff reactivate and transform the sales cycle, shortening the lead to conversion time.
4. Personalized customer journeys
At the end of the day, sales revolves around trust and value of service, both of which are best served by your workforce. Customers are drawn in by-product expertise and the nature of the interaction. The more knowledgeable and hands-on your business development personnel are, the easier it is to win more prospective buyers to your side.
The one thing a resource-centric automated application gets right is your ability to connect better with teams, customers and stakeholders. With inbuilt voice call and video chat interfaces, buyers can reach you faster, facilitating prompt exchanges and access to the information asked for. Even with varying time zones and the widening geographical dispersion between clients and sales teams, digital correspondence bridges communication gaps and establishes consistency in engagement. Adding the personal touch to the customer journey lets you know what your buyers need now and later. Consequently, you can revise your selling technique and add services to existing packages that will help your customers get the most out of continuing their package with you.
Over to you
While every business needs data, the catch is that it’s housed in static spreadsheets or inhouse tools built solely to serve departmental purposes. In other words, the data will be siloed and incomplete, requiring a solution that can collate and sync enterprise-wide information on work, workplaces and workers. By automating resource management, you save considerable time and expenses assigning competent staff to pipelined opportunities.
What’s more, you’ll use a data-driven strategy that predicts hours of work against future available time and how these figures impact footfall and staff availability. By ensuring the resource assigned to a client account is indeed the right fit, you can track everything in accounting from bid to bill and propel your business forward without incurring added costs!
