Business Intelligence Lowdown

Make Your Sales Team More Efficient

When you automate the friction points that slow down your sales people (such as paper work), they are able to spend more time doing activities that generate business - such as building relationships with prospects and customers. Technology-enabled selling (TES) uses technology to sell through all desired channels. These include resellers and over the Web selling. TES has become a critical component of CRM strategy. These technology-enabled selling applications are part of a larger system that combines business planning, forecasting, and account management. These applications allow business-to-business selling across field sales, inside sales, and external sales channels. Using TES to support all your sales channels, frees up sales representatives to focus on revenue-generating tasks. Online quoting lets agents do most of the initial data entry. Providing alerts about critical renewal opportunities gives sales representatives enough time to negotiate with customers to find the right benefit mix and rate structure. Moving the enrollment process online makes completing group and member applications quicker. This, in turn, lets sales representatives monitor progress in real time. CRM Today reports:

With an easy-to-use, tailored system, healthcare payer organizations get measurably better at the front-office tactics that help to grow and service business. Some of the most apparent bottom-line results include reducing administrative overhead, shortening sales cycles, collaborating, and sharing data — all of which lead to greater profitability.

Plan and budget your planning exercises

Planning company level deliverables and budgeting expectations, especially those of the head office are viewed as a cumbersome and time consuming exercise; something which has to be periodically tackled before one can get on with running the business. In fact, many times even after executing the planned initiatives, companies find that they are not much better placed than what they were earlier. It makes them wonder about the utility of expending substantial amounts of time and effort in the elaborate planning exercises. With the opening up of global markets, planners have to factor in things such as manufacturing and marketing capabilities of competitors in another country. Moreover, since the international market situation is becoming increasingly fluid, annual budgets are being rendered redundant. There are new regulations such as Sarbane-Oxley in place that lay down guidelines for management reporting. Several companies are simply not in a prepared state to meet these guidelines. Businessintelligence reports:

Finally, there is the move towards quarterly reporting, putting pressure on companies to meet financial results on a quarterly basis and to reforecast more frequently.

Read More: Six steps to improving your planning and budgeting system