Improve Customer Retention & Keep Them Satisfied

As business becomes more competitive, your customers are also looking to reduce their costs. Your competitors are seeking to gain business from your customers. Too many times a company will not know they are losing customers until months later when sales trends show a decline.

Serious businesses use predictive analytics to identify the most profitable customers and customers most likely to cancel maintenance agreements. You can be proactive during this time to retain your existing customers. Here are a few examples of how you can retain your existing customers.

• Set up a daily Alert that is sent to your sales staff notifying them of all their customers who have not purchased within a specified number of days. Sales people can quickly follow up with these customers to ensure their satisfaction with your performance and pricing.

• Use a technology that provides built-in CRM. This will help your sales staff provide higher levels of service to your customers to maintain their loyalty. Having the right information about each customer, their buying trends, and a 360° view of their current and past activity can enable your sales staff to achieve the highest level of service to keep your customers happy.

Prevent Bad Debt – Improve Cash Flow and Liquidity

Even in good times, many customers are slow to pay. With the current economic situation, you may see collection times lengthening even more as your customers begin to conserve their cash.

Many companies spend a large amount of time at the end of a month running reports and then making collection calls. Often the over due balances that appear on the monthly report occurred at the beginning of the month and are much more than 30 days past due.

You should consider using a management tool such as an Alert to improve your collection process. You can set the alert to send a notification every morning that includes the past due invoices as of that day and immediately begin your collection process. With the right technology, the alert can be structured to include all the information necessary to make the collection call, such as the contact name, phone number, invoice number and amount past due. This will help your employees become more effective, reduce the time it takes to collect the cash that is due you, and improve your cash flow and liquidity.

Business Advice From Van Halen | Fast Company

Business Advice From Van Halen | Fast Company.

Great story about simple ways to confirm that a complex job is done right.

EVA momentum – A new way to valuate companies – Jan. 11, 2010

EVA momentum – A new way to valuate companies – Jan. 11, 2010.

Claim Your Local Business Listing on Google and Bing

You can now claim your local business listing on Google, Bing and other search engines.  The process takes about 5 minutes and requires an automated phone call to verify that you are the owner of that business listing.

Once you control your listing you can add a lot of information to your listing to help improve your appears on map searches and other local business listings.

Click here for Google: Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter

Click here for Bing:  https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx

Optimize and Wring Dollars Out of Your Business

By maintaining inventory, you incur costs. These costs include not only the cost of products but also the cost of warehousing, employee handling, insurance and overhead. Now is the time to optimize your inventory to reduce capital tied up in slow moving products, salvage dead stock, and maximize the use of your warehouse facility.

More than ever, the right technology is an essential tool to help businesses tightly manage their cash, drive efficiencies and reduce costs. The right technology can help you to:

• Identify over stock and salvage dead stock in your warehouse to help you optimize and maintain the correct product mix

• Recommend more efficient purchasing to keep quantities low but still provide the right levels of service

• Help to control rising costs from vendors and suggest more efficient purchasing methods

With the right technology you will be able to wring the dollars you have tied up in inventory assets into cash and reduce your overall warehousing costs.

Sharpen Your Ax and Improve Your Management Tools

Management spends a great deal of time manually reviewing documents, such as sales orders, to make sure there are no errors or price discounting. Purchase orders are often delayed waiting for a manager to find the time to approve them.

Because of these delays, products may not be purchased in time and customer orders may not ship in time. These manual processes slow down your business operation and lower your customer service levels, both of which incur costs to your company.

A solution that offers tools for management by exception and a comprehensive look at the business can help improve your processes and reduce your costs. Here are some examples of how management tools may help you control costs.

Business Workflow Rules: Set up rules for your sales orders, purchase orders or other transactions, such as an acceptable range for gross margins and an acceptable percentage for manually changing prices. Then structure an automated Approval to allow all sales orders that fall within the rules to immediately be processed without intervention. Management receives an alert only for those exceptions that pose a potential problem and require management approval. This will greatly improve your order processing time and free management for more important tasks.

Data Driven Alerts: You can use data driven alerts to remind you of an important event or data exception. For example, on a daily basis the system can send you an e-mail alert of all products that have reached their minimum stocking quantity and require purchasing or a reminder of an important event, such as a scheduled meeting, customer return call, etc. You can receive an alert reminder so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Key Performance Metrics: Establish summary performance metrics that provide easy drill down and benchmark reporting so your business decisions are made on facts not conjecture. A strong reporting function measures via roles based portals, including profit per technician, machine or customer and other related departmental metrics and assessed your company’s performance in comparison to the competition.

Turn Your Potential into Reality with Metrics

Businesses are difficult to manage.  Poor information or detail overload can make it challenging to make a speedy, reliable assessment of your current situation.  Solutions that leave you guessing about key performance issues are ineffective and counter productive.

To make confident business decisions quickly, you must have a comprehensive understanding of your business performance and where your organization and employees stand in terms of productivity, efficiency and profit contribution to business success.

Using key performance metrics can benefit your business by:

• Presenting summary performance metrics via roles based portals, including profit per technician, equipment or customer and other related departmental metrics.

• Providing easy drill down and benchmark reporting into metrics calculations and details.

• Sending business alerts to instantly highlight changes in key business metrics.

• Evaluating employee performance within the company.

• Comparing your company’s performance in comparison to the industry and your competition.

A comprehensive dashboard with these capabilities will ensure your business decisions are based on fact, not conjecture.

Eliminate Your Islands of Automation

Islands of Automation are not a System

Eliminate Your Islands of Automation

As companies grow, they quickly discover that their accounting system does not handle all of their business activities. Many companies find they are using spreadsheets, manual processes, or multiple applications to fulfill their needs. This creates remote islands of automation with information scattered in many places.

To evaluate meaningful financial information and reports, employees must consolidate this information. Entering the same data multiple times in different applications leads to a waste of valuable time. It also allows for manual typing errors and a lack of data integrity. Finding and fixing the errors across multiple applications or spreadsheets requires even more time and creates employee frustration.

Instead of finding a different software application for every business process—accounting, customer-relationship management, etc.—you need a single, integrated solution to handle your business processes. With an integrated solution you will eliminate errors and duplication, save time and money, and improve efficiencies and profitability. Here are some examples of the benefits you can realize with an integrated solution.

• Your staff will be more productive as they will learn one application faster than several applications

• Employees save time by entering data only once

• You will reduce the potential of errors caused by manual typing into multiple applications

• Employee frustration will be greatly reduced

• Financials and reports are much quicker and easier to produce, and contain information that is complete, reliable and accurate.

Many companies find that replacing their “Islands of Automation” with an integrated solution provides more than the obvious benefits. They find that an integrated solution pays for itself in a very short amount of time.

Great little application – tinyurl.com

Have you sent out emails with a long url string only to get back responses that the link does not work?  Try this tool.

www.tinyurl.com