The right IT as the foundation for your commercial success

How many leads does your online campaign generate? How many of those leads then become customers? And what proportion of those new customers will still be buying products and services from you three years from now? Many sales departments are still unable to link these kinds of data streams quickly and simply.

IT as the basis for a successful sales force. More and more sales managers now recognize that software is necessary to get the maximum return from their department. In any case, it is a step in the right direction. In practice, however, there is still much room for improvement and the tools used often do not match the needs of the modern account manager. I outline two situations that are common in many organizations.

Situation1:additional functions in the back office package also form the basis for the company's commercial activities.

Situation2: sales , marketing and customer service together use a jumble of different apps and platforms, each of which accounts for a small part of the solution.

The back office as a CRM tool

The first situation is particularly common among more traditional companies. They have been using a back office tool for years to streamline the back end of their services. This can be production, but also planning and invoicing, for example. The developers of these ERP packages are constantly working on how to increase their profitability. In response, they are constantly expanding their features. This goes so far that there are companies that have now started using these types of packages to manage their customer data as well.

This may sound quite convenient, yet the opposite is true. After all, can you expect miracles from a package that is basically designed to quickly and intelligently keep your records when it comes to something likemarketing automationande-mail marketing? You probably know this expression: if it's actually nice to be true, it usually is. In fact, in practice, these back-office solutions are very limited in their additional capabilities as tools for optimal customer management. In any case,they do not help your account managers achieve your commercial goals.

A jumble of applications

The companies with lesslegacy often see something different happening. They hang their entire company full of different tools in no time. One for online conversion, one for newsletters, an app for database management, one for customer feedback, marketing automation and the list of licenses goes on and on. Each department thus develops its own toolbox of tooling. Separately, sales, marketing and customer service can handle this, but it becomes different when the company wants to link all these different data streams for more insights. We send 1,000 e-mails, how many deals roll out of them and how satisfied are these new customers after six months? With all these different tools that barely communicate with each other, answering such a simple question becomes quite a challenge .

This is how to optimize your commercial process