Riverbank It management

If your business is going to grow in a flat market (let’s be optimistic about the wider economy) you have to do so by winning market share. That means taking business from your competitors. To do that you have to be better than them. You also have to communicate your message to your potential customers.

What underpins your success at attracting that new business is your systems – the way you run your business. Here are seven ways that IT can contribute to your success.

1. You have to be more efficient and get more results for less effort. Without a doubt one of the most effective tools you can use is CRM software – Customer Relationship Management. CRM software enables you to store the intelligence (call back in six months, birthday is 15 May, etc). It also enables you to track your successes and your failures so you can establish what works and what doesn’t.

2. You need a system for spotting opportunities. Can your non-sales people pop sales leads into your CRM system for sales people to follow up on? Things like “I overheard at customer X that they aren’t happy with their supplier of consumables”. If they go into one system you can log who added the successful leads and reward them – build that virtuous circle.

3. Efficient communications links are vital. You need to know that you have enough bandwidth for all your e-mail, web browsing and remote working. If your business development manager is working from home you don’t want them to be hamstrung by a slow connection. Upgrading doesn’t have to be expensive either; you can increase the speed of your current connection or even use two low-cost ADSL lines with one dedicated to remote workers.

4. Have you got the capacity to service the anticipated growth? In IT terms this means considering factors like server disk and database capacity, your ability to process an increasing number of transactions, and the speed of ageing PCs.

5. Are you working flexibly? Flexible workers are more productive workers and happier workers. Are you minimising the downtime of your most expensive resource, your staff? Can they work anywhere, any time they choose? Would a small investment in BlackBerrys or mobile-enabled laptops give people the opportunity to be more effective?

6. Adopt the current technologies. Your younger customers are using social media like Twitter and FaceBook and you must too. If you have any doubts just think how middle-aged people must have felt when the first telephones came along in the early 20th century.

7. Finally, don’t let your technology get out of date. If you don’t keep up you will be left trailing behind your competitors. You will also be stacking up a bigger bill for the future – better to upgrade three computers a year than discover in three years’ time that you have to buy nine computers. You don’t have to be bleeding edge. You do have to be leading edge.