Sales Consultancy

Your I.T. systems should be an aid to sales and not a hindrance.  

You want to be able to:

  • Get more leads
  • Increase conversion rates
  • Speed up conversion times

CRM and ticket systems better lead management

Do you receive enquiries or bookings by email, in an unstructured manner?  A shared mailbox might help (info@yourdomain.com) but it still won’t give you much visibility on what’s outstanding, or on your conversion rates. Nor will it help you prioritise your strong leads and help you to nurture them through. 

A CRM system can help you with this – we’ve integrated some big names such as Salesforce and Hubspot, plus some opensource ones such as WordPress’s CRM system built around WooCommerce.  You might already have a CRM system and don’t know what to do with it and sometimes, small is best.  Just because you spent 50k on a system, it wont magic sales through the door. The bigger the system, the more time it will take to configure and start working for you. Integration is vital with a CRM – you need to get new leads in without re-keying

If your leads come in as booking requests, then a ticket system could be a big help. We’ve used and recommend OSTicket as a free tool that can streamline enquiries into teams and departments, send auto-responders and give you visibility of what’s going where. It works well for enquiries if you are currently just working off of emails. All you need to do is set up a new mailbox such as enquiries@yourdomain.com and then the ticket system will monitor it and deal with everything, including attachments. It’s a genuinely free product – but you do have to host it yourself, although it can run on a cheap desktop PC.

Live chat  get more leads

If you have an e-commerce website, installing a live chat can really help with onsite conversion – it means people can interact with you while they are doing other things (like doing their own jobs). They can ask that question that will just help them over the line. Even if you don’t transact online and accept enquiries only, a live chat system can increase your number of enquiries. It will mean you can progress – or reject – leads much more quickly than through form fills or ticket systems.

There are paid and free versions (such as Livezilla) of live chat systems available – most of which can be set up almost instantly. All you to do is allocate the resource to staff it – which you should not underestimate. It’s commonplace to see chat systems which are “offline” – because the staff are just not available, and no priority is given to it. But think about that for moment – no staff to answer questions asked by a prospect on your product purchase page?  Are you sure you want to be in business?

Live chat is also less susceptible to spam – so if you are inundated with fake enquiries, moving to a chat system could help.

Phone System Integration screen popping

We can pop up on screen customer details when they call. Their bookings history, enquiries, interaction history etc.  We can access all this data from your back office or external systems, CRM etc. 

The way it’s done is by building an index of all your data overnight – bringing together any systems you might have with a summary held under each phone number you have on record. Then when a call comes in, we look up the phone number and give you a list of the records from all the systems. It’s easy to do and it makes you look professional – and saves time. We implemented just such a system to an Avaya IP Office phone system. This all depends on what phone system you run as to whether it’s possible.

Product info keep your knowledge

Do you have a database of suppliers you use but don’t know how to search them, or where they are? We can geo-code them all (determine their longitude and latitude) and show you them on a map, with a click through to show you more information about the product; whatever information you have in your systems already, it can be shown.

We can also provide a search facility – for example, if you want to know what hotels you have on your system in the Cairngorms, or near to the Beatles Story, if your system doesn’t have such a search, then you are relying on your staff’s experience. This experience only lasts as long as the staff – so you need to consolidate that knowledge into a searchable database. This then becomes an asset that grows with you.

Customer profiling quantify it

Is there a trend as to where your customers live? It’s very easy to go on gut feeling and hearsay for this kind thing, and even if you are right, patterns change every year. Just because your biggest market five years ago was in Scotland, it doesn’t mean it is now. Only by properly quantifying your customer base can you know this. And if you don’t know this, how can you target your marketing?

Wallboards performance visibility

Do you have visibility of your sales volumes, targets and phone calls made for your whole company? A screen mounted in your office can be a useful way to give a live view of these – great for driving staff motivation and ensuring everyone is pulling their weight. If you don’t want it on display, it could just be a webpage you can visit on your local network instead.