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Business Tips 2: Baby Boomers are expensive typists

New Business Tips series aimed at helping sales operations.

Baby boomers are now in or near their 60’s, and all that experience is about to head for retirement.  You are faced with some of your most expensive employees with the most experience who won’t be around for too many more years.  What is more, they are being bogged down with basic data entry work instead of maximising their value.

Here is one simple example we helped with.  The most senior and successful sales person at an IT business was spending nearly 40% of their time looking up standard items and populating quotes and then updating CRM.  Ask yourself, what is the key value points of your best sales staff?  I would wager that they are excellent at engaging with the customer and know how to close a deal. So why not give them time to do more of this.

It takes time to achieve quality

Give them time to go deeper and wider with their customers, time to properly follow up leads and generate new opportunities. Another partner we worked with stated that they were able to reduce costs while getting much higher customer satisfaction stats resulting in a lift in profits in the range of 20%.

Document & Understand Success

There are many ways to improve overall efficiency and most importantly hold onto knowledge. The first place to start is with documented & standardised processes.

Do you spend time understanding SUCCESS?  Most of us are quick to pull apart a lost deal but how much effort goes into analysing why we WON a deal and then documenting this to build into our process.

As we build this documentation and train support staff we make our most expensive staff all the more efficient and effective.

Automate

Next is to consider how we can automate some of the process and remove cumbersome systems and double entry.

Staff Tiering

Finally, is there room to move some of the standard and repetitive items to other staff.  This could be local or overseas based support staff.  The key is to maximise efficiency.

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