If we told you that there was a way to predict future sales that your business is likely to make, how would you react? There’s a good chance you would think that it was some kind of joke, or an elaborate hoax, perhaps.
Well, the truth is that there are actually ways for business owners to forecast how well – or not so well– their products or services will sell, as well as how much profit they are likely to make in a specific timeframe.
The best-kept secret in the industry? Sales forecasting software. If utilized correctly, this can be a game changer for your business’ sales.
If you are curious to find out more, look no further than our essential guide:
Sales Forecasting Software: What Is It?
To put it simply, sales forecasting can be one of the most crucial aspects of your company’s success.
It’s a sophisticated process that allows you to uncover invaluable information on how your products or services are performing, as well as how much your company will likely earn from them. And it doesn’t just offer information about how much you will earn by selling a specific product – it can also suggest best practices for when and how to sell that product.
You might be wondering, if sales forecasting is so important, then why is it estimated that by 2025, up to 90% of B2B companies will still be relying on intuitive methods instead of analytics to predict their sales?
Intuitive methods are less accurate, and conducting the sales forecasting process using a less accurate or even obsolete method can have a massively harmful impact. Faulty sales forecasting can induce a negative domino-like effect that trickles down through your entire corporation.
It is also worth mentioning that sales forecasting is not the same as setting sales targets. With sales targets, you are looking at what your company hopes or wants to achieve in terms of sales at a specific point in time, but without utilizing the same type of analytical forecasting models that the best sales forecasting software can conjure up.
Let’s have a closer look at the benefits that your organization can achieve through sales forecasting.
1. Optimizing Your Operations
If you run an ecommerce website, being able to predict the sales of specific items can be immensely valuable. It can, for instance, help you optimize your logistics, inventory, and supply chain operations, making sure that you always stock a good amount of your best-selling products.
But there’s more that sales forecasting can help you with. Departments like HR, accounting, and marketing all rely on accurate sales forecasting. Therefore, it’s vital that your company takes a modern, future-ready approach to forecasting.
2. Helping with Sales Pipeline Management
Managing your sales pipeline is another aspect of your business that is heavily dependent on top-notch sales forecasting. This is because it will enable you to provide your sales reps and sales manager with up-to-date, precise, and trusted information on your products or services, which in turn allows them to close deals faster and more effectively.
For example, you are forecasting for a specific product to sell exceptionally well during a particular time of the year, you will need to tweak your stock accordingly to ensure that there are enough items to satisfy your growing customers’ demand.
As a result, if your customers are able to purchase your business’ product without any complications or delays, then they are much more likely to come back to you next time they need to make the same purchase. They might even buy something else entirely. The ability to create a high level of customer retention is a valuable asset that your business should be taking full advantage of.
How Does Sales Forecasting Software Work?
If you have decided to take a more analytical stance towards sales forecasting, then a sales forecasting software platform can help. By using one of these, you will be able to condense and centralize some of the main sales forecasting tasks, which include:
Historical data: Sales forecasting software collects past sales data on specific products to provide an accurate prediction of how much that product is likely to sell in the future.
Sales funnel: The way your sales funnel looks at this moment in time can be considered a good predictor of future sales. The majority of sales forecasting software has in-built sales funnel capabilities that let you enter all the relevant data about your sales funnel and provide you with a prediction based on that.
Pipeline forecasting: This method helps you create sales predictions based on your current sales pipeline. It achieves this by combining a wide range of elements, including average sales cycle length, individual sales rep performance, deal health, historical data, marketing funnel, and more.
What’s great about working with a sales forecasting software tool is that you can automate, integrate, and centralize all the above tasks – and many more – instead of relying on manual work that is prone to inaccuracies, delays, and human error. Some sales forecasting software platforms can be considered akin to resilient distributed datasets, which means that they can easily deal with and interpret vast amounts of unstructured data.
Unlock the Potential of Sales Forecasting for Your Business
In a world where data remains king, using that data to help you predict how your products will sell and when you should sell them is a no-brainer. This is what sales forecasting allows you to achieve – enabling, in turn, to raise your customer satisfaction, increase your sales, and optimize your overall operations.
Taking an intuitive approach to sales forecasting is not only obsolete, but can cause serious damage to your business, leaving you more exposed to competitors and market fluctuations. On the other hand, a solid, analytics-driven line is what your business needs to thrive in the digital era – and beyond.
Every successful business needs to know its stock levels for all of the different products it sells. In a digital landscape, business management software makes the process of inventory management more efficient and accessible to business owners. Inventory software syncs data in real time and integrates processes to ensure the business owner’s peace of mind when it comes to tracking orders.
Different industries demand different requirements from businesses. It is important to look for the inventory software that serves you and your business the best and most fully. Once you integrate this kind of software into your business, you will find that not only are you improving the accuracy in tracking quantities, shipments, and materials, but also saving valuable time that your business can use to increase profitability in other areas.
Important Features of All-In-One Inventory Management Software
In order to find the right inventory software that serves the specific needs of your business, it is important to take into account some of the key features of inventory software. These include but are not limited to:
Inventory software keeps you on top of your orders and sales in an organized fashion while keeping you informed about all of your crucial KPIs in real-time. This is a proven method to avoid errors and discrepancies. For example, with the right business management software, you can improve your manufacturing processes by creating a bill of materials and labor, easily calculate material costs, update your inventory with new items, and create tasks for your staff.
In terms of order management, you are able to instantly create purchase orders, control vendor costs, record tracking and shipping information, and add images and notes to items. Integrating an inventory management system within all of the departments of your business can assure you understand all of the ins and outs of your finances in real time, most importantly your profitability.
On top of these features, a great business management software is able to be customized to suit your specific needs, allows your customers and vendors to communicate with your business representatives, provides an intuitive applicant tracking system and a complete inventory management system. It is recommended to look for an inventory software that is both comprehensive with optimized tools and can automate many routine and repetitive tasks. Also, it is important to consider the usability of the program to ensure that the management of your inventory becomes seamless and largely automated.
You may find that some software is easier to use than others. Some software focuses on enhancing work orders and B2B sales channels, while others adapt to a variety of business types. Automating processes and reducing costs to maximize profitability should be a staple of any easy-to-use inventory management software. Business management software systems can reduce operational costs as well as administrative costs, while increasing on-time deliveries.
Wrapping Up
Decisions about software are difficult when taking into account all of the seemingly unpredictable variables that may arise over time. For this reason, it’s crucial to know what your business needs and seek solutions that serve it best now and in the future. The best inventory software will support your process of buying and selling products to help your business succeed. The tools a business management software brings to the table allows you to operate your business more efficiently using automated real-time updates to quickly sell products and services while leaving customers completely satisfied. It is a proven way to increase sales and increase profits.
“Do I have any of this product left in stock? Did the order arrive on time? What are our customers saying? How do I track down the one specific product I need amongst the rest of my products in my inventory?”
While many growing businesses find themselves seeking a simple solution to the questions above, what sets the average business apart from the exceptional one is choosing the right inventory tracking software solution for their business. Inventory tracking software is an all-encompassing system integral to ensuring that your customers receive the product they desire and that you, the business owner, can efficiently restock, distribute, and follow up as to the location your product has been received.
To assist in selling physical goods, some form of inventory tracking technology is used by most types of businesses including retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. This technology can range from free tools to expansive (and *expensive*) systems. While there are businesses already utilizing the best inventory tracking software for their business, many fail to recognize the importance of implementing this kind of solution.
Inventory Tracking in Optimizing Business Efficiency
Inventory tracking software allows you always to know which SKUs you currently possess, where they are physically, and what quantity is available at each location. According to Gene Tyndall, a well-known supply chain thought leader, “If a product is in your inventory, you should know where it is in your system—in China, on a ship, in a distribution center, or with a retailer waiting to be sold.”
An inventory tracking system allows for improved fulfillment accuracy, increased warehouse productivity, faster shopping and deliveries, more savings, and better customer satisfaction.
Inventory tracking helps to alleviate typical business woes of disorganized inventory, poor picking and packing processes, and lack of stock control. Additionally, inventory tracking software can help in detecting theft and administrative errors that would otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to deal with. Your warehouse inventory management software will help your employees always to be able to know the levels of all existing stock items and their specific locations.
Inventory Tracking Methods and Applications
Inventory management software covers the acquisition, tracking, and shipping of products, can serve as a forecasting tool for customer demand, and it’s able to offer alerts and notifications to improve operational processes such as cycle counts. It effectively organizes inventory to make the picking and packing process more efficient, automates the order-picking process, and also helps you to determine the operational performance for each item in your catalog while offering inventory reports.
Inventory tracking is useful not only to producers of physical commodities but to a wide variety of other industries as well. For example, a restaurant owner needs to be able to accurately track their store’s inventory to ensure that they are able to sell their customers the food they would like to order.
Inventory Tracking Software Helps Your Bottom Line
A solution for inventory tracking means your business reaps monetary benefits due to your operations being efficient and organized. Optimizing your warehouse or facility means you can accurately estimate the space you’ll need in the not-so-distant future. Additionally, labor costs are mitigated as staff becomes more efficient and able to help get your orders out in a more timely and accurate manner. It helps to save staff from going through the trouble of carrying out inventory recounts and prevents stockouts. Also, implementing an inventory tracking solution will make it easier to retain a large base of loyal customers, as your business will be able to happily boast about having both a great product and a great track record for customer service.
Takeaway
Inventory tracking software allows businesses to stay ahead of their competition and meet the increasing demands of their customer base. With the right system, a business can efficiently restock their supplies right when they are in need of them, ensure accurate and timely deliveries, and even protect themselves from theft and errors. All in all, inventory tracking software allows for time to be spent on other crucial aspects of your business as well as Helping you make better decisions for the company in the future.
Customers get all the attention. After all, they’re the ones keeping the lights on. Your processes and procedures are designed with them in mind, you make critical decisions based on their needs and asks, and you do everything in your power to attract and retain them.
Bending over backward for your customers is by no means a bad business practice. What it does mean, however, is that it’s easy to become hyper-focused on all things “customer” and to lose track of other areas of importance. In this case, another critical group of people—your employees.
You value your employees tremendously. They are the backbone of your business, and their hard work is recognized through salary increases, promotions, and other commendations.
Employees love incentives—especially cash incentives. There’s nothing wrong with rewarding your employees for a job well done. It’s certainly part of a winning strategy. But, it’s not the only component that goes into building the best business possible when it comes to employee relationships.
Your investments in your employees need to go beyond bonuses, holiday parties, and awards. In some ways, your business needs to look at its employee relationships in the same light it would its customer relationships. It’s important to embrace how technology can improve areas such as employee communication, the onboarding process, reduce employee burnout, and the overall efficiency of their daily experience.
In short, enterprise resource planning software (ERP) under the umbrella of business management technology is capable of facilitating a better, more efficient employee experience that improves employee engagement—disengaged employees cost companies between $483 to $605 billion per year, and companies with more engaged employees outperform their counterparts by 202%.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways that business management technology can facilitate a more engaged, productive workforce and how that can have a positive impact on your bottom line.
How ERP Benefits Internal Communication
Even before the advent of widespread remote work, maintaining organization and accuracy in daily communication channels was a challenge. Now, the challenge has risen to an entirely new level.
If you have employees out in the field, they will most likely be calling or texting back to the office. Young and tech-savvy employees working remotely will have the inclination to use their favorite group messaging apps. The term is known as shadow IT where employees use familiar (to them) apps that have not been blessed by your IT department, typically for cybersecurity concerns.
And—even more prominently—most employees will still rely on traditional email chains as their primary method to relay information. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these channels of communication. However, there are two glaring problems when it comes to how they’re used:
1. They’re all disconnected systems that do not have a single, verifiable source of centralized data.
2. There is now an extraneous layer of separation between these communication channels and the work being done.
Transparency and Inclusion
One of the biggest and most immediate benefits that business management software offers in terms of employee communication is the fact that discussions are all happening within the system, with everyone on the same page.
In an atmosphere where all employees are encouraged to communicate, problems will be solved quickly. Oftentimes, problems that would have shown up later down the line will be stamped out quicker than ever when communication is at its peak.
Enabling transparent and inclusive communication empowers your employees to work productively and relay data faster. Another great way to empower employees is through corporate awards; in this way, they will feel more appreciated and productive. It will be favorable among your employees, and it will have a trickle-down effect on your customers who are seeing their problems and needs accounted for much more timely and efficiently.
Accurate, Real-Time Data
Sifting through various mediums of communication to find the “correct” set of data is one of the biggest time wasters that a company can face. One study found that employees spend 19.8% of their business time searching for information to do their job effectively.
If you’re not keeping your data clean, you could be missing out on opportunities to reach new customers or nurture relationships with existing ones. To create and maintain better data, you can use employee survey software tools and have better management.
Needless to say, improving the ways in which your employees send and receive information can save your business time and money.
Project Management Efficiency
Every type of business spends time working on projects of some kind. Whether it’s a construction job site, a catering event, or a financial planning document, you will have information in need of being stored, co-workers in need of being brought up to speed, and work that needs to be reviewed and revised. Thus you can give corporate awards to the most successful employees and enable their trust and dedication.
Instead of communicating about projects on a separate software app, communicate directly where the project data is stored. This way you can point to specific information, upload additional documents, and see a definitive edit history. You’ll be able to spend less time clarifying back-and-forth remarks and more time accomplishing the tasks at hand.
Adapting To Your Employees
Your employees are all truly one of a kind. Some employees are aces in analytical positions, while others are better suited for labor-focused tasks. Skillsets aren’t the only area of importance here—personalities also play a major role in the workplace. Some may be best suited for customer-facing positions, while others thrive in the back office environment.
Differing and diverse talent and personalities among your employees is an unequivocal strength. The hard part comes in pairing employees with others that complement their respective skill sets and personalities. While that requires some managerial expertise, business management software plays a vital role in empowering your employees to maximize their unique potential. Perhaps, take a look at branded corporate achievement awards to improve employee relationships and recognize outstanding achievers.
Automation Enables Creativity
While automation doesn’t directly contribute to creativity, it provides more of the most significant element necessary for creativity to flourish—time. Right now, 67% of organizations are implementing business process automation solutions. And around 85% of business leaders, believe that automating some of this workload will give employees more time to focus on crucial company initiatives.
The truth is, one of the easiest ways for employees to become burnt out and unproductive in their role is when they are required to perform large amounts of menial and repetitive tasks. By utilizing business management technology, your employees can get back to not only the work that they do best but also the work that keeps them highly motivated and productive.
Remote Work
Some employees work best in a lively atmosphere surrounded by lots of people and activity, while others work best in quiet solitude. In the last couple of years, the latter type of worker has thrived. While not every person is at their best working remotely, nor can every job be completed in this way, it can be highly productive for those that embrace it.
47% of employees that work remotely are more productive, and on average these employees end up working one additional day per week.
ERP business management software gives your employees the freedom to work in an atmosphere that suits their strengths while not sacrificing any of the communication or data visibility traditionally reserved for those working in the office.
Enhanced Decision Making
While you still may leave the bulk of the decision-making up to the executives within your business, it’s always a good idea to aggregate ideas from every person involved, not just executives. Using the tools that business management software has to offer, your employees will have faster access to better data, enabling them to make smarter decisions.
Giving employees more leeway to dive headfirst into data facilitates more openness within your organization and gives way to better ideas being developed. Even if your average employee isn’t responsible for making the final decision, having those conversations within your organization from top to bottom will prove the theory that two heads are always better than one.
Wrapping Up
Focusing on the relationship between you and your employees—as well as the relationships that employees have with each other—is really important. In fact, it can be viewed as an extension of focusing on your relationship with your customers.
If your employees are empowered to work their best, they’ll be best set up to serve your customers in an optimal fashion. Giving your employees the tools to communicate about projects, allowing them the opportunity to make intelligent decisions, and overall promoting an atmosphere of open communication, inclusion, and transparency will help every employee in your company reach their full potential, thereby helping your company achieve the most that it possibly can.
Business expense is a touchy subject. It’s not always easy to know how much to spend, or even what to spend it on—especially when it comes to new technologies. Ultimately, when it comes to business management technology, the true financial risk comes from sitting on the sidelines.
The Aberdeen Group reports that small businesses that implement ERP, CRM, and other business management technologies reduce operational costs by 23%, administrative costs by 22%, and increase on-time deliveries by 24%.
Overall, 95% of businesses surveyed achieved major improvements after utilizing interconnected module ERP software.
Despite many small business executives being aware of the positive financial impact that utilizing business management solutions can have, it’s common to still be wary about actually diving in head first and implementing these solutions.
Some common questions that small business owners ask themselves about business management technology would be:
“How do I know what technology can support the unique components of my business?”
“With so many different solutions on the market, how do I parse through them?”
“Will the perceived discomfort of implementing this technology be worth it?”
“Is my business big enough to warrant the use of a business management software solution?”
Answers to these questions are never immediate or obvious. It takes time to research, analyze, and find the best fit for your company—but first, you need a plan:
How To Know When It’s Time To Invest In Software
1. When Scheduling Is Going Awry
Businesses use all kinds of apps for scheduling. Google provides handy calendars, and many people simply use the calendar built-in on their phones. And yes, physical calendars hanging on the wall still exist, too.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these types of calendars, it becomes an issue when they become out of sync. Some employees work remotely, some are constantly in the field, and others simply don’t adhere to the conventional 9-5.
Having to constantly ask “Are you free to meet at ___?” becomes an inefficient and unproductive use of time when multiplied across an entire organization every single day. This doesn’t take into account the importance of scheduling meetings with customers and others outside of your company.
It’s important to have a single, accurate, universal calendar that you and all of your employees can access from anywhere. It should contain all of the various tasks, milestones, and time-off considerations needed to have a streamlined workday free of confusion and schedule conflicts.
2. When Remote Work Becomes Challenging
Since 2020, remote work has evolved to change the way businesses operate. Many employees report higher levels of productivity, reduced stress, and financial freedom when they’re able to do their jobs from home—or, really, anywhere that isn’t the office.
While remote work has by and large been a benefit for businesses that have been able to make such a transition, it hasn’t come without proper planning and management.
HR departments need to adjust their practices, project management strategies have to adapt to geographically scattered employees, and customer relationships need to be maintained in new ways—the list goes on. At the heart of the way that these new norms come to be is the technology used to facilitate them.
3. When You Spend Too Much Time On Tedious Tasks
Mundane tasks are often important tasks but that doesn’t mean you should be spending a disproportionately large amount of time on them. Put another way, there are often smarter ways to tackle these kinds of tasks.
Automation is one of the key benefits of business management software. Tracking inventory, managing employee certifications, accounting, and even market campaigns are some of the areas where software can benefit your business.
4. When Growth Is Imminent
While you don’t have a crystal ball to tell you exactly when your new customers will roll in, there are ways to know when growth is on the horizon. The cumulative effect of the work you and your employees have been doing for years eventually pays off. Sometimes it takes months, other times it takes years. But if you don’t properly plan for the success coming your way, you’ll be behind the curve when it comes time to manage a higher volume of business.
As the old adage goes, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Look at business management software in the same light—invest in an ERP for the company you want to grow into, not for the company you are at this very moment.
5. When Your Decisions Are Solely Gut-Based
Many small business owners rely on their intuition to make decisions. Entrepreneurship is full of success stories that come from decisions based on “gut feel.” While this can be effective when a business is just starting and has no data to pull from, it’s a whole different ball game when it comes to making decisions once years and years of data is available.
For example, take Walmart. Not a small business, obviously, but every business starts somewhere. In Walmart’s early days, they were suffering setbacks by selling products at such a low cost that it wasn’t profitable. To paraphrase Sam Walton’s gut instinct, “If I offer the lowest prices, I’ll eventually generate the highest volume.” Obviously, this paid off.
Flash forward to today. Do you think that the executives at Walmart are making their decisions based on gut instinct alone? While they certainly rely on human intelligence, they more importantly rely on swathes of customer data, sales figures, production trends, material costs, and countless other data points.
While you won’t necessarily have billions of dollars to throw into an R&D department, you do have the option to utilize business management software to help guide you to better, more data-driven decisions.
6. When You Need To Pay More Attention To Customer Relationships
Reaching potential customers is hard, conversions are even harder, and retaining a regular customer base is the hardest of all. It’s easy to get excited about customers arriving en masse. But in reality, is your sales and administrative staff logistically prepared to handle a large influx of customers?
One of the biggest benefits that business management software can offer a growing company is the ability to automate parts of the sales funnel. The human touch is still crucially important to the process, make no mistake—that’s exactly why it’s crucial to adopt automation technology.
Automating email campaigns, customer surveys, and the inputting of sales data within your system will allow the people within your business to direct more human attention to the people deciding to purchase your product or service, not to the back-office work done behind the scenes.
7. When You Need Data Redundancy
With many staff members across all industries routinely working remotely, data security has taken on an increased level of importance. Hopefully, even if your business’ files are stored on a local hard drive, you have some sort of data protection and/or backups in place.
If this isn’t the case, or your backups are located on scattered flash drives and external hard drives, it may be time to invest in the cloud-powered data redundancy technology that business management software offers.
Cloud storage is the safest way to back up your most precious data and documents. Decentralized across multiple servers and protected by world-class encryption technology, your data will be actively protected by security professionals.
In a 2021 study led by IBM, the average cost of a small business data breach for companies with less than 500 employees was $2.8 million dollars. Needless to say, this is a cost small businesses simply cannot afford.
8. When Your Employees Are Burnt Out
Work-related stress is going to happen with or without business management software. That’s just a fact of life. Meeting project deadlines and landing a big customer may always be stress-inducing events, but the methods by which those goals are accomplished don’t always have to be stressful.
Issues like missing documents, faulty financial data, and communication breakdowns don’t have to add stress to an already stressful professional workload. If your employees have voiced any of these concerns—or if you’ve felt them personally—take that as a sign to explore some business management software solutions.
9. When Compliance Measures Take On Increased Importance
Whether it’s meeting OSHA requirements, getting documents ready for tax season, or just maintaining general legal compliance throughout your operations, it’s financially and fiscally prudent to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to keeping things organized.
Having trouble locating this data, let alone losing it outright, can cost you and your business in both the short and long term.
If your business is able to keep this data centralized and easily accessible to all necessary parties, you’ll be able to find information and make updates quickly without having to delay any contracts, miss tax deadlines, or lose any customers.
10. When You’re Spending Too Much On Technology
There will always be some costs that will be unavoidable. Computers eventually get old, cables eventually fray, and interns eventually spill a pot of coffee all over the keyboard. It happens.
What doesn’t have to happen is the large-scale purchasing of equipment such as servers and software on a routine basis. Sure, software upgrades always occur no matter the type of software you’re working with, but it doesn’t always have to come in the form of a massive expenditure.
Most business management software bills on a monthly basis, with software routinely being upgraded on a monthly or quarterly basis. When it comes to expensive servers, you can cut them out entirely. Powered by the cloud, the cost of maintaining servers falls on the service provider, not you.
Where To Find Reliable Information
Finding reliable information is one of the most challenging things about today’s hyper-digitalized society. When it comes to making big business decisions, it’s important to act off of smart and reliable information.
Beyond the basic subscription costs and features, it’s important to dig into some of the finer details about the software you select to manage your business operations. Onboarding, implementation, and training costs, customer support packages, and verified user testimonials are just some of the pieces of information to consider throughout your search.
Fortunately, there are trustworthy websites dedicated to helping businesses like yours make the smartest decisions possible. When it comes to your business, you can’t be too thorough.
G2
G2.com is an industry leader in all things software—they’ve compiled over 1.5 million authentic software reviews for ERPs, video conferencing solutions, eCommerce platforms, and much more.
Their goal is to help businesses make better decisions about technology. You can break down the pros and cons of each software listed on their site as well as compare prices and features between various software solutions.
One of the greatest advantages that G2 offers is the way that it displays its user reviews. Users are asked about the pros, cons, and overall “whys” for each respective software title, and users also list the type of business they represent, what industry they serve, and how many employees are in their organization.
For example, there could be lots of glowing reviews about a software solution that primarily services large-scale manufacturing companies. While this software is great, it may not be great for your business, which, for example, could be a small catering company with 20 employees. Knowing the specifics of the businesses behind the reviews makes all the difference.
Capterra
Capterra.com is another industry-leading software review website that has compiled over 1.5 million verified reviews in over 800 software categories.
Their mission is to list every software product on the market so that every business can adequately search for its perfect software match. Founded in 1999, they’ve always been one of the leading free resources for software reviews.
Capterra breaks down its user reviews into an intuitive format. It asks users about the pros and cons of each software product while gathering a 1 thru 5-star rating in 5 categories—overall rating, ease of use, customer service, features, and value for money. It also lists a “likelihood To recommend” category that’s based on a 1 thru 10 scale.
Another great feature that Capterra offers is the ability to see what software alternatives users considered before settling upon their final choice, and what software they had previously switched from. With so many solutions available, it’s very helpful to have this firsthand knowledge.
Custom Demos
When it comes to software, the best way to see if it’ll work for you is always to try it yourself. Fortunately, that doesn’t require diving headfirst into a contractual commitment.
Most reputable software companies will offer you a free, custom demo of their software. It’s important to know that certain specificities within your operations can be accounted for.
For example, accounting software that doesn’t offer the ability to translate financial metrics into Canadian dollars may not be a good fit for your manufacturing business that has several clients in Canada. Or, if your business works on government contracts, you’d want to make sure that certain data can not be viewed by certain users within the system.
Even if your business is a somewhat run-of-the-mill operation, getting a demo of the software is a great way to ensure that the user experience, onboarding processes, and data management tools are up to far for the requirements you set forth.
How To Pick The Right Fit For Your Business
So far we’ve covered when it’s time to start looking for business management software solutions and where to find the best information. Now, it’s time to explore how your business can pick the software that’s the “right fit.”
“Right fit” is a somewhat ambiguous term. It means different things for different businesses, even within the same industry. To put it another way, finding the right software fit is a lot like exploring the dating world.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, ask the right questions, and steer clear of red flags. It’s also important not to compromise what you want. Just like in the often chaotic, yet often wonderful world of dating, there are some general guidelines to keep in mind. But don’t forget, the right matches rarely fit inside of a broadly definable box—they require you to decide what you want and to make it happen.
Accounting Needs Accounted For
We’ll start with accounting because, well, it’s always about the money. It’s certainly not the only facet of software that’s important, but it’s something that’s universal among all businesses. And quite frankly, some software solutions do it better than others.
Strong reporting functionality, connectivity to the cloud, and automation capabilities are some of the “must-have” boxes that need to be checked off for competitive, modern business management software.
It’s also important to have a system that can be easily accessed by your customers and vendors. This way customers can pay invoices online, vendors can submit purchase orders and submit bills, and a full record of all transaction history can be pulled up with a click.
In today’s professional environment, it pays to utilize the best technology available—businesses that use cloud accounting software acquire five times more customers than businesses that don’t. Five times! Not only do the automation capabilities that come along with cloud accounting software reduce costs and increase efficiency, but customers will also feel better about trusting a company that trusts the best software on the market.
Project and Task Management Is A Breeze
At the end of the day, what does your work boil down to? The small tasks and projects that comprise the larger work that you do year after year. As a business owner, your job is to keep the big picture in clear view while still maintaining a firm grasp of what needs to be done on a granular basis.
With the right project management software, you’ll be able to do just that. It’s more than just assigning tasks and responsibilities, it’s about assigning the right people to the right jobs, keeping customers in the loop, and managing changes on the fly.
The best way to manage projects is by utilizing a microscope that can adjust from a wide-ranging, zoomed-out point of view to a hyper-specific, zoomed-in view and everywhere in between. Obviously, this is a metaphor for being able to manage both the big picture and granular details (unless you’re a scientist or something, then you can take this literally.)
Right now, only 22% of businesses take advantage of project management software despite the fact that 77% of high-performing projects undertaken by businesses put project management software to use. Project management capabilities are one of the many ways that business management software can keep your business ahead of the curve.
Top Notch Customer Support
Even high-performing software is only as good as the people behind it. It’s a lot like the food service industry—a restaurant could have the tastiest menu in the world, but if your waiter screws up your order and brings out a cold plate of food, it’s hard to say that this restaurant delivers upon its potential.
Business management software falls under the same ideological umbrella. The system could be top-notch from a technical perspective, but if the customer service and implementation teams do not properly assist your business in unlocking its full value, then it isn’t likely to be the best fit.
Even in our tech-centric world, it still takes a proper human touch for a business to succeed using a business management software solution. Every business is unique—developing a relationship with the people behind the software to make sure that the software accommodates your needs is a crucial aspect of success.
All-in-all, customer service and support is crucial. 90% of Americans take customer service into account when deciding whether or not to do business with a company, and 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase if they have a positive experience.
Wrapping Up
Making decisions—especially large financial decisions that affect your entire business—is never easy. There are so many variables to take into account. And once you’ve taken all of those variables into account, you’ll find even more to consider.
At the end of the day, it comes down to knowing what your business wants and needs and conducting a thorough research process to seek out solutions that accomplish your goals. Business management software is never a one-size-fits-all solution for every business, but with the right tools, you can find the one that fits you and your business.
Running a business is a high-stakes balancing act. Accounting, inventory, talent acquisition, and customer relationship management are just some of the countless items that business owners, operations managers, and other executive-level employees need to manage and master simultaneously.
In addition, you have to actively keep in mind the most important rule of all: in order to succeed, you need to keep moving forward.
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of tasks and responsibilities that come with the territory of operating a small business. Even with reliable employees to delegate to, the hardest-working small business owners and executives still struggle to sort through and properly prioritize everything that needs to be done. There’s no one size fits all method to success—every business in every industry (not to mention every business owner and executive) is different. The challenges each face are different, sometimes drastically so, and will require different solutions.
When time is of the essence—which almost always seems like the case—it can be tempting to just simply get to work. Simply “getting to work”, implies answering the first email that you see, handling the first employee request you receive, or otherwise jumping into the throes of daily labor. In other words, many people responsible for overseeing numerous tasks and departments default to focusing entirely on a single task without always keeping in mind the bigger picture of what needs to be accomplished.
Integrated Software Systems Help You Work Smarter
Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as having said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”
There’s something comforting about working hard. It provides purpose, clarity, and the peaceful satisfaction of pure, unadulterated accomplishment. Hard work is the foundation of any business and is a core personality trait of any successful businessperson. Hard work is the foundation of anything worthwhile and substantial in this world.
For someone whose job description centers around a singular or just a small handful of tasks (i.e. making cold calls, assembling a product, or counting inventory) putting your head down and getting to work is typically the best course of action.
But those who manage small businesses at a high level know all too well that their job description is never just one thing. It’s about being a career chameleon—sometimes the job calls for being a marketing director, sometimes it calls for being an accountant. Other times it calls for being a hands-off facilitator that’s able to successfully delegate and put others in a position to succeed.
Because small business leadership roles are so prone to widely fluctuating responsibilities, it’s not (just) about hard work. It’s about smart work.
It’s not about any one email, sale, or decision. It’s about all of them. It’s about how they affect each other, how processes are able to cohesively mesh with one another, how action items are prioritized, and how keeping a big-picture perspective at all times enhances the effectiveness of your business strategy. It requires every small decision to be made with the business’ overarching, long-term goals in mind.
Analyzing Unintegrated Software Systems and Inefficient Processes
Sometimes, it even requires taking a further step backward to understand how and why tasks are completed, and whether the processes for completing them can be improved upon.
Taking a step backward to address the big “whys” and “hows” of the processes and procedures within your business is often one of the most difficult things for business owners to do.
When your business is already successful, it actually makes this process of introspection and analysis a bit harder. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality reigns with authority in the headspace of many business owners.
It isn’t about fixing something that is broken—don’t change what your business does (selling car parts, repairing computers, shipping home decor, etc.) but rather it’s about updating and adjusting the processes, methods, and integrated business software solutions surrounding how your business goes about achieving these goals.
For example:
If you have been successfully reaching customers via word of mouth in order to sell your products, you may want to ask “How can I market my products more effectively, profitably, and on a larger scale?”
Suppose you have been successfully tracking your inventory and sales by utilizing spreadsheets and actual sheets of paper. In that case, you may want to ask “How can I more reliably sort, analyze, and keep my data safe?”
If you have been successfully sending field technicians to their job sites but have been exclusively using text messages and phone calls to communicate financial, customer, and job site data, you might ask “How can I implement a more streamlined system for transmitting sensitive data from the field to the office and vice versa?”
What do the processes described in these common scenarios all have in common?
The processes being relied upon are unintegrated and disconnected.
These processes are centered around outdated technology or inefficient methodologies.
The unintegrated and antiquated nature of these processes does not allow for a clear, big-picture focus to be implemented at every level of decision-making and action, hindering growth, scalability, and profitability.
For small businesses, the first step to moving forward should be to take a step back and analyze the process-level improvements that can be made in terms of utilizing technology to optimize workflows and processes.
This isn’t to say that every procedure within your company needs to be overhauled or that every piece of technology your business owns is now rendered useless—it’s about making sure that every procedure within your company is connected in the most optimal fashion, and that employees are going about their business in the most efficient way possible. From accounting to CRM to projects to onboarding, the interconnectedness of data points and information is a catalyst for better strategic and financial outcomes.
For small businesses, it pays to take note of the strategies large enterprises are backing:
Data-driven companies are growing at a rate of about 30% annually.
91.9% of leading companies are accelerating their “big data” investments.
It’s worth noting that these organizations have a (much) higher budget than small businesses do. They will be able to leverage gargantuan data sets from across the globe faster than any small business is capable of. That doesn’t diminish the fact that the strategy of utilizing fully integrated systems is a winning one. In fact, there are many ways that small businesses can put the same strategies to work.
Before these organizations implemented innovative, integrated business management technology in order to leverage their data, they made the important first step that we discussed earlier: taking a step back to assess what improvements could be made to their existing processes and operations and what downsides arise due to disconnected systems.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common challenges caused by process inefficiencies at the technological level and the effects that addressing these problems at their root can have.
Challenges Caused By Disconnected Software Systems
Delayed Data and Reporting
Having accurate data is good—but having accurate, real-time, and easily accessible data is great. When relying on various and scattered spreadsheets, text messages, and emails to find important information, both accuracy and efficiency suffer, leading to slower overall time to task completion.
In all, businesses lose about 20% of their potential revenue due to poor-quality data.
This could potentially have a trickle-down effect in all phases of your business. For example, an incorrect or lagging inventory count will throw sales numbers into a state of confusion, therefore increasing the amount of time accountants spend trying to find accurate information. They’ll need to consult various records in order to rectify the numbers. Not only will this result in wasted time, it could potentially result in a customer not being able to fulfill their order due to incorrect inventory figures.
Wasted Productivity
Time is always of the essence—when it comes to the information that your business needs to function each day, the less time that can be spent searching for the accurate version of said information eats into productivity. In fact, if there are multiple versions of the same data at all, that should be an indicator that this is a process to be improved upon.
Wasted time hurts businesses in more ways than one. When employees at all levels are utilizing inefficient processes, it not only takes away from additional productivity, it lowers the overall accuracy of the information, therefore leading to an increased lack of productivity by having to solve errors when they arise. Yes, errors are inevitable, but taking substantial efforts to reduce their frequency and severity will pay off in the long run.
Increased Cost
While faulty data and decreased productivity lead to reduced revenue, there are other elements that can lead to inefficient processes and systems that generate an increased cost.
Odds are, you utilize some sort of technology to manage your customer data, accounting needs, and other standard types of operations. Are these technologies built to connect to each other? When something goes wrong, is there a single entity you can contact, or will you have to spend additional time and money on customer support from various technology providers to get to the root of the problem? Have you had to spend additional time both learning and teaching your employees the ins and outs of several, separate software systems?
With the ever-increasing costs associated with goods and labor, it’s imperative that the technology your business relies on to function properly provides a net positive cost-benefit ratio.
Wrapping Up
Integrated software systems technology can and should be used as a boon to improve your business at a holistic level. At the end of the day, technology is a means to an end—that end is making your business operate more efficiently and profitably than it did the day before.
