How you can use Technology for Business Growth - Part 1 of 2

We often hear “I want to run my business in a more efficient way so I can focus on growing it while saving time automating processes”. Here's our article on using technology to grow your Automotive business.

As always you can listen by watching this video or read on...

An efficient business is a strong one. By enhancing business processes you will innovate, reduce costs, differentiate, and become more competitive from a financial perspective.

Why improve efficiency and effectiveness?

If you have an inefficient sales person or team then you'll need to employ more people and you'll miss out on many more opportunities. My personal goal is to be so efficient and effective that I don't need to work. Sound crazy? Well, if my business is so good, then I shouldn't need to work, and I like to think differently. Just because everybody goes to work 5 days a week (or more) why should that be the norm. I'm in the process of having my house renovated and the guy that's doing the work has been fantastic but when it comes down to it, he only earns when he works. He is efficient and effective but I'd want to go a step further and find ways to produce work and results without having to be there all the time, and this is where using the right technology comes in. Some ideas:

1. The ability to send emails without being in front of your computer
2. Being automatically reminded when you need to follow-up with somebody
3. Educating your new leads (automatically) so they're more qualified before sales speak to them.
4. Sharing on social media (automatically) when your latest website posts go live.

Even if you already have enough business and have no problem with sales, wouldn't it be good if you can use the right tools to make your life easier. If you're in business there's normally a personal motive and being efficient and effective can help.

Where to start to improve efficiency and effectiveness

First you'll want to keep up with the latest trends and advancements in the tech industry (in terms of tools) that are dedicated to streamlining and optimising business processes. You might want to subscribe to our blog with the latest ideas on sales, marketing, and websites or research using comparison websites such as G2 Crowd.

Technology is important but getting your team into the right mindset is also essential. Get your team to subscribe to the HubSpot Sales blog or start a monthly book club to learn new ways of working such as Discover Questions Get You Connected and Work Smarter Live Better.

Now lets look at the types of technology you have

1. Email
2. Email on mobile devices
3. Website
4. Email marketing
5. Website analytics
6. Automation
7. Live chat
8. CRM

All systems should connect seamlessly to make them easy to manage and so you have a truly centralised approach to see activity all in one place for every contact and company and to track ROI from all your activity.

And the areas that can be improved

We'll look at this from the perspective of business growth, which is generating leads, managing and nurturing contacts, analysing ROI and looking how to improve. Use as a checklist to see how many of these areas you already have covered and how many create new opportunities to improve.

Finding and converting leads

1. Create content for humans, but optimised for search engines.
2. Build multi-channel sales and marketing campaigns and track their success.
3. Build professional Calls to Action (CTAs) to convert website visitors into leads.
4. Use social advertising to quickly generate website traffic.
5. Have a fast, reliable, and secure website that connects your sales and marketing.
6. Build conversion-oriented landing pages that generate leads.
7. Create and publish blog articles so you get found and generate leads.
8. Publish updates across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms.
9. Convert visitors into leads and collect valuable lead intelligence with forms.
10. Have customisable pop-ups on your website as another way to generate leads.
11. Live chat on your website so your visitors can easily get in touch.

2. Manage and Nurture Leads

1. Automation to scale your growth and spend less time on repetitive tasks.
2. Segment your leads based on data or how they’ve engaged with you.
3. Lead scoring to help sales prioritise who they contact next.
4. Send personalised sales and marketing emails and measure success.
5. Smart content that automatically customises email and website content.
6. Ability to create custom lists to market and sell to the right contacts.
7. Make it easy to store, track, manage, and report on the day to day tasks.
8. Manage and report on deals that your sales team is working.
9. Use SSL on your website for security and to increase search visibility.
10. Segment contacts based on how each person interactions with your website.
11. Make calls from inside your CRM and automatically log to a contact’s record.
12. Make it easy for contacts to book calls and meetings with you.
13. Build a library of sales documents and track contacts that engage with them.
14. Use Templates and Snippets to save your sales team time on emailing.
15. Automate your sales teams follow-up emails and reminders to call.
16. Integrate all these 'tools' into Gmail or Outlook so they're easy to use.
17. Know what contacts are engaging with your emails, documents, and website.

3. Analyse and Calculate ROI

1. Analyse which activities are generating website visitors, leads, and customers.
2. Monitor your social media growth, engagement and ROI.
3. View the change in the growth of your contacts list.
4. Analyse the performance of your emails, even the reply rate of sales emails!
5. Create reports that tie all activity to website visitors, leads, and customers.
6. Link emails, blogs, CTAs, pages etc into campaigns to track performance.

That's it for part 1. In part 2 we'll look at putting that all together into a streamlined process, and what are your next steps. Part 2 will be published on 27th September 2018 so subscribe to our blog or get a sneak peak on our YouTube channel.

To learn more about how technology can improve your efficiency, start with How inbound sales and marketing works.

This article is part of our series on Business Growth for Automotive companies. In previous posts we've talked about Driving revenue by understanding your buyers, What is profitable growth, Working with a Business Growth Agency, and The importance of a sales and marketing strategy.