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Eight Recommendations for Back-Office VARs to Help Businesses Focus on Their Customers

Eight Recommendations for Back-Office VARs to Help Businesses Focus on Their Customers. Sheryl Kingstone Director skingstone@yankeegroup.com. Agenda. The state of small and medium-sized businesses Alleviate SMB concerns with value-added front office insight

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Eight Recommendations for Back-Office VARs to Help Businesses Focus on Their Customers

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  1. Eight Recommendations for Back-Office VARs to Help Businesses Focus on Their Customers Sheryl Kingstone Director skingstone@yankeegroup.com

  2. Agenda • The state of small and medium-sized businesses • Alleviate SMB concerns with value-added front office insight • Back-office powers the front office • Final eight recommendations for success selling the 360º

  3. The Connected Company Source: Yankee Group, 2007

  4. Vision Matches Desire “More than 45% of respondents stated their top need was to integrate different systems and standalone applications.” — Yankee Group 2006 US Small & Medium Business Applications and Web Survey Source: Yankee Group 2006 US Small & Medium Business Applications and Web Survey

  5. Information Silos, Insufficient Staff, and Outdated Business Applications Are Top IT Application Challenges What is the primary technology challenge facing your business? Very small businesses struggle with assessing new technologies N = 722 Source: Yankee Group 2006 US Small & Medium Business Applications and Web Survey

  6. Price Is Still the Main Obstacle to Solving IT Problems What is the primary inhibitor of your company’s ability to adopt new technology solutions? Secondary inhibitors (not displayed): Medium and mid-market companies concerned with the complexity of solutions and ease of integration into their network Very small and small companies more concerned about the possibility of downtime and often don’t see the benefit of technology N = 722 Source: Yankee Group 2006 US Small & Medium Business Applications and Web Survey

  7. SMBs Concerned with Reacting Quickly to Market Conditions and Growing Revenue What business-related challenges is your company facing? Very small businesses more concerned about attracting new customers N = 722 Source: Yankee Group 2006 US Small & Medium Business Applications and Web Survey

  8. SMBs Have Similar Challenges to Larger Counterparts • A key challenge for SMBs is finding the right solution set that can deliver the requisite functionality to enable them to compete with their large enterprise counterparts. • A business strategy for an SMB has many of the same desired outcomes as in a large enterprise, including improved customer selection, acquisition, retention and expansion. Therefore, the key business drivers are similar, specifically: • Manage the customer lifecycle from first contact, to contract, to cash and to care. • Become a more customer-centric organization. • Create seamless processes and open communication among company employees, partners and customers for better management and control of information.

  9. Businesses Can’t Answer Critical Business Questions • Who are my most profitable customers, and what have they purchased? • What are the current opportunities that our sales team and partner network are working on, and when are they expected to close? • Which marketing campaigns generated revenue and why? • Are we allocating the right resources to the right opportunities? • Is the information necessary to complete the order available efficiently and accurately? • What are the past and current service requests from this customer, and do they have an outstanding payment?

  10. Manual Processes and Siloed Information Permeate Source: Yankee Group, 2007

  11. Alleviate SMB Concerns with Value-Added, Front-Office Insight • The answer is an integrated suite of business applications that work together seamlessly to help companies keep an eye on their overall operations and business results. • The goal is to gain accurate and timely information for quicker decision-making with customers, partners, employees and suppliers. • As with any successful IT project, companies use a combination of strategy, technology and people to tackle such issues as shortening the order-to-cash, issue-to-resolution and lead-to-order cycle times.

  12. Don’t Rely Only on Back-Office Applications • CRM encompasses departmental applications such as sales automation, marketing automation and customer service and support. • Most businesses implement CRM to leverage insight from a complete 360-degree view of the customer across back-office and front-office applications to increase sales revenue, improve customer service and enhance marketing campaigns. • CRM can do more than just improve customer relationships: • It can enhance marketing efficiency by enriching the data used to design and execute campaigns. • It can reduce operational costs by eliminating redundant or wasteful tasks. • CRM can also lead to significant improvements in customer satisfaction and, in the long term, increase revenue and customer loyalty.

  13. Customer-Facing Integration Benefits Source: Yankee Group, 2007

  14. Employee-Facing Integration Benefits Source: Yankee Group, 2007

  15. The Connected Company Empowered by the 360-Degree View Source: Yankee Group, 2007

  16. The Connected Creates a Competitive Advantage “The ultimate goal is to understand how the connected applications and business can improve the ability of organizations to manage their customers, partners and internal processes, which will enable them to create a competitive advantage.” — Sheryl Kingstone, Director of Customer Centricity, Yankee Group

  17. The Good News Is that Companies Are Allocating Dollars to Achieve this Vision • Because 85% of our respondents have already invested in back-office applications such as accounting applications, CRM applications will be in demand to address their need to attract new customers and grow revenue. “More than 52% of small and medium businesses will increase their application spending by 15%.” — Yankee Group 2006 US Small & Medium Business Applications and Web Survey

  18. Eight Recommendations for VARs for Success in Selling the 360-Degree View • Provide needed guidance to businesses interested in becoming fully connected. • Use back-office knowledge as the foundation to help businesses create success strategies and processes before implementing software. • Convince management that the integrated strategy is critical for long-term viability. • Use flexible account management solution to enable collaboration and team selling to effectively close the deal.

  19. Eight Recommendations for VARs for Success in Selling the 360-Degree View • Sell a solution that offers a visual dashboard of integrated information. • Realize back-office value-added resellers offer strong expertise to sell front-office software—especially to businesses that require processes around the order. • Partner with specialist front-office CRM VARs. • Investigate front-office packages that easily integrate with the back-office application or offer a complete suite.

  20. Thank You Sheryl Kingstone Director skingstone@yankeegroup.com www.yankeegroup.com

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