Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Thursday, April 15th, 2021
I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the Eleventh episode of our show,
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With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headline
China rebukes its tech giants, signaling the end of unchecked growth
Over recent months, china has been taking steps to discipline ecommerce giant Alibaba, a china based amazon competitor that is the 3rd largest ecommerce company in the world, after amazon and JD, also from China, due to comments made by Alibaba CEO Jack Ma that were critical of the CCP Regime. On Tuesday evening by US timezones, they took that a step further, and called 34 of the largest companies in china, including such giants as JD, the largest chinese retailer, Tencent, who makes games and software, Ant Group, a Paypal equivalent, and ByteDance, the owner of popular social media platform TikTok, to a summit, warning them that, Quote "The red line of laws cannot be touched." Clearly, China has grown concerned that their tech giant's influence was beginning to outstrip that of the regime itself, a pattern we see in the west as well, as companies like facebook, google, and amazon have wide reaching influence rivaling that of their host countries on global politics. This discussion, along with the billions of dollars of fines levied on Alibaba in recent months since Ma's comments indicate that China is not comfortable with the rapid expansion of its giants, as it threatens to leave the more western facing companies like ByteDance and Alibaba, in a position where they could slip out of grasp.
So, what does this mean for your business?
Well, since 2019 or so, many companies have been looking to remove Chinese companies from their supply chain, and many chinese companies, where permitted, have looked to move manufacturing and leadership roles out of China, however, for those who haven't, this promises greater volatility. Furthermore, it can be difficult to identify places where your supply chain interacts with some of these companies. For instance, AliExpress, Alibaba's western facing storefront, is used for a variety of unique small parts that might serve as subcomponents in equipment that you purchase elsewhere, or even be purchased in bulk by american companies to resell on amazon and ebay. Some of these components can't be easily acquired elsewhere. For these parts, we can expect lead time to go up as these companies reengineer their business practices to comply with the more specific demands Beijing is placing on them, along with a possible increase in prices. In the long term, we can expect the rising stars of Alibaba and Tencent to fade in the west, as China has signaled it values cultural dominance over its peoples over the market dominance these companies are seeking to acheive on a global scale. Generally speaking, we can expect less competition out of China in our business endeavors.
With that done, let's continue the conversation we started yesterday about CRMs, and now focus on the sales side of things. What should a good sales software provide to you as a business, and how do these functions help you turn more leads into signed deals?
So, let's look at the basics of what your Sales system should be doing for you, and how this can help you land more sales.
Lead management- your sales engine should be keeping track of every contact you have made to every potential customer. The last thing you want to do is bombard a lead with materials from multiple salespeople purusing them, or give them the same materials more than once because you've forgotten what you sent them after abandoing their account as a lead for a few months. Either makes you look unprofessional and disorganized, not exactly a scenario you want for a potential. By being able to see a list of every lead, and every time you've contacted them, their current status, and data on them that you have such as emails for decisionmakers or headcount estimates, you can send more applicable material to your leads and get that material in the right hands so that it gets seen, and you get leads reaching back out to you, rather than the other way around.
Campaign management. If you advertise in multiple channels, it can be hard to keep track of your advertising spend, and what channels give you the best success rate or most lucrative clients. As a result, balancing your available marketing budget and time for optimal returns can be finnicky at best, and based off gut feeling and guesses at worst. A good CRM should allow you to track your campaigns, see their effectiveness over time, what leads got into your pipeline via which methods, and the individual close rates based off where your leads entered these pipelines. With a little bit of work, you can turn this into a calculation that tells you how much revenue would come from additional investment of X amount into each pipeline, and what sizes of accounts might be expected. You should also be able to send things like follow up campaign emails from your CRM or a linked system, and this should be reflected in your list of contacts for an account.
Real time data. You should be able to see the click rate on your ads throughout the day, to be able to see how wording tweaks, new keywords, and time of day affect your ads effectiveness so that you can tune your ads easily and optimally, to make sure your ads are being clicked on by the right people at the right time to make a decision.
In that same vein, your CRM should support the ability to have seperate versions of materials to do A/B testing on, for instance, testing email subject lines between two options on a small portion of your email list, so that you can send out a marketing email with the more successful headline to everyone else. This will result in more clicks on your emails, which in turn means more engagement with your brand from existing and potential customers alike.
The theme of the last few points has been analytics. Let's take a look at a few of the things a good CRM should be calculating for you.
Monthly sales, which helps you with revenue projection
Monthly new leads, which helps you forecast the demand put on your sales team
Lead to sale conversion rate, helps you find where in your sales funnel you are loosing people, and helps you project revenue growth, and examine broader trends such as sales team performance or general economic trends that might be affecting your sales rate.
Cost per conversion, as hinted above, this will allow you to project revenue growth based off your investment into marketing
Net Promoter score, which will allow you to keep track of your efforts to build a stronger referral business to reduce your long term marketing costs.
With these analytics, you should be able to more thoroughly tune your marketing and sales engine to make your marketing dollars translate into more accounts with less of that dollar spent on labor and more spent on ads, prints, and the like. It also allows you to get more value out of your email list to get more accounts closed from drip activities rather than direct outreach, which, of course, scales much more cheaply than outbound methods.
As talked about yesterday, your CRM should be able to serve as your single source of truth for your business. This is equally true for your sales team as your fulfillment teams. You should be able to determine what your status is with an account without ever leaving your CRM, and be able to know that that data is accurate because your business processes demand it to be so. This allows supervisors to quickly get a view of what's going on with any individual lead without having to interrupt the workflow of the employee working said lead, leading to increased productivity for both.
Quotes, your CRM can be used for all of your quote and procurement needs. This includes sending quotes out to your customers and potential customers, getting signoffs for quote approval, keeping track of prices on your sources, and handling payment. Ideally, once a quote is set up, all the processes should be in place in your CRM to not require any additional human input to get product to the door of your customer. This will increase your quote approval rate, AND decrease your account management and sales teams workload, allowing them to take on work for more accounts and leads.
That's our show for today, thank you so much for listening. Next week, join us for a conversation on why you need to have your IT team perform network assessments, and what value they should be bringing to your executive team. In the meantime, check us out on the web at www.YourOperationsSolved.com, where you can join our newsletter, and opt to be notified of all our uploads. I will see you next time.