Many companies are hoping that their customers will just stay loyal. Given that today everyone is having to watch where every cent is spent, many people are reviewing suppliers and will be happy to move elsewhere if they believe that an alternative will deliver their requirements more cheaply. This means that the companies who are more likely to survive are those where the sales and marketing effort has been increased to work with the customers and prospects and help them through these times. This can only be done either by increasing the size of these teams, or by enabling your sales and marketing people to work smarter rather than harder.
In one of their recent projects Opsis helped their client to reduce the monthly sales report from 30 man days to 0 for a team of 20 sales people, while making the report more graphic and instantly available as required. This gives the team 30 more days per month to focus on their customers which is of course what sales people prefer to do, at no additional cost to the company. This was achieved by implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution which aimed to give the team immediate access to all the relevant customer information while they spent time with their customers rather than collating data from various spreadsheets.
