The company that provides a service or product with a competitive advantage wins market share and continues to grow. To do that, you need to discover how to generate more value from your resources than your competition.

Because employees generally make up the lion’s share of businesses’ resources, how they use their time is the first place to look when attempting to maximize productivity. Since officer workers’ productivity is usually not scrutinized the same way as that of production line workers, this is where business managers often find the low-hanging fruit.

Making the most of employees’ time doesn’t mean squeezing 60-hour work weeks out of them until they burn out. It means empowering them to work highly efficiently with processes and systems.

So, let’s look at a couple of areas that are ripe for harvesting savings in many companies. In service-oriented companies a couple of tasks are often precursors to gaining business and rife with inefficiencies. They are writing proposals and following up with prospects.

1. Proposal Writing Made Easy

Writing a proposal can be a pain-staking, time consuming process. And because businesses want to provide more options and customized services to counteract the competition, it’s taking longer than ever before.

As proposals have become more complex and customized, a greater number of people are involved in piecing them together—sales people, marketing and production managers, estimators and more. They’re searching for content; copying and pasting old proposals; tweaking the language to tailor it to the client; and running it up the approval chain of command before sending it to the client.

This is a perfect process to systematize with software such as SharePoint. SharePoint provides a content library where employees can easily search through reusable content to piece together much of the proposal. Also, the collaboration platform enables users to see every proposal that’s in the works. Tasks can be assigned to each of the individuals involved, and each person can filter tasks to see just what’s on their plate.

Once the team has fulfilled their tasks and assembled the proposal, the approval process can be automated. While the proposal circulates, it is all tracked by SharePoint and doesn’t get lost in an overflowing in-box.

It doesn’t stop there. You want to know what impact each proposal has on your company. So you need a system that tracks the approval rate, helping you to predict demand and cash flow. When you know this, you can hire people and order materials to meet future requirements.

2. Follow Up For the Fortune

The National Sales Association says 2% of sales are made on the first contact and 80% of sales are made somewhere between the fifth and twelfth contact.

So if you follow up multiple times rather that just once, you’re 40 times more likely to get the sale. With an equation like that, it’s easy to see that a rock solid follow-up system delivers a substantial return on investment.

Many companies have prospects sitting in the queue. But as day-to-day business operations become all consuming, they don’t follow up. That’s money left on the table.

The solution? You can set up a follow-up system with an alerts dashboard. It tells you if you haven’t followed up on a prospect during a specified period of time, such as a couple of weeks. If it’s been several months and still the prospect has not converted into a client, it may be time to close them out, or do something to move them closer to a sale.

The Automated Business

Step by step, you can work through repeat processes in every department. In the end, you’ll have an automated business that frees up employees to focus on meaningful tasks.

You’ll also be able to measure the tasks your people are performing and determine if they’re getting the work done efficiently. If not, it’s time to investigate; you may not have enough people, you might have the wrong people, they need more training, or maybe the process still has some kinks.

The Time is Right

The time is right to leverage technologies to design and systematize processes to enhance productivity for long-term business growth.

Call us at 484-892-5713 or Contact Us today to learn more about how to take advantages of processes and systems that deliver amazing competitive advantage