Execute better using Salesforce.com, Basecamp, and Quickbooks

When it comes to business, using flexible tools in the wrong place can make your profitability flexible too. Every business does it for at least a short time but the successful will proactively innovate to avoid the high cost it brings with growth. Here’s a short test to see where you are on the scale.

The Test

1. Do you have at least 2 versions of the same form and have difficulty getting your team to use the right one?
2. Do you let your sales reps come up with their own method to manage leads?
3. Do you only hear of a deal once it’s been signed?
4. Does your staff complain of too much “admin” or “overhead” time?
5. Do you have an employee that manages docs and spreadsheets regularly?
6. Do clients complain that their expressed needs were not met or items were forgotten?
7. When a sales rep departs, is their little hope of finding, not to mention working his in progress deals?
8. Does your sales manager have little visibility into your sales pipeline (i.e. accounts, deal size, win rate, discounting)
9. Is there little historical data available without significant manual labor?
10. Do you often have to search through numerous docs and emails for account related info?

Each ‘yes’ answer on this list is shaving hundreds of dollars from your profitability for each employee!

The flexibility of these tools is very helpful at times, especially when doing one-off tasks or exploring a process. However, when you are looking to grow and add on additional resources as needed, this flexibility puts too much creativity into the hands of each person and leads to an organization headache with lots of confusion. Especially if the situation isn’t changed before the next growth spurt.

The worst time to change is when potential customers are knocking down your doors.

The Solution

Most businesses make the decision to move away from this flexibility toward a manageable system when they are small and want to grow. Profitable growth is very challenging in general and without a simple, consistent system to manage the increase of very important information, it can be stunted.

My recommendation to any business that answered ‘yes’ to at least one question above is to consider starting with Salesforce.com Group Edition. With a free 7 day trial and just $8 or so per user per month for up to five users, you can see quickly the benefits of having a common system for all your team.