For an established business, using technology to increase sales and build relationships comes down to four things: answering customers faster, making it easy for them to order again, keeping one reliable record of each customer, and knowing who needs a call this week. None of these depends on a new marketing channel. Most depend on getting the systems you already have to share what they know.
This article is written for companies that sell to other businesses or to repeat customers, where a sale involves an enquiry, a quotation and an order, and where the relationship is expected to last for years.
Find where sales are being lost
Before buying or building anything, look for the places where sales leak away. The same few turn up in most businesses:
- enquiries that wait a day or more for a first reply;
- quotations that take several days because the prices and rules live in one person’s spreadsheet;
- quotations that are sent and never followed up;
- regular customers who quietly stop ordering, unnoticed until the year-end figures;
- customers who have to telephone to find out where their order is.
Each of these can be measured from records you already hold. Compare the date an enquiry arrived with the date the quotation went out. Count quotations sent against quotations won. List the customers who ordered last year and have not ordered this year. The numbers tell you which problem to fix first, and they give you something to measure the fix against afterwards.
Reply and quote faster
In many markets the supplier who replies first with a sensible price has the advantage, and speed is the easiest thing for software to improve.
Start with how enquiries arrive. A form on the website that writes straight into a system, and not into a shared inbox, means every enquiry has an owner and a time stamp. The customer gets an immediate acknowledgement, and if nobody has replied by the end of the day the system can tell a manager.
Then look at how quotations are produced. If pricing depends on a workbook that only one or two people understand, every quotation waits for them, and holidays bring quoting to a halt. Moving the price lists and rules into a small web application lets any trained member of staff produce a consistent quotation in minutes, keeps a record of every version sent, and shows which quotations are still open. This is one of the commonest reasons businesses ask us to turn a spreadsheet into a web application.
Make it easy to buy again
Keeping a customer is usually less work than winning a new one, so the second and third orders deserve as much attention as the first.
A customer portal is the most direct way to help. It is a secure website where your customers sign in to see their own orders, prices, delivery dates, invoices and documents, place a repeat order and raise a query. It answers the routine questions at any hour without a telephone call, and it makes you easier to deal with than a competitor who can only be reached during office hours. A customer portal does not have to replace your order system; it can sit in front of the one you have.
Two smaller measures help as well:
- Prompts based on history. If a customer orders consumables roughly every six weeks, or has equipment due a service each spring, the system knows when to remind them, or to remind the account manager.
- Screens that work on a phone. Buyers place orders from site, from a van and from home. If the portal is awkward on a small screen they will ring instead, or go elsewhere. Our tips for optimising a website for mobile users apply equally to portals.
Keep one record of each customer
Relationships suffer when the customer has to explain themselves twice. The salesperson does not know about the complaint raised last week; the accounts team chases an invoice the customer has already disputed with someone else.
A customer relationship management system, or CRM, is meant to prevent this by holding contacts, conversations and opportunities in one place. Packaged CRM products are mature, and for most companies buying one makes more sense than building one. The trouble usually starts afterwards. Orders are in the accounts package, jobs are in an operations system, support requests are in a mailbox, and the CRM knows about none of them. Staff are asked to copy information across by hand, they stop doing it, and within a year the CRM is out of date.
The cure is integration: software that passes records between systems automatically, so that the person about to ring a customer can see recent orders, open quotations and unresolved problems on one screen. If your systems do not talk to each other, fixing that will usually do more for sales than adding another tool.
Bespoke software has a place where the way you quote, schedule or deliver is particular to your business and no packaged product fits without awkward workarounds. In that case a system built around your own process can be what sets you apart, and it should still exchange data with the packaged products around it.
Let the data say who to call
Once orders, quotations and contacts are in one place, simple reports become possible that no salesperson could compile by hand:
- customers whose orders have become less frequent;
- quotations still open after a set number of days;
- contracts and service agreements coming up for renewal;
- customers who buy one product line and have never been offered a related one.
A short list sent to each account manager on a Monday morning is worth more than a dashboard nobody opens. The aim is to prompt a conversation at the right moment.
AI tools can add to this, for example by summarising a long email thread before a call or drafting a follow-up for a person to check and send. They work only as well as the records underneath them, which is another reason to sort out the single customer record first.
Keep it personal, and check the rules
Technology builds relationships when it removes administration and leaves people more time to talk to customers. It damages them when it is used to imitate a personal touch. Customers can tell an automated message dressed up as a personal note, and a weekly stream of promotional emails teaches them to ignore everything you send.
There are also rules to follow. In the UK, marketing by email and text is governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations as well as data protection law. The Information Commissioner’s Office publishes guidance on electronic mail marketing, and it treats messages to individuals differently from messages to companies. Check that guidance, and take advice if you are unsure, before sending anything in bulk. Whoever you write to, keep a record of those who ask not to be contacted and honour it.
A first step that costs nothing
Take your last twenty enquiries. For each one, write down how long the customer waited for a first reply, how long for a quotation, whether anyone followed up, and whether it became an order. An afternoon with those figures will show where the largest loss is, and whether the fix is a change of habit, a connection between two systems you already own, or something new.