S3 Blog

When your business is doing well it is all too easy to rest on your laurels and believe that this will continue indefinitely, but this is not the case, particularly in light of the recent recession that has hit the UK. Business owners are now facing the fact that they need to compete or get beat and as a result they are looking for ways in which to do this. Here are a few suggestions on how you can compete and beat your competitors:

1. Do away with old and outdated ways of recording customer contacts, using complicated and ineffectual methods to record customer contacts creates confusion and vital information is sometimes missed. Without streamlined way to record contacts conversions can be missed and customers lost.

2. Cut down on the number of software applications your business uses – spending thousands each year on software licenses eats away at money that could be spent on other areas of your business, such as advertising.

3. Check out what your competitors are doing – if you have no idea what your main competitors are doing you need to find out, and fast! In order to compete you need to know and understand your competition or your business is out of the running and is already beaten.

4. Use email marketing to reach more customers – more and more businesses are seeing the value of email marketing as it is a fast and effective way of sending advertising directly to their customers. S3 CRM offers email marketing as one of its features and this can help any business to instantly compete with its rivals by enabling users to plan, create and send email campaigns in minutes.

5. Create a business website if you don’t already have one. The internet is an amazing way of generating business and the chances are that your competitors are already doing all they can to increase their internet presence.

6. Think about using other internet methods to further spread the word about your business brand. This can be done in many different ways including blogging – these are massively popular right now and a great way to engage with your customers and keep them interested in your business, social networking sites – create a profile for your business and spread the word, or you might want to take out advertisements on these sites as they get huge amounts of traffic. Not only are these types of methods effective, they are also cheap and they encourage customers to visit your business’s website more often.

As you can see there are a variety of ways in which you can start to actively change the way that your business competes with your competitors if you are not already doing so. Customers are becoming more and more fickle when it comes to choosing who and where the purchase good and services from so it is essential to engage with them and make them feel valued to retain their custom.

As anyone with their own business knows it is important to keep up to date with the market they are in both in terms of products and competition. Failing to do this means that ultimately your business will not be as forward thinking as it could be which will result in losing out to competitors – something that no business ever wants to do. So what is the answer to staying ahead of your competition today? A good CRM or Customer Relationship Management application, that’s what.

There are various CRM software applications that are available at the moment but the best one of these by far is S3 CRM which is not only easy to set up and use but it also grows with your business.  S3 CRM can help you to stay ahead of your competition in the following ways:-

1. Keep detailed records of your customers – S3 CRM has unique features which allow all information that is relevant to a particular customer to be saved in that customers record. This can range from contact details to quotes and invoices to documents and even photographs of your customers if you or your reps meet with them on a regular basis. This will improve the customer service that your business provides, which is often lacking in many businesses today and this will give you the edge over your competition who might still be using outdated methods to store and retrieve customer information. Stay professional – use S3 CRM.

2. Quote and invoice with ease – quoting and invoicing often takes up a great deal of time within a business and this can frustrate your customers and lead to them going to your competition for a faster, more efficient service. Stop them in their tracks by using S3 CRM to streamline and centralise all quoting and invoicing. S3 CRM even takes the strain out of adding VAT to invoices as it will automatically add it and make the calculation for you, giving you and staff more time to spend in other areas of the business. Similarly invoices are easily produced using the same feature within the application.

3. See your business at a glance – by using the dashboard feature you can place all the areas of your business that you need to see an overview of on one screen. This cuts down the endless searching through screens to find the information that you need, meaning that you can make decisions faster and more efficiently whilst reducing wasted time – can you say the same for your competition? We hope not!

As you can see these are just a few of the features that S3 CRM provides businesses with that will help them to stay ahead of their competition and provide an efficient, customer focused and streamlined service to be proud of. S3 CRM really does make all difference to a business and after using it for a few weeks it will be apparent why as time is saved and profits are increased.