How can technology help your company win business?

In these times we need to do even more in order to sustain business levels and at the same time try to increase them with new clients or customers.
The question here is can technology help your company to win business and following a lot of research that I have been carrying out the answer seems to be yes, although not necessarily directly.

What that means is that the core to winning business will still be based around the product or service, the price and possibly the relationship. At the end of the day the customer wants the right thing at the right price delivered in the right way and by somebody they have confidence in.

So how can technology play its part?
Technology can help in numerous ways mainly around automation, providing access to information, analysis of information, specialist systems and improved collaboration.

The specifics identified in my research seem to fall under a number of headings although like most things when you try to put them into a single box they spill over into other boxes but here are my groupings:-.

Customer
Satisfied customers can and do defect. They are often seeking more than a service and want solutions that are innovative, add value and remove their pain points. They also like being delighted when they receive a service that provides unexpected value.
In order to achieve this I believe we need to understand not just the process that we use to deliver service but also the customer’s process and to involve them in this analysis. This will help us to seek out where value may be added.
Some of the areas the research indicated that are customer related were:-
• Providing the customer with improved process
• Giving more transparency with direct access to information
• Improving the customers experience and ensuring relevance
• Providing online systems that are product or service based and that can shorten the supply chain
• Understanding the customers requirements and pain points and delivering unique solutions in response
• Demonstrating relevant technologies that give the client confidence and maybe demonstrate cost containment or quality assurance
• Demonstrating security and data leak prevention to install confidence

Analysis
Knowledge is power and analysis of your knowledge (data) may highlight some interesting results. Your company will have a mass of data, sometimes buried in different systems, but if this can be harnessed and analysed, often known these days as Business Intelligence, then it will assist in the decision making process and hopefully guide you on where to concentrate your new business activities. Results of the research were:-
• Use Business Intelligence to spot growth areas
• Use predictive analytics to identify opportunities and likelihood of success
• Identify profitable areas and focus new business on these



Marketing
The best marketing is still about understanding what the customer wants, listening to their feedback, matching your offering and then getting your message out hopefully in tune with your clients and your target markets. Clients are also interested these days in technology and your capability, your security and your innovations to name a few so these are worth getting over in any pitch or tender. Supporting the marketing message are numerous systems with Web sites and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as the prime marketing database. The march of social networking technologies continues and not just in the personal communication market. This is a brand new set of technologies that can be exploited in your marketing campaigns and the power is integrating these new technologies with the existing core CRM products which could open up new prospects, markets as well as providing better data on what your customers are doing. A lot of this trend was identified in the research and included the following specific points:-
• Using social networking for lead generation and qualification
• CRM systems to maintain relationships and information about prospects
• CRM integrated with social networking site contacts
• Google alert type systems to track clients and filter to CRM
• Reporting systems on deals lost and delayed for lessons learnt
• Demonstrating technology capability in pitches
• Web analytics
• Web sites that sell your services and allow easy contact

Internal Business
The remaining area was about using technology to improve internal processes which would not only enhance the client experience and support the business goals but also free people from unnecessary tasks so they could be more productive in marketing and selling. In particular the following research data fell into that category:-

• Innovative businesses models/Streamline/ automate to reduce costs and make product/service more competitive
• Use of technology to free up people time
• Support business goals and expansion plans

So it would seem that Technology is in a supporting role but used properly in conjunction with other initiatives it can help to win business