I like to describe technology as an enabler for growth. The digital landscape of sales and marketing has profoundly transformed over the years at an astonishing rate. Take a look at your customer journey map for example. I can assure you if you look at its transformation over the last 5 years, you will see a significant shift towards digital touchpoints. The ways that your customers experience your brand is more important than ever when it comes to differentiating from your competitors. The way your team can collaborate effectively and efficiently in a remote environment is no longer a choice, but a necessity. The way that your prospects are nurtured at the proposal stage demands differentiation to close more deals. Technology is the answer to these growth challenges.

Today we will look at 3 different examples of how technology can set the foundations for transformational business growth. But, before we do that it is important to clarify one big misconception that we, at Elation & Solvi, explain to businesses all the time.

“Technology alone won’t help you grow your business.”

Yes, it provides the means for getting from A to B, but it doesn’t determine what B is. In other words, technology is only effective when it complements and enables a well thought out process that is embedded throughout the customer journey. And that takes time, planning and strategic implementation.

Now that we’ve clarified that to reap the rewards of technology you require a solid strategy, let’s jump into the 3 growth common growth challenges technology can address.

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Challenge 1 – Providing personalised experiences at scale

A key challenge that businesses face when looking to grow is ensuring that they maintain personalised experiences. There is only a certain number of leads that a small business team can handle. In an ideal world, every single lead that comes through to your salespeople will experience the same high-quality journey. The reality is quite different. Typically, as lead volume increases, the quality of customer experience decreases.

So, the question is: “How do we cater for an increased volume of leads, without compromising quality?”

There is a widespread misconception that marketing tools & automation promote standardisation, diminishing the personal touch that manual, human outreach offers. That is certainly not the case. When there is absolute clarity in a team that technology exists to help the execution of process, and not fully manage it, then we achieve beautiful solutions that deliver consistent high-quality experiences to leads.

Video Funnel software are an example of how we can address the above challenge. They allow you to put leads through interactive video funnels, guiding them towards the information or value they are looking for. By designing your video funnels to represent your customer journey map you can deliver a consistent personalised experience to all your leads.

With one simple tool, you can:

• Speak to your potential leads on a personal level
• Give leads the option to prequalify themselves based on their interaction with the video
• Provide a consistently high-quality experience regardless of volume

The key to ensuring a balance between personalisation and standardisation is to strategically decide at which point of the customer journey it is appropriate to introduce truly personalised experiences through manual human outreach. Then, and only then, these tools can facilitate serious business growth.

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Challenge 2 – Achieving growth by increasing profitability

Many businesses fail to recognise that a certain portion of potential growth can be achieved by closing more of the same business. If you were to imagine closing 10-20% more deals every month, how would that look in terms of increased profitability for the year? I imagine it would be significant! The right technology tool can help you close more deals in the pipeline and make you stand out from the competition. Specifically, we will look at how technology can be utilised at the proposal stage.

Chances are, your proposal process looks similar to the way it did in the 1990s. Digital proposals give you the ability to create truly remarkable proposals in half the time. They are also mobile-ready and packed with intelligence to help you sell better, smarter, and faster. Here are some of the reasons why they will help you close more deals:

• You can create proposals faster than ever that are personalised and suitable to the prospect’s industry with pre-made templates.
• Your proposals will be visually stunning and auto-formatted to mobile devices. Not only will this make you stand out from your competitors’ standard word docs, but it will also cater to the growing audience that uses phones and tablets to conduct business.
• You receive notifications when your prospect opens your proposal.
• You get an indication of what sections were read and which sections were skimmed.

All these features empower teams to make better sales decisions, at the right time, closing more deals.

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Challenge 3 – Maximising your team

A key issue that companies have to deal with when aiming to grow, one that we have heavily experienced over the last 12 months, is the ability to work remotely. It is clear that business who are serious about being futureproofed, need to invest in tools and strategy that enables full business operation remotely. Team management software can help you achieve that.

A team management tool allows you to manage complex external, and internal projects helping you streamline your business processes and execute them from anywhere in the world.

But let’s explore a little more about how it enables growth.

If we consider some of the key reasons that cause team inefficiencies, a list of 3 would look something like this:

• Time wasted on emailing back and forth for information
• Time wasted on trying to collate information from multiple sources
• Time wasted on not knowing what tasks need to be completed

The right team management app can address all 3 areas.

• With integrated chat functions, teams can communicate efficiently and clearly in a single chain of communication
• With dedicated tasks, teams can store and access information from a single place, eliminating the need for time-consuming searching
• With the ability to prioritise tasks, set due dates and importance scores, team members can have a clear understanding of what needs to be done today!

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