As a business leader, the day-to-day decisions you make contribute to your company’s long-term success.
Therefore, you must make well-informed decisions based on facts, figures, and analysis. The only problem is, pulling this together can be time-consuming and prone to manual errors, which is where business tools and software come in handy.
By doing some targeted research, you can find tools and dashboards that organise and display the information you need in an easy to understand way. Online software and management tools can dramatically speed up tasks that have previously been time-consuming and ensure you have the information you need to make smart choices. Here are four tools worth considering for your organization:
Workforce Management
Managing your team and perfectly orchestrating rosters can be a real juggling act. If you have a shift based organization, then workforce management software is a fantastic investment. It will help you streamline everything from hiring and onboarding through to management and payment in one seamless system. There is no need to log into program after program or patch together multiple platforms through complex integrations. The best workforce management software allows you to do everything in the one place.
Project Management
When you work with a large team that collaborates on complex projects, it can be hard to keep track of who is accountable for each stage, which tasks have been completed, and how you are tracking against the deadline. Project management software allows employees to view each step and get a clear understanding of their responsibilities and deadlines. It also allows the management team to review where the team is up to at any given moment. Most project management software offers a simple dashboard view, meaning there should be minimal training required for your team to get up to speed.
Customer Relationship Management Software
So you haven’t made your budgetary target this month. Was it because there weren’t enough marketing leads? Did the sales team fail to convert the opportunities in the pipeline? Where is your sales funnel falling over? A customer relationship management tool answers all these questions and more.
A quality CRM will track all of your business leads and contacts and allows you to see all of the touchpoints each lead and customer has with the company. At a glance, you can see the calls the sales team has made and their email interactions. If your business is struggling to keep up with the lead flow, can’t keep track of customer data, and isn’t sure what opportunities it has on the horizon, then a CRM could add a great deal of value.
A Decision Matrix
Not every tool that your business implements needs to be a fancy new software solution. There are some reliable strategic tools that don’t require anything more than a piece of paper (or an excel spreadsheet). A decision matrix is one of these.
If your company is making a challenging decision (for example, which vendor will be the best partner moving forward), then a decision matrix can help you compare the options.
To make a decision matrix, you list the relevant factors to compare as columns and the decision alternatives (in this case, vendors) as rows. You might compare them on price, quality, reliability, customer service, and reputation. By giving each vendor a score out of 10, you can easily compare them. You can also weight each column, for example, deciding that reliability has a weight of two and reputation a weight of one.
As a time-poor business leader, choosing the right tools for the job will help you make strong decisions for your company’s future.
https://www.bmmagazine.co.uk
Tagged with: BUSINESS NEWS • ECONOMIC NEWS • MAKE MONEY
