How to understand, that your business is dying?

I will say right away — we have no task to scare you. From the statement of the conclusion “fatal outcome” to the actual liquidation of your case, it may take a long time. However, the “agony” will no longer bring much profit, then it will only become unprofitable and you will want to stop this process early at any cost. Understand that the beginning of the end of the business has already taken place is difficult, so many people simply do not notice it. Or, worse, they confused it with prosperity. The presence of a CRM system and company management tools can prevent such an end. How to understand that your business is dying?

I recommend starting from here and I will explain why. Firstly, everything in your company depends on those who carry out business processes. Even the best products do not sell themselves — they are sold by people (well, or bots, which are still programmed and controlled by people). Secondly, employees are a very narrow place in any company where the most unexpected situations are possible. They have the ability to tolerate for the time being and it is not always open to say what they do not like (or do like), fearing criticism, dismissal, adding responsibilities, and so on. And this time happens at the most inappropriate moment and can either greatly harm the business or completely destroy it.

When increasing the burden on managers, adding new functions to them, tightening up reporting, you are in great danger: employee’s dissatisfaction can turn into strikes, their loss or sabotage of business processes. Thus, if your people are unhappy, and you do not react to it - your business is dead.

How to deal with it?

To effectively assess the workload for an employee, Bitrix24 provides many useful tools. Depending on the specifics of your business, the workload can be automatically distributed among people. Our company has a case when we set up the distribution of an applications from clients among the three (but there can be as many as possible) managers, taking into account their areas of work and the level of employment.

You can see at any time what tasks your worker performs, how much time he spends on it, and how well he handles his affairs. With the use of advanced functionality, like the Time and Project Report PRO application from our company, you can also see how employees interact with each other and how effective it is (not only individuals, but also the entire departments). Reporting in Bitrix24 is transformed from routine and lengthy torment into a fast automated process: the system itself calculates the data, sends it to the necessary verifiers and minimizes repetitive daily operations.

The western business model provides for leads — potential customers who are walking around and around your offers, but have not yet voiced their decision to you. Roughly speaking, this is everyone who calls/writes to your company to find out something, watches your advertisement and even “likes” your posts on social networks. Each such a person can become a client himself, but he is more likely to be such after some action on your part — an additional call, additional email, SMS or some kind of bonus. Yes, there is a share of the work of marketing, but the main thing is not to miss this action.

A lead-free business model is very common in our region: someone calls you by phone, asks you to send something, you make a deal, and only then you figure out who addressed you. Both models have the right to live, but both require a certain responsibility — to get a lead or a deal, not to forget anything, in order to make a profit in the end. If your company has a very dense flow of orders, managers lose people’s contacts, forget their phone numbers or addresses, send wrong or wrong ones — your business is dead.

How to deal with it?

And exactly for this, or rather, against such troubles, and invented CRM — a system of relationships with customers. In Bitrix24, a whole huge reservoir is built on the lead, the task of which is to help the manager to lead a potential client from the first contact to the conclusion of the transaction. CRMs get leads from any connected sources: a phone call, web chat, email, a message from a social network/messenger such as Viber, Whatsapp, Telegram ... If a person came to you, you need to wipe it into the system. This gives a mandatory minimum of information about the lead, which is not lost and should be used to turn it into a client. At a certain stage, the lead can be converted into a deal or a contact (and it will not disappear anywhere from your CRM).

It goes similarly with deals. In the version of Bitrix24.Dubai there was an option of quick deals just under the model without leads. The transaction is also carried out according to the status of the funnel and either closes with success, or “burns through”, but leaves all information for itself for the future.

Bitriks24 will not let you forget to call back the lead or do something important about the transaction: there are various reminders for this, and there are also mandatory conditions that will not allow you to simply advance the lead or deal on statuses.

“You can conquer the market for ever and ever.” The thesis, of course, is good, but only for those who amuse themselves with this thought. If your strategy is based only on the sale of a product or service to new customers, then your business is already more dead than alive. Of course, it will be relatively easy to get customers first, but in the future the price of each new customer will increase. A competent business is based on the possibility of repeat sales, and for this it is necessary to work with customers additionally. Of course, you also need to comply with the quality of the goods or services, otherwise no one tool will return to you a dissatisfied customer. But if you are okay with this, repeat sales should be: this is a real hen that lays golden eggs. If the chicken does not rush — your business is dead.

How to deal with it?

In addition to the mentioned quality, you need to constantly “heat up” the interest of customers to your offers. Here you need to connect marketers who will track customers and provide them with the right information at the right time. With Bitrix24, this task is simplified many times. CRM-marketing has all the necessary tools to increase the likelihood of the repeat sales. Here you can segment customers and organize distribution by email, SMS, remind yourself in messengers and social networks. At your service are multiple and beautiful templates, where the name of the client or other important information from CRM records or the editor for creating your own designs are being pulled. In this way, people will receive automatic, but personalized messages, which are much better influenced in shaping attitudes towards you and your products. A telephone info call that never gets tired of calling your customers is very effective. From the portal Bitrix24, you can also manage advertising campaigns on Google and Facebook. Together with Bitrix24, you will not need to use many third-party services, like Mailchimp, for marketing purposes.

Advertising is the engine of progress, and also super-powerful money from your budget. And if the cost of advertising was directly proportional to the exhaust from it, everything would be great. However, this is absolutely not the case: the effectiveness of advertising is almost impossible to predict, and reports, say, on social networking sites, may disappoint even the wildest forecasts and expectations. The second negative factor lies in the so-called “money needle”, on which your business is placed by advertisers. Each subsequent campaign will cost you more and more expensively and without constant infusion the effectiveness of advertising will only fall. You need to pay attention to this, because if promotion budgets eat up most of the revenue, your business is dead.

How to deal with it?

Unfortunately, in this article I will not tell you how to increase ROI or to make effective advertising. However, a tool appeared in Bitrix24 that will help you quickly and accurately assess the profit (or loss) from advertising. This “End-to-End Analytics” is a great way to get a detailed report on promotion costs. For this tool, you can write a separate article, which is also in our plans. However, the main thing you should know: “End-to-End Analytics” collects all the costs for each individual campaign and shows how much income it brought at the time of completion. Here you can enter not only data from electronic sources, but also pay in cash. Manually, of course, but otherwise it does not work. For example, a campaign can be a sum of the campaign that students paid for the distribution of flyers on the street. The “End-to-End Analytics” setting is intuitive and, by default, the tool is already attached to each site or store in the Bitrix24 Portal.

And finally, engage in industrial espionage. No, we do not encourage you to break the law, however, to know, or your competitors are using any kind of CRM. And, if so, it is desirable to find out, or this is not Bitrix24. So far, according to statistics, less than 10% of entrepreneurs use customer relationship systems. But it may happen that your main competitor already has such a program. And if he has, and you do not — your business is in great danger. And if this is also Bitrix24, then, unfortunately, your business is dead. And it will happen very soon.

How to deal with it?

Do not even think about fighting with the competitor himself! This is stupid and absolutely not necessary. Integration of a CRM system takes not a lot of time, a little more is needed for setup, personnel training and debugging. And when this process starts now depends only on you.

I hope you all were not afraid of this reading. Of course, you can doubt and continue to rely on the inevitable integration of Bitrix24 in the future. But personally, I think it is better to do it early, be confident in the future, earn more and spend money on wreaths and black ribbons for the quick burial of foreign competitive businesses without CRM systems.