A critical aspect of a business, Cashflow management often is the defining factor which can be either the boon or the bane of a startup. That being said, cash flow doesn’t have to be the pit bull from hell, this checklist of things to keep in mind and some focus will help you too, first, get control and then thrive with it.

Ace tips

Accounts receivable (AR) =  Payments from customer = Inflow

Accounts payable (AP) = Payments to vendors (products & services) = Outflow

Understanding the cash situation in terms of what’s coming in and what’s going out is the hallmark of good cash management practice. Vigilance and lookouts must be present to identify payments (AR) delays and unplanned expenses (AR). The following are pointers that should act as a checklist for effective cash flow management:

1. Weekly Cash flow overview: Have a weekly cash flow stand up and check your cash position how the expects inflow and outflow tally with the projections.
2. Balance, AR Vs AP: Pay attention to the accounts, what you’d want to do here is to a) reduce the amount of time that it takes to collect the receivables, and b) Increase the time for accounts payable.
3. Keep customer balances in check: Use software to track customer payment schedules and maintain appropriate follow-ups.
4. Ease the outflow: Rule of the thumb is to keep the cash in your accounts as long as possible, this being said it’s important to not fall back on payments, rather if you can negotiate longer payment terms from your vendors, the better it is.
5. Invoices in advance: Generate/deliver invoices in advance to ensure that the payments are on time as the turn-around time on the invoices must be taken into account.
6. Control Inventory: Avoid over-stocking in the name of maintaining sufficient supplies, lean manufacturing is the most effective technique to ensure proper efficiency.

Trap to avoid

After learning the things that you can do to improve your cash flow situation, here are a few traps you must target to avoid.

1. Surprise budget outages: Keep your AP in check. When quick payouts meet delay in AR collections, you have a surprise cash outage. You may be well within your budget but these surprise outages can be serious disruptions for operations.
2. Bills are first: For startups, the money made is money pumped in. Optimum cash flow management means that though you are putting the money back in your startup, you still have cash at hands to pay for operational expenses. (Marketing expenses are necessary and important, make of note of this)
3. Expenses of the Chutzpah: All expenses must be budgeted and unplanned expenses must be avoided at all costs.
4. No fat, all lean: Payments for AR can fall behind without any heads up, this isn’t a possibility but an eventuality. Enough reserves in cash (fat) must be kept to make such eventualities inconsequential.
5. Don’t overextend: Always remember that growth is super intensive on cash and overextending in terms of marketing, hiring, and facilities must be checked and rechecked with the cash flow in mind.
6. Delegate when possible: As a startup founder/operator it is common to sit with excel sheets and do all of the work and tackle the cash flow on their own. Utilizing a potent cash flow management software can help manage and smoothen the entire process.

Evomatiq Business Solutions LLC is a professional, lithe and boutique enterprise software services providing company based in Dubai, UAE. EBS specializes in helping businesses identify and deploy effective and efficient solutions that give them a solid edge.

For any queries, reach us from here.

 

Okay so I see a lot of literature out there that says that cold calling is dead. Clearly, this is not the case. Cold calling will always remain a valid part of the game. Before moving ahead, lets clearly define cold calling.

*source – merriam webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cold%20call)

In other words if you calling a prospect without previous contact, the first contact call is what is termed as a cold call. Cold calling is –

1. As old school as Old Spice cologne.  
2. High skill cap activity, like high tier light tank driving in World Of Tanks.

Allow me to explain.

The cold calling tool has been in play ever since the dawn of commerce, sales people have always reached out “cold, uninitiated” prospects for conducting business. With the advent of the telephone, humanity (well those in the sales profession) transitioned to reaching out to prospects on the telephone and so dawned the age of cold calling. Newer technologies like email and social media have tried their fair share to kill the Cold caller, but it has and will prevail. Anyone who says that cold calls don’t work doesn’t know how to make it work.

Now here are a few tips which will help you develop your cold calling skills and make an impressive and memorable first contact with your prospective customer.

Have a script

A massive, MASSIVE misconception that script means that you have to speak word for word, like a mechanical robot. The objective of the script is to give structure to the conversation. There is absolutely no need to rattle it like a parrot, all you have to do is preserve the structure of the conversation. A good call script will have the following hallmarks:  

1. Clear in its objective: A cold call script must be clear of the sought desired outcome and must be designed for achieving that, for eg, ascertain need, seek a face to face meeting, seek an agreement for receiving of information package, gain internal management mapping information, etc.
2. Conversation centric: Keep the focus on the needs of the prospect and not on what you are selling. Use open-ended questions (why, how, when) rather than questions that can be answered with a yes or a no.
3. Handles Objections: Here is a caveat, your product or service will not be a fit for everyone, you must remember and realize this. In such a situation it’s advisable to listen with an intent to help and explore with open dialogue to ascertain if what you offer is of value to them.  Having said that, responses for the most common objections (reasons that prospects give for why they aren’t interested). A script without objection handling makes for short and ineffective calls. It wastes time, yours and the prospects.  

Research your prospect

This may have not been much of an option for a cold caller in the 80s, in 2019 it’s not only possible but also absolutely necessary. Before making the call, check the social profiles of the company, LinkedIn is a wonderful source for getting names and designations. Information is the key in helping you uncovering details in which you can engage better with the prospect. A simple thing as knowing the name of the person you are trying to reach can astronomically improve your probability of making contact with the right party.

Follow-ups, Follow-ups & Follow-ups

A cold call will not get the desired outcome 7-10 times and that’s okay. The emphasis is on having a natural conversation, objection handling can help identify clearly the reasons for a “No”. When this happens have, try to get the following done:

1. Request to check back with them in a month, quarter, sometimes in the future to check if something has changed.
2. Request for the contact email address and take permission to add them to your monthly mailing list.

After you have done the following, remember to mark your calendar and follow up. Caveat, close follow-ups are a sure shot way to make sure to lose the prospect and hence this must be avoided at all costs.

I hope these pointers help you up your game. If you need help with the scripts, leave us to comment below or contact us. And remember, persistence is the key. You’ll only get better if you keep at it. Remember, intelligence is first simulated and then emulated.

Evomatiq Business Solutions LLC is a professional, lithe and boutique enterprise software services providing company based in Dubai, UAE. EBS specializes in helping businesses identify and deploy effective and efficient solutions that give them a solid edge.

For any queries, reach us from here.

 

The Internet is the fuel of the “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere” economy. Social selling and big data are the most dominant feature of the cutthroat marketing battlespace, the ramifications of not having a solid “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM) are far-reaching and potentially unhealthy for a company’s financial bottom line.

Broadly, CRM encompasses the collective activities, strategies, and technology used by a company to cover their interaction with their customers and prospects over multiple channels such as social media, websites, calls, chats, email, etc. With a record of all historical communication with the customer, businesses gain deep insight into the customer and also on internal processes. Information thus generated is critical for adaptation and improvement of current and future processes for the continual growth of the organization.

CRM can be of the following types:

1. Operational: CRMs that deal with most current customers. The data collated here is generated via activities such as sales, marketing and service rendering. Operational CRM has tight integration with all marketing activities, customer purchases and the level of service satisfaction achieved historically in each case. Automated CRM for these processes provides a 3600 view of the individual sales process working out beautifully both for the company and the customer.
    
2. Analytical: Increasingly being taken over by the BI suite, this flavor of the CRM deployment is mainly for crunching and making sense of the data. Understanding patterns and trends in user behavior helps gain valuable insight into the buying behavior of customers. Armed with this potent information companies can pivot and plan sales activities around the peaks and prepare for slumps better
    
3. Collaborative: This deployment version of CRM is mostly B2B, via which businesses shared each other’s data on customers. In the era of GDPR and entire fiasco of how social media companies deal with the data of their Users, this deployment may either completely fall out of favor or will have to abide by stringent privacy regulations.

 

Why Implement CRM in the first place?

There are several compelling reasons, they all can be surmised broadly in terms of Learning, Organisation, and Customer Satisfaction.

What’s learned?

With the data that your sales and marketing activities, there is a ginormous amount of insight that can be gained. Apparent information like details about who your customers are, their buying behavior leads to information on the buying patterns. Such information is critical sales readiness. With access to such data patterns, customers and promotions can be matched for an enhanced probability of purchases.

What is organized?

Proper CRM means that customer flows have been charted and actions based on them have been automated. CRM play a pivotal role in marketing activities, including online marketing activities. Automated processes are designed to target prospects based on their behavior on your company website. Multi-Channel communication with audiences can be logged and collated for personalized communication and enhanced conversion from prospect to customer.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

With optimized processes, companies are able to better able to take care of their customers. Data is centralized and phenomenally easy for references, resulting in swift and decisive resolutions. The ability to service customers efficiently and quickly boosts customers satisfaction and encourages loyalty.

A robust Customer Relationship Management strategy is a smart decision for an organization as it helps stakeholders to get the complete, 360-degree view of their customers and the environment that drives their purchase decisions.

Evomatiq Business Solutions LLC is a professional, lithe and boutique enterprise software services providing company based in Dubai, UAE. EBS specializes in helping businesses identify and deploy effective and efficient solutions that give them a solid edge.

For any queries, reach us from here.

    

Searching, selecting deploying and ERP is a daunting task for an organization and its stakeholders. The entire project demands due diligence as it must account for all of the current requirements and those of the future. This coupled with the premium pricing, means that the entire exercise for complete ERP implementation can easily a year.

In such a scenario, having an overview of the functional components of ERPs, in general, can help you screen software as per your requirements more efficiently. As a part of our ongoing endeavor to help businesses implement ERPs/business software smartly, here are the 6 broad components that encompass an ERP system.

1. Financial Management
2. Inventory Management
3. Customer Relationship Management
4. Business Intelligence
5. Supply Chain Management
6. Human Resource Management

Financial Management

Business, by definition, means money will change hands. Financial transactions within your company as well as the transactions made to outside parties are all recorded in the ERP system.  

As a part of financial management, an ERP system will maintain records under Accounts receivables, Accounts payable, costing/budgeting along with costs associated with inventory. The allied reporting mechanism helps you forecast and gives you an overview of your company’s financials. This helps in proper identification of costs and revenue centers enabling you to affect actions to positively affect your bottom line.

Inventory Management

By now you are aware that inventory management is one of the more critical aspects of your business process. Inventory management, by its sheer nature, talks to multiple modules within the ERP.

An inventory management module, worth its salt, will handle multi-location, costing of the inventory in all of the multi-location, track inventory via serial/batch numbers and handle multiple SKUs. Lean manufacturing is something that deeply benefits from an inventory management system that is deeply integrated with Supply chain management

Customer Relationship Management

In this social media-driven age, prospects and customers want to connect with you on multiple channels over multiple time-zones. Having centralized data of your customers is absolutely paramount for the maintenance of the healthy lead funnel. A robust CRM integration will help you give the best services to your customers and prospective customers.

CRM’s historical information on your customers helps you to get a deeper understanding of the buying patterns, get personalized with a complete view of customer conversation history and use the insight to further improve your internal processes. Information provided by CRM is of strategic importance and can help you increase customer satisfaction and provide more opportunities for up/cross-selling.

Business Intelligence

BI modules are today one of the more critical components of an ERP. BI modules make sense of the data that is collected and generated by the ERP system to enable data-backed decisions in real time.

Reports are the most common medium of extracting reports, market-leading BI modules also pack potent feature of data visualization. This helps in getting maximum value in one eyeball. BI most effective in analyzing the big data for patterns that can help in achieving tighter efficiency with more optimized operations and protocols.

A proper BI tool is a must for getting the most juice from an ERP system.      

Supply Chain Management

Global suppliers and extensive distribution networks provide for a delicate situation for manufacturers and cargo operators. Here, delays in delivery and under optimized inventory translate to a domino effect of disruption. In such a scenario real-time data is worth its value in gold.

An SCM module optimizes the process of manufacturing and distribution. With real-time overwatch of your operation, you can anticipate issues/bottlenecks and remedy them with time at hand. SCM will also help you fully embrace lean manufacturing by enabling you to plan demands and optimized production plans to minimize waste and maximize time efficiency.

Human Resource Management

The stars of the show, without the employees there is no company. As a 21st-century employer having high employee retention is pretty high on your agenda. A transparent, and hassle-free HRMS will take care of, onboarding, payroll, and general administration will go a long way to make sure that employee satisfaction in this regard is high.   

Payroll is pretty much the king of the HRMS as it saves you loads of time and costs. A robust HRMS system will help you to automate payments, handle taxation seamlessly and with transparency.

Endnotes

Every business is unique and what it seeks from the ERP will be different too. We advise you to do your homework properly before you settle on a solution for your business. We have a video that talks specifically about the process of ERP implementation, you can access it from here.

Evomatiq Business Solutions LLC is a professional, lithe and boutique enterprise software services providing company based in Dubai, UAE. EBS specializes in helping businesses identify and deploy effective and efficient solutions that give them a solid edge.

For any queries, reach us from here.

Enterprise Resource Planning software is a critical and essential tool for any organization today. A properly planned ERP implementation goes a long way in bringing out efficiency in operations of any organization.

Here are things that must be kept in mind in order to ensure a tight fitting software solution ensuring that you get the most bang out of your buck.

Step 1- Business Requirement Gathering

The most basic of the steps, this phase has the most profound and long-lasting impact on the entire project. Generally handled internally by the IT department of the organization, the idea is to collect requirements of management from every level of your organization.

Broadly any organization can be represented by this pyramid where the C and the D Level management occupying the top of the pyramid, mid-level occupied by senior department managers and the frontline occupied by managers of teams on the field. Having said that, Its okay if your organizational structure does not fit this pyramid. The point is to identify the different layer of management which is going to interact with the system. You’ll notice that the requirement and style of interaction with the system will vary from each level and department

One of the best ways to get the ball rolling is to identify one user of each management level from every department and try to understand from them:

1. How do they currently interact with the system, for eg, the features that they use from the current system?
2. What do they feel is missing from the current system
3. And lastly, what would they need the new system to do for them.

The requirements collected in this exercise should then be grouped categorically as requirements that the new system:

1. Must meet: Features that are critical for the day to day business operations of your organization. Highest priority.
2. Should meet: These are features that are mostly missing from the current system. These features, when incorporated, could improve the operations and business processes. Important.
3. Could meet: Mostly a wishlist, with minimal impact on the productivity of the system. These must be assigned the least priority

The requirements should be collated and signed off by every department in the organization.

Now is also a good time to identify the budget for the project and the timeframe to achieve deployment. An average ERP project takes up to 90 days (ballpark) to get fully deployed.  

Once this is done you have concrete requirements as per priority to work on.

Step 2 – Software Selection

Once the requirements are frozen, you can float the tender and start inviting RFP from vendors of various makes and brands of ERP developers. Note, that depending on the vertical of your organization, you may need specialized modules like inventory, manufacturing, logistics, machinery maintenance, construction, HRMS, ETC along with general modules like GL, AP, AR. In most cases, there is always a brand which caters to your segment its a good Idea to start looking from there.

Another aspect to keep in mind during the software selection process is the mode of deployment. Locally, as in on a Server on your office premises or off-premise hosted on the cloud. Both of them have their own pros and cons.

On-premise deployment adds the cost of a server and network infrastructure hardware and installation as one-time cost and their independent maintenance as recurring cost.

Cloud deployment means no hardware and networking costs, only a subscription fees to be paid monthly (could be quarterly too, varies from vendor to vendor).

So on-premise deployments attract one-time payment and then recurring costs as maintenance Upside being that you fully own the system (and hence are responsible for its maintenance too) and cloud deployment means no one time cost but a lifetime subscription payment commitment in return for not having to maintain any network or server infrastructure.

Having clarity on which mode of deployment can help you further qualify the competing software.

Last but not least. Check the skill availability for the software in the market too. By this I mean, any ERP that you select, must not be so obscure that it’s hard for you to find people to work on it or to provide you support.

Step 3 – Selecting System Integrator

Here is a golden rule with you, an ERP is only as good as the team that deploys it. Due diligence must be taken when you select a vendor. Check for the experience that the vendor has, where they are located as timely support is critical. Remember, the big company brings with it the power of infrastructure but You may never be a priority for them, too small a company, you have to priority but you may face difficulties because of the small team size. The trick here is to find the middle ground. Seek a vendor who is hungry for success but is also stable. Has experience and is also available for quick service.

Step 4 – Deployment

By this stage, you have already identified the ERP make and a reliable deployment partner to take the project ahead, it is now time to start the deployment of the new ERP.

Start with requirement mapping, where you will match the requirements generated internally (remember the must-have, should have and could have?) with the features of the selected software. Don’t worry if not of your requirements aren’t being covered “as is” by the new ERP. This brings us to the Gap Analysis. In this step, the deployment partner may propose “workarounds” and in some cases, “customizations” in order to completely cover the requirements of your organization. This stage is a good Idea to discuss any new requirements which may have come up since the initial requirement gathering exercise.

As long as the requirements are minor, the deployment partner generally rolls with the punches and incorporates them in the schedule, but in case the requirements require a major change, in that case, it’s back to the drawing board with costs and efforts. (that’s why I said in the beginning, requirement gathering really does have a profound impact on the entire deployment process)  

Once you agree on the gap analysis and the proposed solution to resolve them, you can finally get started with the configuration of your shiny, brand new system. This involves data migration from old to new systems and setting up workflows and rules. Different ERPs handle this differently and are undertaken primarily by the deployment partner with your inputs from time to time.

After all, this is done, we can start the User Acceptance Trials. This stage brings out a model user from each department on your organization and tests all the use case scenarios as detailed in the requirement document. Based on the results of the UAT, after some tweaking, you have a functional ERP at your organization.

All is not done though, we still have to account for end-user training. The best practice is to select power users from each department and give them extensive training on the new ERP. These power users can then conduct internal training within their organization, albeit, with occasional hand holding with by the deployment partners and voila, you are ready to go.

Transition Management

What happens to the old system? How to transition to the new system?

Best practice in the industry mandate that both systems be used parallelly for at least a month before phasing the old system out completely. We do this to iron out any unplanned teething issues with the new system while at the same time insulating the day to day business operations from disruption. This step is not compulsory but highly recommended.

So this is it. If you follow these steps, your ERP deployment is going to be a smooth and painless experience.

Evomatiq Business Solutions LLC is a trusted, lithe and boutique enterprise software service provider based in Dubai. We help businesses get the most out of their enterprise software like ERPs, CRM, Business Intelligence tools.