Many business leaders seek greater agility in their organisations. Your company’s ability to mobilise quickly and capitalise on emerging market trends is a must in modern business. But what makes an organisation more agile than another?
Five characteristics of a modern, agile business
- Leadership is informed, empowered and confident
Agile organisations develop leaders that are accountable and competent in making decisions based on accurate information. Ensuring that those leaders have access to information across the organisation is key to gaining deeper insight. By developing systems and procedures that encourage information flow, an organisation can develop a much wider view of their customers, target markets and suppliers. A central hub into which data on your business is stored and accessed, such as a CRM solution, can be mined to find opportunities for improvement at every level of your organisation.
- Customer insight gives customer foresight
Successful strategies often rely on actionable market insight. These insights, gathered from the plethora of data stored within an organisation’s business systems, provide the agile business with much-needed clues to your market opportunities and challenges. Whilst gut and intuition can get you so far, accumulating insights puts you in a position to make fact-based decisions. The ability to draw upon these insights gives business leaders the confidence to make change in the organisation – change based on facts and figures.
- Collaborating teams
Ultimately your ability to create a successful business relies on people; building and engaging effective teams that work together to create an end to end process across your business. Being an agile business, ready for change, means developing a group of people capable and confident to change with it. From the receptionist to the delivery driver and all the way up to the CEO, CRM provides an anchor for a business, by which all teams can connect through a common view of the customer, benefit from insight garnered within one department and play their part in delivering to a strategy.
- Opening up to your end to end journey
The modern, agile business understands that the entire ecosystem of an organisation is important. Suppliers, influencers, employees, customers and prospective customers all offer valuable input. As the trend for self-service grows, an organisation can provide greater access and transparency to its wider target market and influencers in order to collaborate and work together. Imagine if your suppliers and customers could all buy in to your vision? By giving them secure access to valuable information on their account and relationship with you via a self-service portal, you are free to spend more time improving the service. You can also provide opportunities to extend your service or product offering and increase your revenue. Making it easier for everyone to do business with you really pays off.
- Using technology to get ahead
Technology doesn’t intimidate the successful, agile business, nor does it control it. No longer the sole domain of the IT manager or CTO, all business leaders need to find innovative, cost effective tools to enable sustainable growth. Consider perhaps the information that is absolutely necessary in order for you to make your next big decision in your organisation. Now consider how you might get that information in your business. Is the raw data there in some format?
Modern CRM tools offer an incredible facility to collect data on trends, behaviours, macro activity and social interaction giving you a wealth of information to call upon. By using built-in business intelligence and dashboards, users can quickly drill into the data that means something to them, offering valuable insight for that next big decision. Visual analytics tools take insight a step further, allowing you to ask questions you didn’t even know were important.
Sage CRM benefits
Using technology, such as Sage CRM, your business can develop a central hub of data from which you can garner customer insight, improve collaboration between teams, speed up decision – making and have your employees respond faster to the demands coming into your business.
We’d love to discuss how Sage CRM can help you to build a more agile business. A 15-minute call with CPiO, a leading Sage CRM partner, could start your organisation on its agility journey. Call us on 0344 880 6140 or email marketing@cpio.co.uk
