Using Business Technology To Grow Your Company

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Today’s sales and marketing technologies offer numerous opportunities to help businesses grow more effectively.

It wasn’t so long ago that these technologies were out of the reach of many SME’s due to their high costs, but technology has increasingly got cheaper and with the advancements of open source, and software as a service it can even be obtained for free with some technology know how.

The Internet Has Made Business Technology More Accessible And Cost Effective

The biggest impacts though have come from areas of wide area networking in the form of the internet bringing with it an vast array of remotely hosted applications and services such as web servers, VoIP and CRM.

In fact it’s now possible to create and run a hybrid virtual business that can draw in customers from the internet which are then ascended and serviced to mutual benefit by a much smaller team of people than traditionally necessary. This provides a significant competitive advantage by dramatically lowering the running costs of operating the business, enabling more to be done with less investment in infrastructure, reducing staffing overheads and the need for capital equipment, all without impacting the organisations geographical presence and overall service levels.

Furthermore “open” technologies and low cost proprietary tools allow degrees of customisation not seen before, meaning that a system can be tailored to suit the actual business and its customers rather than using the suppliers predetermined and in many cases limiting developments.

Business Technology Investments Are Strategic Decisions As They Impact Many Parts Of A Business

However many organisations continue to fail to make the most of their technology investments as they are not always purchased or deployed strategically with some kind of strategy behind them, especially in the SME sectors. Integration between applications may be an essential part of achieving leverage and harnessing the true power of these investments.

One of the reasons for this is far too much reliance upon “suppliers” of technology solutions, who’s interest is in selling their solutions, products or services. This has been necessary to some degree due to the high levels of technological complexities and choice meaning that ultimately customers were being lazy and unwittingly outsourcing to some degree this decision by being allowing themselves to be lead by their suppliers.

An Independent Consultant Can Help You Select The Right Business Technology

Independent consultants can bring a degree of “deep support” and advice that traditional suppliers cannot offer. The focus of a business growth consultant is on providing knowledge and advice that will ultimately service the company and not the sales of some particular technology. Furthermore their insights are typically business or commercially driven from the point of view of the company(s) using them, instead of the supplier who is delivering or providing it.