Again, it all starts with sitting in the chair beside the business leaders (CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, CRO, HR, etc.) and learning their business processes, people, goals, objectives, challenges, and desired outcomes.
Increase Revenue
The most obvious place to start is with the sales and marketing folks. There has been massive innovation to help marketing increase the quantity and quality of leads, and to help the sales team close deals. Almost all of my clients have massive room for improvement here. I start with a baseline and analysis of their lead-to-close process, and see where CRM and marketing automation platforms could help. More often than not, we see areas where marketing automation and an integrated CRM can help considerably. In today’s digital world, it’s paramount that the marketing and sales the teams work hand in glove—and cloud technologies can make that happen.
Decrease Costs
Getting costs down is really about increasing efficiencies across the client’s entire organization. The most fitting and popular place to start is to understand the client’s overall internal, mobile and external communications, and collaboration processes. Communications and collaboration solutions, most notably Office 365, have seen the most innovation and deployments in all of cloud recently. While documenting the communication and collaboration processes can be like following a bouncing ball, they can have the most dramatic effect on helping decease costs and increase efficiencies.
Minimize Risk
Increasing revenue and decreasing costs are vitally important. If you don’t minimize risk, it’s all for naught. Think cloud backup and recovery as well as security—those are the most logical places to start. Much like following the bouncing ball with communications and collaboration, understanding where and what solutions are needed for backup, recovery, and security is much the same process. And as much as cloud solutions for increasing revenue and decreasing costs involve Line of Business (LOB) managers outside IT, it’s where your relationship with IT really matters—and involves your best technical resources.
This post appeared previously on the SBT Partners blog.
